Slashdot Mirror
Scribus Cracks the Big Leagues in Print
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview on O'Reilly, The Scribus Team, who recently released Scribus 1.2 , reveal the first commercial adoptions of Scribus, GIMP, Inkscape, and Linux by commercial newspapers. Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?"
Cool, the rest of the world can't be far behind.
Scribus is taking desktop publishing asunder. Now all there's left is GIMP getting a usable interface and we have ourselves the tools! :)
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
..to a print edition of the quite insightful article.
Right!
I never said: Who said Linux could not make it in the print world?
But I have said: Who said Linux couldn't make it in the print world?
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Post-nuked just got nuked
--Residential Interior Design
3 comments and it's gone.
Here is a google cache of thier website.
Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?
Now, if only they could make it in the printer world!
Stupid drivers... mumble mumble mumble
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Wow, the scribus site has already crashed from it's slashdot article. Maybe slashdot should have a caching service for any articles posted on the main page, kind of like google's cache(but with graphics).
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
One of the most useful filters I can think of would be an import filter for MS Publisher.
I know quite a few small businesses that use this software and take it to press. Yes, most print shops moan about it, but they still accept the EPS files.
Publisher is used because of convenience (it is there); ease of use for small setups as opposed to Quark or Pagemaker; and integration w/Word and Excel. It is an abomination, but it is still popular.
A filter for Scribus could help me move a couple of shops off of Windows boxes.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?
They think me is stupid! They think me is not as smarty as them is!
As a Photoshop Tutorial author, if I ever subjected my audience to that kind of bullshit, I wouldn't have a God damned audience! (intended)
Go ahead, make an excuse!
Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.
So far it sounds like Scribus is setting the bar at beating PageMaker and Quark. That's great, but when Scribus also overtakes InDesign, that's when I'll cheer loudest.
We'd be robbing them of ad banner revenue.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
I've used Quark and InDesign, and strongly prefer InDesign. In particular, InDesign seems to have a much better hyphenation (not the dictionary, but better choice of hyphenation spots to keep paragraphs from being ugly), better font kerning, and support for transparent images. Does anyone know how Scribus compares in these areas? Basically, how pretty does Scribus output look?
corel painter like software for unix
PS is the standard for image manipulation programs, so I don't understand the reluctance of gimp developers to provide a 'ps emulator' mode for Gimp so people familiar with PS could feel more at home. Heck, even emacs has vi modes for crying out loud! It's not like actually getting more users for Gimp would be a bad thing, right?
Personally I don't mind as much the Gimp UI (in 2.0, in 1.3 I minded it very much) despite the fact that I am more used to the PS keyboard shortcuts, but can't really use it as my primary app until adjustment layers will finally be supported (people have been asking for this feature for years and years, yeah, I know, if we want it so bad, why don't we code it)
-- the cake is a lie
Unfortunately, good import filters are incredibly hard. Look at how much trouble OO.o has with Word ... and they can afford to get things wrong.
Even Adobe's filters for PageMaker (for which they have the source code) are far from perfect. Their Quark filters often result in pages that need a lot of tweaking.
If a small error is found in the print job, it's not fun. At all. Even if the client approved the wrong proof, they'll bitch, moan, be generally difficult, and waste your time.
Also, good clients who can properly check proofs, provide good quality samples, etc are rarely the ones using Publisher in the first place.
In my experience the best importer for DTP is Acrobat Distiller.
There's a lot to be done in the field of API:s.
Basically, I'd like to see a good and definitive API for vector graphics. This is something still very lacking.
Preferably, the API would handle:
* High-quality printing
* Export to PS,SVG,PDF
* Bitmap rendering (for on-screen drawing)
* Support transparency
* Be well integrated with the font API:s.
Basically, a unification of all 2d graphics things into one single device-independent API.
Apple already has something similar to this in Quartz.
Supposedly, Cairo is supposed to do this, but given that there is no real documentation or roadmap for it, it's hard to say how, when or if it will ever get there.
Apparently, you did. Now turn in your geek card, unbeliever.
Scribus is doing OK on typsetting, but I don't personally think it's the strongpoint of the program. There's lots of work coming on that though.
It has quite good hyphenation and very good, going on excellent support for typsetting non-latin languages.
Work on smarter widow avoidance etc is being discussed for 1.3.
I do quite a bit of graphic design (including text layout), and while I can definitely see myself using Scribus and I'm sure Inkscape or one of the other mature OSS vector drawing programs would be more than adequate once I got used to it, and a great solution if I weren't stealing Illustrator (i.e. if I were running a design shop and I needed to make sure all my licenses were legit), I just never got to like Gimp. It's significantly gotten better over the years but it still seems like a poor substitute for photoshop. Although, I would say that it's definitely gotten to the point where I could see it becoming a suitable all-around substitute for photoshop in the next few years.
