Here’s a little bit about Scribus from the home page:

Scribus :: Open Source Desktop Publishing for Linux, Mac OS® X and Windows®

“Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.” (http://www.scribus.net/).

Basically what follows is an emphasis on optimizing the output for an email sized attachment after I enjoyed using Scribus to do the layout of the newsletter.

1. Layout newsletter
2. Install latest version of Ghostscript

   sudo aptitude install gs-gpl

3. Export as PDF (1.3 or 1.4)
1. General Tab:
1. Resolution for EPS Graphics: 300
2. Compress Text and Vector Graphics: [X]
3. Compression Method: Automatic
4. Compression Quaity: Maximum
5. Resample Images to: 115 dpi
2. Fonts Tab:
1. Embed all fonts
3. Save file to news.pdf [~ 315KB]
   1. If size and quality are good enough then you are done, else
   2. Re-process the pdf file through ghostscript [~70kB]

      gs-gpl -r115 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=newsletter.pdf news.pdf

      (-r115 sets the resolution or DPI to 115 pixels per square inch)

4. If you feel like it, you can also use pdfopt to linearize the PDF, so Acroread can start showing the first pages while the rest is still being downloaded.