Desktop Publishing for Unix?

weierophinney asks: "In a past job incarnation, I was a graphic artist and page layout technician for a small guidebook publisher. We were a Windows-based shop, and I used Macromedia Freehand for drawing maps, Adobe Photoshop for scanning and sizing images, and Quark XPress for book layout. I have since moved on to web programming, but occasionally want to do something that would use these tools. While I use GIMP regularly, I have yet to find a -good- free, open-source, alternative to the 2D vector graphics programs I used, or a page layout program with the power of Quark XPress. Is anybody in the Linux community doing publishing or using such tools, be they commercial or otherwise? Is Linux a viable option for small publishers (where profits are often slim and money for software upgrades is sparse)?"

Comments

Kontour

[PhaseBurn]

for 2D/Vector, I've come to love Kontour, actually, and Paint Shop Pro 7 actually does run well under Wine for me. Both do vector nicely, and PSP 7 under Wine does nice rastor, as well... I've been "almost" successful in getting Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 to run under wine, too...

Kontour can be found in KOffice, at http://www.koffice.org/kontour/

Hope this helps slightly... I'm in the same boat as you, actually... and I am totally 100% linux at work now... If you have any more questions, feel free to e-mail me.

Right tool, right job

[foobar104]

Okay, I'll brave the trolls and weigh in with my thoughts on this subject. What the heck.

I spent 1991-1997 as a graphic artist, and I did all my work on Macs: various versions of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quark mostly, with brief excursions elsewhere, but always in the Mac way.

Since then, I've kept up the graphic arts stuff as a hobby, mostly, doing fill-in for my company's marketing department or mocking up user interfaces, stuff like that. I use Windows 2000 at work, and I do my software engineering with XEmacs under one flavor or another of Unix.

When I want to mock up a user interface, I fire up Illustrator on my iBook. Similarly, I did some quick-and-dirty marketing brochures for a last-minute event earlier this fall, and I did those in QuarkXPress on my iMac at home.

I wouldn't try to do office-type stuff-- spreadsheets or whatever-- with my Mac, even though Office v.X is very nice. Likewise, I wouldn't try developing software with Windows tools, even though lots and lots of people do.

And I have never had any success using Windows or Unix tools to do graphic arts. I've even tried Photoshop 3 on an SGI under IRIX; it was essentially the same application as Photoshop 3 for the Mac, but I couldn't find my way around it worth a damn.

See, the keyboard was the wrong shape, and the toolbars weren't exactly right, and it just felt wrong. I was so used to Photoshop on the Mac that the same program on another platform was virtually unusable for me.

I learned my lesson well, and I've applied it ever since. I choose the tools that work best for me for the job I'm trying to do, because I get the job done faster and better if I work that way. My desk at work has a PIII workstation under the desk with two graphics cards and two 21" monitors set for 1280x1024. I toggle back-and-forth between the Windows desktop and Exceed, which is showing me the IRIX desktop on my server in the lab. Beside this stuff I have my iBook, which, at work, I use exclusively for email.

Every task I do, I could do with different tools. I use the ones I use because they work well for me. If I sit down at somebody else's desk, I spend as much time fiddling around as I do actually working. God help them if they expect me to use a different OS, or a different editor, or a different email program than the one I'm most comfortable with. You'll hear me bitching all the way down the hall.

If you're comfortable using Freehand or QuarkXPress under Windows, keep using them. Don't change your tools unless you have a really compelling reason. For myself, I don't count "I hate Microsoft" as a compelling reason, so if that's your argument, don't bother.

This is just my opinion: use the tools that work best for you, and don't worry about anything else.

Scribus

[gmhowell]

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.

sodipodi

[danpat]

Seems very nice for 2D vector graphics. It's based entiredly
around the SVG standard, saves in SVG, etc. Works well for
2D vector graphics for me.

http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/

TeX and LaTeX

[Ivan Raikov]

Much has been said about Linux and Unix "desktop" applications in other threads today, and this topic invariably causes lengthy flamewars, but let me tell you about my experience with typesetting software under Linux. Please note that I'm not covering image processing and drawing, which I consider separate from publishing and typesetting.

Anyway, on to the subject: for the past two years, I have been using LaTeX, which is a package of macros for the typesetting engine TeX, orginally written by Donald Knuth of Stanford University. TeX was intended to be used as a typesetting tool for scientific papers, and to this date, the quality of typesetting mathematical and other formulae with TeX remains unsurpassed (the reason probably being that the commercial niche for that type of stuff is too small to be profitable).

TeX and LaTeX have become the de facto standard in the scientific world -- they are the official typesetting tools of the American Mathematical Society, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, many universities and scientific magazines produce all their official publications using a flavor of TeX.

As far as I am concerned, the main advantages of TeX and LaTeX are the (unsurpassed) beauty of the output, the tremendous flexibility, and wide availability of packages. Consider the following uses I have for LaTeX:

• Typesetting of simple documents such as letters, papers, and others.
• Typesetting of more complicated, composite documents, such as multi-chapter books (I do a little bit of translation in my spare time).
• Typesetting of documents in other scripts -- Cyrillic, 18th century Church Slavic, European languages which use the Latin alphabet.
• Typesetting of software documentation, which must obey strict rules in formatting.
• Typesetting of diagrams -- be it high level block diagrams of electronic circuits, or any kind of UML diagrams, LaTeX does it all for me.

To me, the only application which can perform all these tasks, using a uniform description language, is TeX. The reason TeX is so flexible, is because it uses a mark-up language (HTML is another example of a mark-up language), which describes the text layout. It also allows for creating macros and extending the basic TeX capabilites.

One of the most widely used macro packages for TeX is LaTeX, which provides templates for many standard types of documents -- letters, articles, books, etc. But you are not constrained with that -- you can create your own templates and macros, or you can use one of the multitude of packages available, which can do almost anything, even typesetting musical scores.

In TeX, you also have the ability to include and manipulate images -- you are given the opportunity to include PostScript code, so almost everything you can do with PostScript, you can do in TeX (and there are high-level PostScript macros, so you even don't have to know PostScript).

But beware -- the greatest strength of TeX is probably why graphic designers may find it inappropriate for their needs -- due to its scientific roots, the description of the document is exact -- it's very difficult to force TeX to produce funky, non-standard text layout, like you can do in Word. And most TeX packages for creating complex graphic objects are geared towards diagrams and scientific graphing, so an artist would not be able to just freely draw something and place anywhere at will -- the design of the document is very carefully considered and calculated in TeX, and it is difficult to produce ugly or non-standard documents.

In recent years, people have been developing WYSIWYG environments for TeX, so now you have TeX front ends like LyX, which allow you to edit the layout in a more "visual" manner.

For more information about TeX, one can go to the Web site of the TeX Users Group. There are plenty of good resources in the Interesting URLs section, so that should be a good start.

Sketch; Context

[siepo]

For vector drawing have a look at Sketch (sketch.sourceforge.net). It pretty stable and has good PostScript support and Illustrator compatibility. But I don't think it is a replacement for Illustrator or Freehand. As to TeX: the Context package (www.ntg.nl/context/) is much more modern and powerful than LaTeX, and there is a very active mailing list. It also does xml. For technical publishing, there are projects for which TeX would be the better choice and other projects for which TeX would just be pain. For a while, I tried to do as much as possible within Linux, but I often ended up moving artwork from Sketch to Illustrator and from the Gimp to Photoshop because the Linux programs didn't have all the functionality I needed. I think that you are better off with some commercial stuff at hand.