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What is it?

Portable Scribus is a portable standalone version of an open source page maker/desktop publishing tool called Scribus. With it, you can create professional looking documents, newsletters, magazines, and so on. Put it on your USB drive, and plug it in to any computer, and leave not trace behind when you're done. Or run it on your computer without the need of installing it.

How'd it all start?

I wanted to try my hands at a portable version of Scribus. My big problem was getting Scribus to save user settings in the Scribus folder. I then came across someone else's attempt at a portable Scribus, called XScribus, is what I used as the bases for my Scribus launcher code. (It was an older version of Scribus, so I decided to create my own with the latest Scribus version). The changes are listed under the 'Changes' header. The author and I are now starting to collaberate together with the two projects.

As of Portable Scribus 1.3.3.1, the source code has been rewritten, and is no longer based from XScribus. But if it wasn't for XScribus from the start, this project wouldn't be here. If you don't like Portable Scribus, try XScribus instead, as they are a little different.

Features:

· Scribus, not just Portable Scribus, does not save anything in your applications folder. Normally Scribus saves user files in the directory just before the applications folder.
· Both Scribus and Portable Scribus do not use the Windows registry. And why would they? Scribus was originally developed for Linux, inwhich there was no such thing as a registry that resembles the Windows registry.
· Although Portable Scribus used to base it's code from XScribus, it no longer does since the 1.3.3.1 release.
· Portable Scribus may be reported by some antivirus programs as a virus, it is not a virus. I couldn't figure this out for awhile until I found that UPX, a dll and exe compression utility was probably causing this, as a few other people were having the same problem.
· PDF Import
· EPS import/export
· Unicode text including right to left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew
· Portable Scribus is a portable wrapper for Scribus that writes settings to the application folder instead of the Windows registry

Myths

As Portable Scribus grows in popularity among portable applications, I've noticed quite a few people have taken assumptions upon how Portable Scribus works.

* Scribus, not just Portable Scribus, does not save anything in your applications folder. Normally, however, Scribus saves user files in the directory just before the applications folder.
* Looks like Scribus did use the Windows registry after all. However, as of 1.3.3.4 and on, Portable Scribus deletes all Scribus related registry entries when it is closed.
* Although Portable Scribus used to base it's code from XScribus, it no longer is since the 1.3.3.1 release.
* Portable Scribus may be reported by some antivirus programs as a virus, but it is not really a virus. I myself couldn't figure this out for awhile until I found that UPX, a dll and exe compression utility was probably causing this, as a few other people were having the same problem and were using some form of UPX. UPX is completely safe, but apparently is often used by viruses, which may be why these antivirus programs think programs like Portable Scribus as a virus.