OCEANIA NOW AT WAR WITH EAST ASIA!
*this page layed out with open-source tools.
My personal suspicion would be that they may feel they have better things to work on - like core functionality.
IMO the really important things PS gets write - like the quickmask - are the important bits to look at.
I'm a heavy Photoshop user myself, and I prefer it - but mostly because of the more polished tools like the masking, filters, and selection tools.
Perhaps a group of users who really want a PS-like UI will get together and write one...
The thing about the gimp is that photoshop is such a standard that it has a harder time making inroads than other open source design programs. I mean, with page layout and vector drawing there are a few different programs popular with designers (i.e. for vector drawing many people use Illustrator, but many people also use Freehand or CorelDraw, or other programs). With photo manipulation though, the huge majority of professionals use Photoshop.
It seems the Scribus folks are well aware of how TeX does things, but alas it's not as easy as grabbing the guts and dropping them in.
Improvements along these lines are being looked at for future versions though.
Alright, alright. I agree with you, but you should look at what's happening.
Linux people are getting it. More projects are doing more beta testing than mindless feature addition (see Firefox). The great part about the open source movement is that the geeks start the project, and a lot of them are very pedantic about stability and security. So, you get a text based library and program interface that never, never fails to work. But you have to remember
$ program -xvjpf
or some other non-intuitive command set. Then someone builds a KDE or Gnome GUI front end for it. The GUI might crash, but the libraries and commands are still rock solid. After a while someone might come along and take a look at both projects, re-use the library, create a better GUI integration that (hopefully) doesn't make the program unstable.
Notice the workflow? Stability and security are FIRST. GUI implementation is SECOND, and most likely won't break the stability and security.
At Apple and Microsoft, they try to do everything at once, so the library built to work with the gui built to integrate with programs XYZ and it looks so pretty! but what are these kernel 32 errors? If Apple didn't have the NeXTSTEP and BSD bail them out, you'd be hearing, "Cupertino, we have a problem." OS 9 was dead a long time ago, and they smartly got out from under it.
So anyway, I say, "Give me stability or give me death." But don't try to sell Linux to newbies quite yet. The first bad impression is hard to get rid of.
Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?
Joe.
Joe did...
Bad Joe... ;)
Nice insight. Now describe the republicans.
A common sentiment until recently - InDesign will go nowhere because everyone uses Quark. I'm just trying to provide a counterpoint.
Way to prove his point, Einstein.
Since I work in the digital printing business I have to love Linux because open source started with a printer driver. :) But the really important thing is that my few Linux customers can deliver me the perfect file: A PDF. Making a PDF under Linux is very easy and doesn't require expensive software like Adobe Acrobat. I got a lot of my customors to use PDFcreator (sourceforge) but a lot of them just have to hand over MS Word and MS Publisher documents. They are both a big problem. Especially Publisher. Even a (Ghost- or PostScript) PDF made out of a Publisher file is messy. I like Scribus a lot and it's just something you have to get used to. For the lack of CMYK support: I don't care that much. The CMYK Offset printing has tough competition from machines like the HP Indigo 3050. These baby's print from RGB files and make really stunning prints. My Windows Office clients using MS Word and MS Publisher can design their own stuff and have it printed with Offset Quality and speed as long as they take the effort to make a PDF file. My Linux Scribus, KOffice, OpenOffice, etc. customers too but they have less problems with making a PDF file. The thing that that is still a problem is the lack of PANTONE color support. This would make it possibe to have stuff printed with just two colors insted of four making the prints a LOT cheaper.
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
A question for those who know how to use it: Does anyone know how to resize an image in a frame?
The closest I've been able to come to is editing the image (spawns The Gimp), and changing the size there manually.
(I haven't delt with news copy since college -- so maybe the answer is "If Scribus supported resizing the image, that would be a bad idea.".)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If you had half a brain you'd realize that tutorial was written completely tongue in cheek and as the lead-in page clearly states its supposed to be "rude". I guess you couldn't figure that part out? Wow you Photoshop users will do anything to slam GIMP huh?
For anyone else dumb enough to think that's how all GIMP tutorials are written read the rest of the tutorials espeically the ones under "photo editting".
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"In my experience the best importer for Publisher is Acrobat Distiller"
Sorry. It's 6am here and I've been up all night.
Something like how IIS just makes Apache look like a weekend project, huh? ;)
It is a developer myth that Gimp has a good interface. I've used it since 1998, and it has sucked since the beginning. I am also somewhat sad to see that the winning desicion to keep that horrible UI is originating from, mostly, people who don't even use Gimp to paint and draw, but who use it for image manipulation and simple button graphics.
Gimp is horrid to use - and in KDE it sucks, doing wierd things to the WM (which the Gimp developers blame on KDE doing things wrong).
