Install Ghostscript for Windows – Ghostscript 8.7+ or later is recommended. This is important for EPS import and some other features.
Note: After installing there are two Ghostscript *.exe files available on your system. The correct *.exe name to use in the Scribus Preferences (under External Tools) for Ghostscript is gswin32c.exe
(or gswin64c,exe
), not gswin32.exe
(or gswin64,exe
). In the large majority of cases if Ghostscript is properly installed before installing Scribus, Scribus will automatically detect the location of Ghostscript for you. This having been said, Ghostscript is not essential to the use of Scribus for most purposes. If you have not installed Ghostscript, when you run Scribus you will get a warning and a link to help you get it, but you can choose not to add this external tool.
When you select the “Extra Fonts” Option in the installer, this will install two sets of high-quality, freely distributable fonts. One set is the the URW fonts from Ghostscript. This includes 45 typefaces which are compatible with those included with most PostScript printers. The second is the Bitstream Vera font family, widely used on Linux and by some of the included templates.
The first launch of Scribus or when a new user launches Scribus can be much longer than usual. This is because Scribus is creating a cache file of your fonts. Later re-starts will be much quicker.
In the Start > Program Files menu there is a second shortcut Scribus -console. This mode merely opens a Windows command prompt, but will show line by line, each font and its full path being loaded by Scribus. This will also show any rejected fonts and duplicate fonts Scribus finds, along with other diagnostic info in some cases. Duplicates are not loaded, even if they have different names.