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Prospective gsoc student participants interested in improving Free Software Desktop Publishing are invited to look at Scribus Team's ideas list at http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas. We are starting our second GSoC year and are looking for good student coders to improve the *nix/MacOX/Win32 Desktop Layout Software. Come in to #scribus on Freenode if you'd like to talk to us or join our mailing list at http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus. We are open and quite friendly.

Alex
Scribus Team's GSoC Administrator

Well, I could point to *plenty* of things that you can do in only one operating system. You can only use appletalk on an Apple network. You can only use QBASIC on a Microsoft. You can only compile a tarball built with an IMakefile on BSD. You can only use apt-get on a Debian system. You can only use multi-threading on a POSIX-compliant system. Yadda, yadda. Doesn't inherently make anything superior to anything else. You're pointing to one instance of profession-specific functionality. In point of fact, there is a Gimp plugin project: http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml it seems to be getting some attention http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2003 -July/001415.html, but, hey, I don't type-set for newspapers so who knows if it's any good?

But I know this from my years of Linux use: There's no such thing as a problem that only one person's encountered. No matter how intricate your solution, there is at least one person who has searched for it before. Some people search, and give up, others search and, finding nothing, hack up their own solution. If it works in a big way, they post it for others to use. That's how it all started! I always figured, better to have the tools to do it myself, than pay somebody else to do it for me. PS: Gimp is certainly not the only graphics program on the Linux desktop, try researching http://www.mediainlinux.org/ MediainLinux live CD, a distro made specifically for media content creators in graphics, audio, and streaming media. Check their package list, see if you can Google about one of their programs and maybe it'll turn out to be what you need.

If the font can't be copyrighted, but only the font name can be copyrighted, then how would using a GPL'd font cause a problem again? Something is a miss here. Is this just Sunday evenning foolery?

The true issue was poorly represented by the post (blah blah Slashdot "editors" blah blah). It was about embedding fonts in a document. Since digital typefaces are bytecode, it seems very clear that embedding them in a larger work would work exactly as embedding any other GPL code into a larger work. A few replies after the linked message is a much more enlightening one.

The other point of confusion I see is the difference between copyright and licensing, which type's unique status makes it hard to explain. To clarify what I said in the last post about copying/duplicating : you can copy in the analog sense -- you make make your face look like theirs, but you can't copy in the digital sense of making it exactly the same. As I said before, it's all very weird.

I think what this all points to (and the above link seems to agree) is that the GPL probably isn't a good idea for typefaces, at least not in it's current form. It wasn't really written with them in mind, and confusion like this is the result.

I may be leaving something out re: type copyrights, as I am only a dilletante typophile, and don't have a professional understanding of the subject.

Making fluxbox and its kin usable winds up requiring I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.

Incredible! Does this mean a base installation of XFce includes Firefox, Abiword, Emacs, GVim, The Gimp, GPhoto, Inkscape and Scribus? These are the apps I require in order to make Fluxbox usable.

*nuf said*. PDF is a open standard, and is pretty easy to implement everywhere.

Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux which has been gathering momentum recently. SuSe now proudly proclaim that with SuSe 9.1, Professional layouts can be prepared with the desktop publishing application Scribus. Scribus is also recieving critical acclaim from other big open source quarters such as Newsforge who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of Free Software's Killer Applications.

ut what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?

About ScribusScribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features. These professional publishing features include:

• CMYK Colour

• Press Ready PDF Creation
  • Further advanced PDF features for making interactive PDFs exist together with a large amount of support for the PDF 1.4 specification including:
  • Transparency
  • Encryption
  • Form Field
  • Annotations
  • Bookmarks

EPS and PDF import/export

Complete ICC colour management

Font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF exportIn addition to this Scribus also provides:

• A WYSIWYG viewpoint for document creation
• An XML based file format allowing for easier file recovery if corruption occurs
• Drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc

As can be seen Scribus certainly isn't devoid of features, and there are many others in the program which I haven't described above. All in all, Scribus is a fairly feature rich program and more features such as importing from Microsoft Office and OO.org are expected in future releases. Installation of Scribus

I installed Scribus by going to the download section of the Scribus homepage in order to obtain the latest version which at this moment in time is 1.1.6. There are several different methods of installation available, including source and prepackaged files. Prepackaged files are available in the form of RPMs for Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1 and SuSe 9, Deb files are also available for Debian users.

Since I'm using Fedora Core 1 I downloaded the RPM from the site and installed it. I used the Scribus website instead of a Fedora Yum repository as I have only been able to find out of date versions of Scribus on them. When installing the RPM I did encounter a dependency issue in which I needed to install a program called

We would be more than happy to have some people creating sample docs like this for Scribus..

IRC: #scribus on irc.freenode.net...
OR
Mailing List

"what is Scribus really like?"
Here a link to their homepage

Publisher is desktop publishing. The Open Source equivalent for that is Scribus.

There is a open source, Qt-based program called Scribus available.

A space seems to have snuch into the URL between 2003 and -June. Remove it and the URL works. Here it is clickable: The Link

On the free software side, I would tend to recommend Scribus which is one of the most promising attempts at reaching the quality level of Quark XPress that I have seen this far.

Good news for open source applications like Sodipodi, Sketch and Scribus, which all have SVG support.