It seams that the Gimp developers have some sort of agenda and political standpoint - nothing else would explain why they maintain this wierd UI. They keep saying "It is the GTK way of doing things!" - I reference thee to the MDI dispute if you have followed the debate.
I put my faith in Kolourpaint and Krita - which might evolve to become real, viable choices.
I think it would be a bad thing - one more item for somebody to maintain, more developer resources consumed.
in general UI developers tend to be UI developers, not people that would be interested in writing CYMK support or implementing adjustment layers. You are falsely assuming that the pool of Gimp developers is finite, I am sure that if there was a clear componentization of the Gimp (clear, defined boundaries between UI and back-end) it wouldn't be too hard to allow an 'UI useability group' to operate in parallel with the traditional 'backend' development.
he irony is that if they cloned the PS interface, people like you would be lambasting them for being unoriginal,
People like me would adopt the 'copycat' software and be productive instantly. I am long past the age where installing a new program and learning it is an exciting adventure: I want software that works the way software I already know works (ok, I am not against improvements, I am talking about paradigms here), and if this means that Gimp on Linux will look =exactly= the same as PS on Windows, hey, by all means count me in. If PS worked under Wine as well as on native win32 (it's much slower and currently it seems tablet support doesn't work very well, as in, no pressure info seems to get to PS) I wouldn't even bother with dual booting at all.
The GIMP UI is good. It's not a barrier to productivity with the GIMP - the only barrier is people's refusal to let go of something familiar in PS.
that is a barrier for a lot of experienced people. If Gimp folks want to target a user-base that has no PS experience ('newbies' in a lot of ways), hey, fine, but I really can't see why the Gimp folks wouldn't WANT more people to switch away from PS (championing the open source movement and all that), a little investment in UI would go a long way towards that shift (that and more PS-comparable functionality of course).
-- the cake is a lie
You're a tutorial author, so Write A Better Tutorial instead of whining.
Sigh...
>Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?
Me.
--Anonymous Coward
There's talk about better support for spot colours for 1.3 . As for PANTONE, there are unfortunately licensing issues that make it tricky.
Meanwhile, Kerry can't decide if his "seared" memory serves him correctly regarding Christmas in Cambodia. At least with Bush, you know he's not pandering--you know exactly what he thinks on every issue and that he'll stubbornly stick to it. Kerry is too busy saying vague partyline phrases like "I will lead America forward" and "I served in Vietnam and understand the values of leadership in America."
And, so, Bush has a double-digit lead because you know what Bush thinks about the issues. Kerry, you don't know him as well.
Right click on frame -> show properties
(The properties pallette is your friend.)
Click on image tab of properties palette.
Play to heart's content.
Also note the "Scale to frame size" option.
I'm referring to post-1.2 CVS but it should be the same in most versions IIRC.
I too like to see the GIMP folks not giving ground to those that say GIMP should be a clone of the PS interface.
That sort of thinking bought us OpenOffice.
*shudder*
I do think that more general usability concerns should not be put out of sight, however. Clearly the GIMP folks do too, given the clear improvements in 2.0.
Well??? What is it? What does it do? Why should I care?
Agreed. I publish a newsletter for a club with 3,000 people. inDesign handles everything so nicely and has a variety of features Scribus could never hope to match (for example, I doubt you can choose between display modes, ie fast for displaying low-res previews of your 600DPI photos so you can scroll around and edit text, or high-res for showing off what the final product will look like). I've got styles defined which let me typeset the whole thing consistently; article title is one style, author's name is another. They all inherit qualities from their parents, so if I want to make it New Times Roman tomorrow, it's one click and a quick trip through the pages to check for any text box sizing problems. Its PDF support is absolutely amazing. It supports color management, something linux bumbles almost completely. It takes Adobe Illustrator, EPS etc directly. My only complaint is that it doesn't have support for imposition, and Adobe says that's because it's not designed for large documents over a few pages- yeesh, what a bunch of bullshit. Tip- if you have to put a faq entry in about why you pulled a feature from your program(it was pulled in 2.x), you shouldn't have pulled it, dumbasses.
The authors showed themselves to be utterly and hopelessly clueless when they said the following:
In fact, it has evolved into a worthy competitor to the print industry's premier layout programs for the PC and Mac: PageMaker and QuarkXPress.
PageMaker hasn't been "the industry's" premiere ANYTHING for years because it DOES NOT RUN ON OS X. QuarkXPress has been consistently loosing market share and only companies who are tied into it irrevocably are still using it. It's a pathetic, buggy, overpriced, underfeatured dinosaur piece of bloatware.
I tried Scribus last time a new version came out, and it crashed constantly, and was extremely poorly documented. inDesign is ROCK solid and --does not crash--. Further- the documentation is astoundingly good and easy to search; probably the first electronic documentation I've actually found useful, especially as someone who's not a publishing 'pro'. I picked up inDesign essentially from scratch and within a week had a newsletter people raved about.
