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Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.

But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!

Scribus exists for some time now, and still, it was only a few months ago that I heard about it, and only 3 weeks ago that I installed it. And I was absolutely amazed at its quality (and standard support, even the latest pdf specs, including embedded script support!). What OSDL needs is a central place where all the great apps likely to be needed in an enterprise/office environment should be listed. There aren't that many actually, but how many of the respondends who missed PageMaker knew about scribus? Seeing the quality of the app, I was surprised at the lack of marketing/hype this application receives. Even their website ... well, it is not bad, but it isn't good either.

Right now marketing focuses on distributions or tools, and rarely on the application stack (except FF and OO.o). GNOME does a good job at marketing as well. But KDE? They formed a new marketing group only recently, and as they started to look around, they found plenty of examples for KDE use in business, like this one (Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE). Or take a look at this initiave: part 1, part 2.. Or another example here. Quote:

second, i have the inkling that we have a lot of small and medium sized business deployments out there. personally i count anything under 500 seats to be in that umbrella. at the table (which i picked at random) i ate lunch at in munich during trolltech dev days there i found myself sandwiched between two such examples. while eating the rather amazingly good food, i discovered that on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.

Scribus is available through fink, but if you don't know what that means, you're in for an adventure getting it installed (X11, packages, etc.). And compared even to PageMaker or Publisher, it's still quite rough around the edges, makes Quark look like a Lexus and InDesign look like a Rolls Royce.

But it'll damn sure make a greeting card, if you're patient enough.

Currently I use LaTeX for documents and Lilypond for music.

Wow... I guess I lost out in the moderator lottery today! My poor attempt at humour may have fallen flat but it was certainly not meant as a troll.

I was kidding, okay? Obviously, PDF is a good choice for a document like that when they want page-level formatting and such, and when the new format described is not ubiquitous or implemented yet. (Parent was meant as a joke about bootstrapping a new format.) PDF is open and is great with the right tools -- Preview and the "Save as PDF" buttons in OS X rock! (Though I've done the same thing for years in Windows, using a generic PS printer driver, the save to file button in the print dialog box and ps2pdf -- OS X just makes it far more convenient.) And between open tools like Ghostscript, pdftk, pdflatex, Scribus and anything else that produces PS or PDF directly, it's possible to do quite a bit. I've also found it wonderful for archiving interesting papers and other documents useful to my research.

I was able to do my state tax forms (which didn't grant me "rights" to save changes) by opening it in gv, saving the individual pages to separate .pdf files, converting them to .ps files with pdftops (don't use pdf2ps, it's crap), then importing that into Scribus. It has a nice WYSIWYG environment to do your editing.

> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive

On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a variety of software packages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)

> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on

Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).

> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features

It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...

> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer

Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).

> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards

What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !

[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*

I agree with you about LyX; it's certainly not perfect, and it's buggy on Mac OS as well (last time I tried it, at least). It's still more correct than the likes of Word or OpenOffice, though.

As for Scribus, that's even worse than traditional word processors! The point I was trying to make is that it's fundamentally wrong for the writer to be concerned with presentational details like this, and the program should merely let him get down to the business of writing. All the user should have to worry about is what the parts of his document are -- what they look like is the business of the program. Or at the very least, the presentational details should be handled later as a separate step, akin to applying a stylesheet to an HTML document. I want the editor to encourage the writer to express a quotation as "this is a quotation", not as "this text is italicized with 1/2" indentation." Get it?

Check out scribus. It even does the fancy stuff like creating interactive pdf forms.

These materials include multi-page booklets, flashy flyers, membership cards, event tickets and programmes, and more.

You sound like an excellent candidate to be using Scribus.

It's a full-featured DTP application that seems to improve almost daily. Friends of mine use it to produce two newspapers, among other things.

You really want to compare Word and (La)TeX, they are both document preparation systems that provide you with outlines, tables, figures, indexes, tables of content, equations and general typesetting facilities (styles, fonts, etc).

MS-Word is the archetypal "WYSIWYG" typesetting system, with all of its seemingly low-barrier-of-entry appeal. It is completely state of the art. The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.