This means open source drawing and publishing applications will have a file format which is open, scriptable, XML based and can display on the web and print well.

No different from a corporation, schools often have undertakings that are caught up in precedent and convention.

If your school has a newspaper, consider showing them how to set up Linux file server or some story-typing / editing stations.

If they have an advertising crew, show them that Gnumeric and Open Office offer high-quality, free spreadsheets. (And if they're pretty simple, there should be no probs with converting to / from Excel format.)

Graphics: there are decent-enough vector graphics now (Carbon14 is one) and excellent image-retouching programs (GIMP, Image Magick), available built into most distros and downloadable for others.

Web browsing: School newspapers often use the Web for research, and for other purposes when they're not "working." Show them with a 5-minute demo that with Mozilla they can forget most popup ads, open tabs for organization, bookmark groups of tabs for a useful start-up state, search using keywords, etc.

If they can afford it in the first place, they probably are stuck on a DTP program like Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, etc: that's OK, and hard to replace with Free software right now. The fantastic Scribus is getting better and better, though.

Still, you can show them that a cheap, even discarded computer can be a useful and reliable adjunct for many *other* purposes when set up with Linux. (Which lets you save the DTP machine(s) for the ones using it for that purpose.)

timothy

Start it on source forge, or something, seems like out there must be something that would do for a start.

It's already started. Tell ya the truth, it ain't half bad. It's no Quark or InDesign, but it's still pretty decent. It's called Scribus and I just installed it here on my FreeBSD box.

Pretty screen shots here.

Problem is, no matter how good Scribus gets there's still the little matter of something to replace Illustrator, and some kind of graphics app that can deal with CMYK. Still, it's one heck of a start at it! Just gotta love open source.

I'm ready with my credit card because I know that Operators are Standing By!

For those who haven't tried the KnoppixKDE edition, it's great. Last I heard, the developer of this Knoppix remaster was working on a new version. Does anyone know if it is nearing completion?

KnoppixKDE doesn't have all the software that the full Knoppix distro has, but I generally find it to be a little more comfortable and much more unified.

The only thing that was missing (I think) in the last version was Scribus. Scribus is a QT app that comes with Knoppix that looks like it may eventually be a good alternative to Pagemaker and perhaps QuarkExpress or InDesign. It's got a ways to go, but it's already quite useable for simple layout.

-Peter

The essay was well worth reading. I wonder whether someone could explain why there are no open source page layout applications worth mentioning... Yes, I have heard about Scribus, tried it and would probably use it, too, if it was a GNOME app, but Pagemaker/InDesign/Quark, games and the NHL radio streams (WMA version the Crossover plugin doesn't handle) are the only thing I keep Windows installed on that other partition.

If you are looking for professional level publishing on Linux, be sure to check out Scribus.

Scribus is a completely free (as in freedom) publishing program that works very much like Quark.

Check it out here:

http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/about.html

"is a simple desktop publishing program similar to QuarkXPress, Adobe PageMaker or Adobe InDesign"

GPL Color Management for Linux/BSD: Littlecms for Linux/BSD/Windows

GPL Desktop Publishing which is uses lttlecms: http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid

Have you looked at Scribus? I've never used it myself (having only recently decided to look at TeX/LaTeX for my own publishing needs), but it sure looks like it's aiming at the same target you want to hit.

But there is no equivilant for QuarkExpress for linux.

This really great news. Linux and X have badly needed a unfied way to handle fonts for a long time.

fontconfig adds:

1) Excellent Unicode handling for developers.

2) This resolves the need for developer hacks and workarounds for accessing and displaying available fonts. For programs like Scribus - a Linux Desktop Publisher this will make life much easier in the future.

3) Makes adding and fonts much easier. Now we need a good GUI front end so installing fonts is as easy as Win/Mac.

For desktop linux this is as important as having TCP/IP for networking. (You need good plumbing underneath.)

For the features most people need in PageMaker, that is to say simple layout and no need to re-use old files, I've been using Scribus for a while. It has an astonishing pace of development and is eminently usable.
In terms of panoramic photo stiching, I'm sure there's plenty of software, but I can't reccomend anything.
I've done a lot of digital video editing, and I'd say that AfterEffects isn't bad as a compositor, and Premiere is pretty damn good for video editing. Both are partially replaced by Cinerella
Dreamweaver, Flash 5, and Illustrator seem to me to be the killer apps. Most people's pirate copies of photoshop see less use than PaintShopPro. The GIMP beats PSP. I just wish the GIMP had better support for print output -- like CMYK color. Development seems to be halted, with text output broken in the development version.

Yeah, Scribus. It's not Quark yet, but for those sorts of project it should do just fine.

At some point, Scribus will be ready to do serious desktop publishing. StarOffice/OpenOffice (see the OpenOffice marketing brochure here) can do PowerPoint. What exactly do 'yall use Access for? (we've got very good databases, but the Access-like DB frontends I've seen just aren't end-user ready IMHO).

Also, you should find lots of useful school-targeted Linux resources here.

I have been looking for something like Quark Xpress (mostly because I enjoyed doing newspaper layouts on PageMaker in college) and just grabbed something called scribus. I have no idea how to use it, or if it works.

URL is: http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid.