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Rule No. 1: never confuse the Microsoft term "supports" with the generally understood phrase "does a good job of." Case in point: current versions of Microsoft Publisher, which are supposed to "support" the Postscript format (also from Adobe; PDF is essentially just a gussied-up Postscript). Microsoft has had a good decade to get their Postscript support in line; however, Microsoft's current Postscript drivers in XP are so lousy that many graphic arts consulting companies are urging clients to stick with or downgrade to W2K.

http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/pmfaq1.html

Other fun and games: latest Publisher can't save in a file format that older versions of Publisher can reliably open (just went through this particular nightmare a couple of weeks ago); I can easily create HTML docs exported from Word that Word's Office-mate high-end HTML editor, FrontPage, can't deal with (Word's HTML export capability is "legendary" in the same sense that William Shatner's rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is legendary). Microsoft has a real problem with passing "supported" file formats just between the various versions/components of Office; the odds of Office 12 routinely pushing out PDFs that I could open in, say, Illustrator or CorelDraw or Acrobat will most likely be quite slim. If you do publication production/design like I do and have to deal with thousands of submitted files every year, you learn to cringe whenever somebody says "I did it in Office."

Is color management something that the open source community has just not gotten around to yet? I'd be surprised if that were the case...

In any event, I did find this: Scribus. I don't know if it's OS or what, couldn't be bothered to look. :-)

Here's another link to a screenshot showing it's Publisher/Pagemaker like appearance.

(Forgive a Linux newbie if I've got the wrong end of the stick...) but have you played with Scribus yet?

http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/

I must admit that I haven't tried it out with any really huge documents yet...

The friends that I know who do serious DTP tend to stick with PDF formats and transfer to EPS at a later stage (if at all). (That isn't to say that I don't respect TeX - I just prefer more 'visual' tools :) )

Running Photoshop in an emulation layer is not the same as in 'native' Windows, because WINE can possibly alter the colorspace (eg. to fake a 24-bit visual on 16-bit displays). So you can't just calibrate your setup in Windows and hope to get accurate results with the same ICC profile in WINE.

Corel PhotoPaint for Linux can do ICC, and so does Scribus. Not sure on the GIMP side of things, but overall I think at least manual calibration (Adobe Gamma) should give good results.

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.