People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)

In contrast TeX is more of a "what you mean is what you get" system. It enforces the rules of the Chicago Book of Style for you in a relatively straighforward manner. You enter the data structure of the document, it produces something up to publishing standards immediately. It is incredibly productive but not of obvious usage to anyone. In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler (yes I do know about things like LyX, TeXShop and the like, they are but a crutch to the TeX afficionado, although they might lower the barrier of entry somewhat).

In Word you just type away. You *will* make stylistic mistakes that TeX would not allow you to get away with, but it does look easier at first glance, and even long-time TeX users have to fight with the system to sometime get the result they would like to see (like "put that damn figure on *this* page, not the other page, dammit!") although what TeX does is usually the correct,proper way.

No prize for deciding which is the eventual winner however, except in the category of "ease of use for single-page, no frills documents", and even then...

TeX is not meant for desktop publishing though. You would not be able to put together a glossy magazine in TeX without considerable efforts, and so doesn't really compare with Quark or Indesign.

For DTP the free alternative is Scribus.

Well, you could take a look at Scribus.
Even though it's nowhere near InDesign as features, imho, but if it does what you need, then there you go.
(One of the bigger limitiations is the lack of Windows version, which stumped me last time I needed a DTP application.)

Scribus is a robust open source desktop publishing app. Editing pdfs is one of its most killer tools.

For DTP try Scribus

I wonder if the existence of Scribus is giving them reason to wake up and realize that eventually (maybe not today, but eventually) they're going to be facing some real competition in the DTP universe. If so, I have to applaud Adobe for being proactive about it.

Scribus impresses me, so this is a note from a fan who dabbles in it; I can't compare it deeply to state-of-the-art DTP programs.

If AbiWord is slow on your machine, then I think Scribus would be, too. However, it's a very nice application which gets better (well, that is the intent, I realize ;)) with every release. They just had a major release, too, and the documentation is far better than most software's documentation in the source-secret or open-source worlds.

Is it Indesign / Quark? No, but it's also a gifthorse ;)

Right now, Scribus is more like PageMaker of a few years ago, frankly, but OTOH, can directly create PDFs and do other things which (when I last touched PageMaker, quite a while ago) PageMaker could not.

(Also, though my DTP experience is several years old now, I actually preferred PageMaker for small things; Quark I was eventually won over to, but for small things PM is just more familiar and simple to work with. YMMV ...)

timothy

Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.

Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).

OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.

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

Photoshop also supports color management through and through- GIMP never has out of the box and never will, because there's no such thing as color management under linux; it's not builtin to X, there are zero calibration devices for linux, etc. Even gamma is something of a mess under Linux.

What's wrong with X11's gamma settings? Can tune gamma on all three channels, or all at once, with pure and simple command line tool.

X11 has color management extensions. It's just that apps don't seem to care. (Sounds familiar, huh?) GIMP, however, does do CMS, via littlecms library (which is also used by other cool Linux graphics/typesetting apps like Scribus these days).

Not sure about high-bit-depth graphics formats though, I'm a plain old-fashioned SLR & el cheapo scanner kind of photographer, digital cameras are not in my price class. Maybe Cinepaint?

Its time to promote open source, and for people to improve it.

Photoshop = Gimp, the lastest version is much improved, with a DECENT GUI, masking layers, the beginings of CMYK support and much much more. There is no need to complain about the gimp, and if you need a feature that is not there, Then you can help. Also check out the gegl project, which will add much wanted stuff such has weird colourspaces and 48-bit support

Illistrator = Karbon. Sodipodi is nice, but its designed as an SVG editor only, Karbon has a more illistrator like interface and supports more file formats. As usual, give feedback, its how open source improves.

InDesign = Scribus. A powerful DTP application, its a lot to explain on this page, so go and read the page and don't forget to help.

GoLive = Quanta. Quanta is the best OpenSource Website creator. Support for wysiwyg is in the CVS, so help them out ;).

I use these tools everyday and FOR PRODUCTION work, remember don't complain on slashdot about $APP dosen't have $FEATRURE. Either help fix it if you can program, or submit a feature request in bugzilla. I have several times and gotten the features I wanted. So, if you are tired of Adobe lock in, then help open source.

In a word, Scribus

It has very complete support for PDF 1.3,1.4 and PDF/X-3, including interactive PDF, bookmarks, color management via littlecms.

Try it..