Slashdot Mirror

• flpsed
• PDF Edit
• KWord
• Scribus
• Inkscape
• GIMP
• pdftk
• Jarnal
• Multivalent

If the comics that Microsoft comes out with are not funny enough perhaps other people should try to create their own more amusing alternative comic advertisements. They could be done in a style that is somewhat similar to the comics that Microsoft hands out. They could be a spoof of the Microsoft comics. Of course when doing a spoof they should probably check how to best do that legally.

The comic might start out with an employee of some unmentioned software company lecturing some children about how using pirated software is stealing. He would then ask the children what they would do if they owned a computer and WGA discovered discovered that their were not using a genuine version of Windows Vista and would only let them connect to the Internet for one hour at a time. A young boy might then raise his hand, and say "one hour would be just enough time to download a free copy of Ubuntu Linux. I could stay legal by using free GPL licensed software instead." A young girl might then raise her hand and say something like this. "There are hundreds of properly licenced free Linux programs that you could then easily dowload and easily installed using Synaptic (with a screenshot of Synaptic in the background). It is a complete alternative ecosystem of free GPL software." The first boy might then add that "their is also tons of properly licensed free GPL software for Windows users too. In the final frame of the comic another resposible adult might give this final moral advice (as the disapproving exasperated software company employee looks on). "Don't be a software pirate, if you can't afford to pay for commercial software use the free properly licensed GPL software instead."

Underneath the comic strip it might metion that this comic strip was created with the following properly licensed free software:

• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Scribus

Near the bottom of the comic strip there might also be something about this comic strip having been released under the Creative Commons license. "So feel free copy make copies of this comic stip and share them with your friends at school."

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

First we'll toss in one some people will kick and scream about: Graphic Design. Yes, I know all about the Gimp.

I disagree.

Not about the GIMP; for production work on raster images it doesn't make sense to leave the known comforts of PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro for a FOSS equivalent that might do the job as well, but offers no significant improvements. Yet tomorrow's graphics designers are currently on student budgets and are learning The GIMP because of that— something that should be making Adobe nervous about tomorrow's profits.

But Blender and POV-Ray are major presences in animation and ray tracing work: many of the younger people working in the field cut their teeth on these, and still use them for exploring some concepts. Inkscape has compatibility benefits over Illustrator and is beginning to attract commercial use for that reason, even though it is a long way from its v1.0. Scribus is poised to shoulder its way into first tier desk top publishing.

FOSS has become majorily important in the graphics sector.

I don't know anything about audio mixers. Maybe the value of 1 kazillion is closer to 10 than to 8. Maybe FOSS products like Audacity are making significant inroads among the independent bands. I've no idea.

I know nothing about games, either. I know a lot of tomorrow's animators and game designers are developing their techniques with Blender and POV-Ray— I expect that they will continue to use these to some degree when they get paying jobs.

There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.

My recommended line of design tools are:

GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)

Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.

For your publishing activities, you might like to install both Scribus and LyX in addition to the TeX and LaTeX you mention.

While the suggestion to buy a Mac is marked 'Funny', and was, I'm sure, intended to be such, it's actually not such a silly suggestion because Macs do run Linux very well, and if you find you don't like Linux, which while being superbly user friendly, it does tend to be somewhat pickey about the friendships it makes. If you and Linux just do not get on, you still have a very good piece of hardware and software in your possession. Macs will also run the software I have mentioned using the X-11 server from either Apple or Fink. That's in addition to all the proprietary software offered by Apple and their ISVs.

I can't find a donation link either, so I guess promoting the project would be a great thing to do! :)

I'm not the main graphics design guy (girl in this case) at our company. I'm just the system administrator, I just showed Scribus to her and she liked it so much we switched. We have been publishing books since 1992. Our first book was done in Professional Page for the Amiga. When we switched to Mac after it became clear that the Amiga was a goner we chose QuarkXPress (I think it was version 3.3 but I could be wrong.)

I'm just mentioning this to accentuate the fact that the product is being used in a real publishing environment. We've published 5 books using Scribus and it's worked great so far. Our books are very graphic layout intensive (we publish art curriculum). They usually include hundreds of pages with unique layouts on each one - containing thousands of high resolution color images. Scribus does great! Thanks guys! Get a donation link!

Don't forget Scribus, it's excellent for DP! My company switched for all our new publications (to avoid the Quark mafia, $900 yearly or publishers can't read your files.) It saves directly to PDF with perfect color, fonts, embedded icc profiles etc. Oh, and it's Open Source!

You say you have a need for desktop publishing and film editing, but then you refer to F/OSS programs that were not designed for either. Maybe an apples to apples comparison is more appropriate? For desktop publishing, Scribus seems to be the most acclaimed F/OSS program. http://www.scribus.net/ For Video editing, Cinellera seems to be more in line with Final Cut Pro. http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

Linux simply killed our capacity to produce here...

The commercial Autodesk Maya was used by Weta Digital to create the Lord of the Rings triology. Maya is, as you can see, available for use under Linux.

For Desktop Publishing you can use the Free Scribus which I have used to produce very nice pamphlets and booklets.

Linux has come of age in recent months and the excuse that it is not suitable for ordinary folks to do ordinary computer jobs is simply not true any more.

Define "good". gaim does a fine job for me with AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and Google IM services (as well as IRC and non-Google Jabber servers). I believe the video/audio support is still not present, but for text purposes, it's fine.

5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?)

Doubtful for straight up specialized software. However, one with an artistic bent might appreciate trying out the suite of GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus. If all he wants to do is fill in templates, though, it will be inadequate. If he's feeling really generous, though, he could potentially develop a template and submit it for inclusion at Inkscape or Scribus, and maybe add some more stuff to Open ClipArt to help others as well.

Best of all, you can get him hooked prior to hitting Linux, because everything I just named has a Windows version.

GAIM for IM. There are others as well.

Greeting cards, well, that depends on what they use now as to what they will be familiar with. A quick google pulled up Scribus which looks interesting but may be fairly complex.

Family tree software also depends on what they use. There are a few out there, but I can't attest to how well they work.

I use VIM, but I don't have much use for a word processor. Typically to write a letter I use VIM, aspell, enscript and ps2pdf. I've done mailshots like this using sed to insert the customer address from a text file and it probably took me less time to script than reading the macro docs for a word processor. For more complex work there's latex, docbook or css styled html printed to ps via a browser running in X and for compound graphics documents I can use scribus.

A word processor is only ever the right tool for the job if you don't know how to use any other tools. The saying about having a hammer and everything looking like a nail, applies broadly to the majority of word processed documents and spreadsheets. Talking of dinosaurs and since you mention Netbeans and Eclipse; the writing is pretty much on the wall for Java isn't it?

What about http://www.scribus.net/ ?

I start like this: Pen/Pencil -> Image Mockup in Photoshop -> XHTML/CSS mockup with real structure.

I know (from personal experience) that GIMP takes some time to learn, and creating graphics from scratch with it is not exactly easy. But for the image mockup stage I have a somewhat unorthodox suggestion. Try Scribus. Since you are doing visual layout anyway, why not use a software that actually is designed to create and manipulate such? Different elements are not tied to graphical layers, and dropping sample texts into them is dead simple.

The really interesting part is that if you end up doing the layout this way, you already have a visual model for CSS box elements. Of course, for the final mockup and image spots you may need some heavy-handed image manipulation (also known as "cheating") but then again, you're selling a project and sales material usually only approximates the truth... (And CSS provides the tricks to pull the same stunts off in any case.)

Personally I have changed to using Scribus when creating diagrams. Takes a little longer than with dia, but the results are damn good-looking and certainly worth the effort. Combine that with some good clip art and you have near-professional quality results.

Unorthodox, or outright heretic? You decide.

Then wouldn't it make more sense to download something like GMT, Generic Mapping Tool to make you maps, charts and graphs to professional standards with, and then type-set them with something like the scribus desktop publishing system and export the slides to a PDF for printing and display? I guess I just think of power point slides as about equivelent to ruled 3 holed notebook paper, somethings notes are written on and the pre-printing is more or less an altenative to hand drawn pictures.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X 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.

I've used Scribus on a bunch of projects lately, and I've been really impressed. It's a perfectly viable alternative to Adobe's pay layout tools for me.

Sorry for the bad netiquitte

Hey Blue, we might be in luck...

Anyone tried Scribus ?

CMYK has been my biggest bugbear with Scribus,

This should work though
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Installing_Littl e_CMS_and_configuring_Scribus_to_use_it_on_Fedora_ Core_3/
I'll have to have another look myself.

Some questions:

Did you use the latest version ?

Define "immature" ?

What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?

I will just point some relevant links:

The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.

Capabilities: Scribus Specs

(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories

Made with Scribus

Press Reviews

Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.

Some questions:

Did you use the latest version ?

Define "immature" ?

What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?

I will just point some relevant links:

The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.

Capabilities: Scribus Specs

(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories

Made with Scribus

Press Reviews

Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.

Some questions:

Did you use the latest version ?

Define "immature" ?

What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?

I will just point some relevant links:

The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.

Capabilities: Scribus Specs

(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories

Made with Scribus

Press Reviews

Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.

Some questions:

Did you use the latest version ?

Define "immature" ?

What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?

I will just point some relevant links:

The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.

Capabilities: Scribus Specs

(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories

Made with Scribus

Press Reviews

Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.

Some questions:

Did you use the latest version ?

Define "immature" ?

What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?

I will just point some relevant links:

The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.

Capabilities: Scribus Specs

(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories

Made with Scribus

Press Reviews

Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.

If you are looking to do a 300 page scientific manual, then no Scribus is not up to it yet. You might however be surprised by the professional posters, leaflets, pamphlets, magazines, brochures, and, yes, books etc that have been done with Scribus. It might of course depend on the version you tried...

Maybe refer to http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories for some real examples.

• Photoshop: The GIMP - how many times does this need to be said, the interface is slightly different but the gimp has most of the features of photoshop plus a few of its own.
  Why don't I do the rest of the main Adobe stuff while I'm at it:
  
  • Pagemaker: Scribus
  • Illustrator: Inkscape
  
  
• Games: Cedega - but maybe you'd be better off using a console (not as in bash you blockhead) as they're cheap and while piracy for them is a bit harder its doable if you're commited.
• Autocad: a quick search reveals two commercial solutions LinuxCAD and VariCAD and a guide to getting AutoDesk's Autocad running under wine
• Dreamweaver: NVU, Amaya, hell even fckEditor or, if you're hardcore then vi(e)macs.

1) GIMP does not equal Photoshop

No, it doesn't. But does it have to? For 90% of the people in need of an image editing software, the Gimp will be just fine. And who says you shouldn't have to do some work for making a switch? I don't count the "but it's different" argument. Missing features make a more justified argument, but saying GNU/Linux sucks just because apps are a bit different really isn't a good point.

2) Pagemaker is a LOT better than Draw

LaTeX isn't a replacement for Pagemaker and similar software, but Scribus is. Sure, it's far from being as good as the software available on Win/Mac. But do cut them some slack, it's a great piece of software, and, again, it will suffice for more than 50% of the people out there who need such software.

4) [...] Access

You got that right, but Access does have another thing going for it -- rapid prototyping of simple database apps. If there were a similar GUI tool available that could use a (My|Postgre)SQL backend, that would be great... (of course such things may already exist? Never looked...)

5) [...] PDF Converters

In my eyes GNU software is, for most everyday use, superior to existing proprietary software when it comes to PDF handling. Your standard GNU/Linux desktop will let you create PDFs easily -- sure, not with all the great features that Acrobat might offer you. But you can create PDFs, for free -- no Acrobat necessary, and much more hassle-free than digging around for random Windows shareware/freeware PDF tools.

In the end, Windows/MacOS sure is easier. That's why I still haven't converted my parents or my sister to GNU/Linux. But we should also consider the great progress that has been made on the Free software desktop front and give some credit to the volunteers responsible for it.

Another point to make: surely much great software is available for Mac/Windows. But remember most costs money, and think about how many people you know that use a pirated version of some software or other. Moving them to a free system at some point will at least mean that they finally have a legal system installed. I think that's a very worthy point.

I don't do much in the area of Framemaker or Pagemaker, but most desktops will do fine with the functionality present in OpenOffice.org Draw

A better substitute, IMO, would be Scribus. But OO.o is pretty decent for what's included.

If you think lack of CMYK support isn't enough to keep GIMP from being used by people in the printing industry, you're either ignorant or just too stubborn to see that GIMP isn't ready to replace Photoshop in the real world.

Or maybe he just uses Scribus to export his finished work to press ready CMYK pdf's, like I do.

Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.

I do graphic design professionally -- both freelance and fulltime. I once did all the typesetting, etc. for a 600+ page illustrated children's book using nothing more than Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus. I did all the raster image editing in the Gimp. When it came time to go to press, I just exported to PDF from Scribus (makes excellent press-ready pdf's), which performed a very accurate conversion to CMYK for me. Problem solved.

That sounds fairly darn civilized to me. In particular, I'm much less bothered by a keyserver approach when I know the game won't just stop working if the company that makes it encounters difficulties. Keyserver based approaches seem relatively inoffensive, and I imageine they'd stop a lot of casual copying. I can understand why they have a bad rep (it could be done very badly, ie game not playable/installable if the key server is unreachable so you no longer even really "own" the game; privacy issues) but honestly if I'm stuck with copy protection I'll take a keyserver system over CD-based systems any day.

I'm glad to hear about the lack of any requirement for a CD in the drive. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that you have a local reseller that I already have dealings with. Given that this game sounds like just my thing (almost as much as the X-com games, Star Control 2, Master of Orion II, System Shock II or Deus Ex), I'll certainly have to put my money where my mouth is. I may also have to grab Postal simply to have it on the shelf ;-)

I'd still be interested to know your views on the effectiveness of traditional CD-based copy protection, given the comments I made earlier.

By the way, congrats on being brave enough to take on this market. I'd be pretty wary myself, what with binary compatibility issues across distros and versions, a significant proportion of spending-allergic or foaming zealot users who equate free with gratis, etc. I find it quite challenging enough maintaining software that is recompiled for each distro/version. *shudder*autotools*shudder.

Here's the The Adobe PDF reference, for if you want to implement applications that use PDF. In particular, you might want to read Section 1.5 of the PDF Reference, "Intellectual Property". In summary, it says that they'll enforce their copyright on the PDF specification in order to keep the standard accurate, but grant you the right to implement the standard pretty much however you like.

Some apps that do so, without licensing the Adobe PDf libraries or tools, include:

GhostScript
OpenOffice.org
Scribus
Mac OS X
(specifically the window system, print system, and Preview tool) ... and *LOTS* more, including evince, xpdf, kpdf, libpoppler, and other open source PDF viewing tools/libs, several reporting libraries like ReportLab, etc.

Scribus?

http://www.scribus.net/

Even if they wanted to, I think you'll find that Quark can't. Their app is really messy and not very portable - it was apparently a screaming nightmare just to port from MacOS 9 to MacOS X.

My understanding is that they'd have to rewrite quite a bit of it to do a proper Linux port. I guess they could port the win32 version using WINELib, though.

At this point, it doesn't matter much. Until Adobe ports Photoshop, nobody will care. If Adobe ports Photoshop, chances are they'll port Acrobat and InDesign instead. Why should Quark then try to contest a small market with a juggernaut already crammed into it?

There are also other options. I happen to work on one of them, Scribus. It's not that great right now and needs a LOT of work to bring it up to the required levels of features and reliability. It's already extremely useful, however, and it has some ass-kicking features including PDF export reliability that's right up there with InDesign.

Gee.. I wonder why you posted that as an AC

Using linux does not have to mean typing in scripts at a bash shell.
Linux can be made to look and act just as point-and-clicky as windows.

Using K12LTSP enables you to quickly set up a large school network where students have access to office applications, web browsing, photo editing, desktop publishing, web publishing,programming languages , etc.
It also centralizes network administration, allows for recycling hardware, and saves a ton of money on software licensing.
It is important to teach computer concepts, not just the nuances of the latest proprietary office suite.

Just remember, It should never under any circumstances be the responsibility of educators to teach brand loyalty.

Quark is still around, and they have a solid user base in the media industry, not to mention the GPL:ed page layout program Scribus, which is coming along nicely...

Since Adobe has axed FrameMaker for Mac, that means I am stuck on Windows for ever. And no, Scribus is not a replacement for FrameMaker, and neither is KWord. I wish they were, but they're not.

A firewall is impractical. The network needs to be extremely high performance, and currently goes though a gigabit switch. Replacing that with a router smart and fast enough to do rule-based filtering like that ... ouch.

Host firewall might be viable, but we're stuck on MacOS9. Anyway, I wouldn't put it past Quark to refuse to run when there's a host firewall, or to mangle core system files to bypass it.

As for open source alternatives - there are none. Sorry. I'm a contributor to the closest thing yet but right now it's barely fit to replace MS publisher, let alone Quark. In many ways it's a very good app even at this stage, but it has a number of issues that make it impractical to use in something like newspaper DTP. Of course, I'm currently helping to fix that ;-)

This dicussion has been done to death in many previous Slashdot posts, but I'm going to bite anyway.

The Photoshop interface is far from perfect, too. I have new users at work who have been exposed to both the GIMP and Photoshop 7/MacOS, and they find things confusing and difficult in both. Users tend to be able to unable to find functionalty, and tend to be unable to retrieve palettes etc when they close them. It seems to be roughtly the same for both apps.

Of course, our experienced Photoshop users are lost in the GIMP. This is unsurprising - it's new and different, after all - and if you're an experienced Photoshop user then I don't doubt you'll find the interface difficult. I use both programs quite comfortably, myself, but I seem to be in the minority.

I _hated_ the GIMP 1.x interface, but I personally think they've done so much to improve usability in 2.0 that it's on par with Photoshop - just different.

Most importantly, I'd strongly prefer different but good to the hideous mostly-similar ugly kind-of-works interface cloning approach of OpenOffice.

I wouldn't mind a Photoshop interface _option_ for the GIMP, but I think the core GIMP developers probably have much better things to do with their time. It's a good thing for the (apparently many) people who want one to think about getting together and writing. Yes, I _do_ speak from experience, having pulled out my thumb and started working on issues that really irritate me in Scribus.

As for colour management, /there/ I entirely agree with you. If you're not just doing web development, colour management matters. Perhaps even more critical for many uses is proper CMYK support (this generally ties in rather tightly to colour management support). There is primitive support now via a plug-in, but I'm not aware of any good, solid colour management / CMYK support for the GIMP yet :-( .

As for the widgets ... that's just not a GIMP problem. Gtk widgets can be changed using gtk themes and engines. Anyway, as you seem to feel the strong desire to replace the entire UI, that'd be an ideal opportunity to replace the widget set too ;-)

/* Think, using fairly large letters. then use the names (of course, tiny-tiny font'd...) to 'construct' up the letters. Fairly easy to do, in a DP suit... say, scribus .... */

Heck, to come to think of it, if they'd use somethnig like AAlib ... they could even use 'letters' to construct up images =)

/* Think, a modified AAlib to use 'full names'' and in association with 'colours' build up a 'visible' picture/image... doable 'hack' in the timeframe that's allotted... */

Give Scribus a shot. It's young, but improving. It's probably nowhere near what you need, but I have no clue.

• a brand-new KDE-3.3 code-named "aKademy" together with
• a first-time ever release of FreeNX Server and FreeNX Client (using NX/NoMachine technology)
• as well as a Scribus-1.2 "aKademy Release"

• a brand-new KDE-3.3 code-named "aKademy" together with
• a first-time ever release of FreeNX Server and FreeNX Client (using NX/NoMachine technology)
• as well as a Scribus-1.2 "aKademy Release"

Even though it's not that hard, nobody should *have* to fall back on tarballs and ./configure / make / make install. DUMB

Very true. I made the mistake of selecting a "desktop" install instead of a "workstation" install when (finally) setting up my wife's pc with FC2 -- (she's off Win, yeah). I didn't realize that desktop installations did NOT install gcc! Then I wanted to install Scribus, and I was nixed right there. I sighed, shuddered to think what else might be missing from a desktop install, an proceeded to re-install, working with a "workstation" setup the second time around.

I hope AutoPackage can address these types of issues, looks promising .

Scribus perhaps?

We on the Scribus Team have begun over the past few months working closely with the Inkscape devels on improving SVG import export with with both apps. You can take your Inkscape created SVG, import it into Scribus and create a highly compliant "press-ready" CMYK or PDF/X-3 PDF. Thanks to steady efforts and collaboration, support is improving daily. A few notes and comments:

• SVG is a large and somewhat complex spec. However, it has many excellent features. Props to the Inkscape Team for making a goal of real compliance to the W3C spec. Not even Adobe can match all the spec.
• We on the Scribus team really consider Inkscape to be the future of SVG drawing in the open source world. The Inkscape project is very well managed and has approached their development roadmap with enviable discipline and professionalism. We have a lot of respect for the know how of their devels.
• EPS/PS import/export is not trivial by any means. Not every app on the planet exports good EPS and some introduce their own quirks. After 3 years of development, we are finally getting EPS import to where we want it to be.
• Likewise, exporting PDF is not particularly easy. The kinds of effects and transparency Inkscape is capable of creating requires high level PDF 1.4 features, which not all apps can support properly. A simple bitmap dump is not likely to obtain satisfactory results all the time. This is one area where Scribus really shines and the collaboration has allowed end users the ability to reliably export high quality PDF 1.4 with commercial grade reliabilty.
• Most importantly, they are a great bunch of folks who are very attentive to end users and lots of fun to work with.

We (the Inkscape developers, anyway) currently use Scribus for PDF and EPS output when we need it.

Scribus is kind of a sister project, and we've been working closely with them to get perfect import of Inkscape SVGs.

That's not to say that Inkscape shouldn't have PDF etc support in the future, but it's already not too painful if you have Scribus handy.

That is the older one. The new one is Scribus Home Page

or the newer one.

You're not hearing about ad agencies doing mass migrations to Linux, replacing Photoshop with the Gimp and Quark with... with... um, well, you're not hearing about it.

Replacing Quark with Scribus. But, ya, it's not going to happen. Windows really is a bigger player than many people realize. MS is taking over a significant portion of the market. And, for the most part, outside of America, MS controls the print industry. It's a point that's been beat to death already -- when the cost of an illegal copy of software is zero, free doesn't mean much.

Silly picture link for the weekend