Please help metamoderate.
Right now I'm taking a DTP class and everyone else uses Publisher, 2000/2002/xp/2003. One big problem is that not all versions are compatible with each other. So when we do group project some people can't see the others. (I know save as jpeg and such but some people in the is class can't) Any how I love to export to PDF function-along with embeding the fonts! For this class I have not had a problem yet!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
If papers and magazines are publishing with open-source, it would follow that they would start paying greater attention to it and possibly leverage their power so that their sources(businesses, government officials, whatever else you might think of) convert to open formats with them.
It is obviously clear that large organisation can switch to Open Source tools for DTP needs (and round them) like for years. LaTeX is here and it is proven (for some companies) to be the best choice. But what with the simpliest DTP - for people that don't really know much about DTP - they just work like monkies in Corel and indeed produce something that makes revenue... I myself face such situation - I would convert entire office to Linux if there was a native version of corel aviable (I know - things like WINE/COOffice - but this makes no sense). Now for hardcore DTP operators Linux gives a lot of options, also commercial offerings are aviable (checkout PageStream for Linux) - but they require somebody to actually have a skill in what he is doing... Windows tools come with extensive libraries of templates, examples, tutors, 3rd party plugins - this stuff really makes things easier. I love Linux and I'am posting this from my custom built distribution - but to be real if no tool like Corel shows up for Linux - it has no chance in things like (name it) desktop publishing. Scribus is nice. For hobbyists.
That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)
After helping design a A0 poster in just LaTeX+some pstricks, I can say that for me, the best approach would be to mix some graphical tool to design the layout of the page (using, say, minipage environments) and then do some hacking on the LaTeX code itself. Nothing beats LaTeX when it comes to some hairy details.
BTW, while making the poster I didn't know, and still have no idea, how to make the text flow from one minipage to another. Any suggestions?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Well, the documentation isn't there because the API is still in development. The GNOME roadmap has GTK+ moving to Cairo in mid-late 2005, so it's likely that others will follow suit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Uh, how is this cracking the big leagues? From what that article said, they had their first roll-out on the Twin Tier Times which seems to be a brand-new small time newspaper in a small town (region?). I'd say they are just cracking the minor leagues, but nowhere near the big leagues yet.
This is not to take away from Scribus, me and my fiancee used it to create our wedding invitations. It's a very capable program and fun to use -- even for a Gnome zealot like myself. But the Twin Tier Times is *not* the New York Times.
501 Not Implemented
I work for a 100k+ daily circulation newspaper doing ad design with InDesign 2 as a front end for our proprietary database workflow system (made half-assedly by DTI but that's another story).
An earlier post knocked ID for being a cross between Illustrator and Quark, but that's a large part of what makes InDesign great -- the familiar Adobe-style UI, useful vector abilities from Illustrator, and it's not Quark!
I'm constantly exporting files to PDF for customer proofing and haven't experienced any trouble with it's PDF creation, or it's ability to import a PDF image, and I'm using 2.0 not CS.
I've not had the chance or need yet to use Scribus and Gimp in a production environment, but my toying with both have been positive. Gimp 2.0 seems, to a daily photoshop user, to be quite powerful and feature-rich, if not quite Photoshop. Scribus is still, from a new-to-it perspective, playing catch-up in terms of instant usability, but I love the inroads that linux and open-source in general are making towards having a competent toolset for professional designers. Not that I want to sit in front of the computer and do design at home after working all day, but hey, you never know...
Saying that Scribus should work on Publisher support is nuts. We don't even allow Publisher files as graphics-standards submissions. In my experience, if it comes in designed in Publisher, it's gonna be the print equivalent of a GeoCities teenager's website: an eyesore.
Scribus and GIMP should keep their eyes on the workflow and output needs of professional designers, and we'll see more /. stories about firms moving to OSS solutions.
Speaking of which, does the GIMP have much functionality along the lines of creating web graphics slices along the lines Macromedia's Fireworks? That would seem a wise avenue to go down...
Tools menu -> properties
The scribus folks keep an eye on the GNOME HIG, though don't strive for "compliance" as such. Also watch the Apple HIG as it has some good ideas too.
Thanks or the pointer though.
If Scribus and Gimp keep up they way they're going, I might be able to not upgrade to InDesign 5 and Photoshop 10. But until then I'll stick with the stuff with the high-end abilities and fluid, productivity-enhancing GUI.
And noone mentioned tremendous feature for regular linux user who sometimes need to write a page or two article? Scribus does great job importing postscript (ps/eps) files and allows editing... seems to be much nicer than ps2edit (I'm not sure if they don't make use of it... :-))
Did anyone catch this amazing tidbit on the Scribus site regarding their 1.2 Upgrade?
"Over 800 bug reports and user feature requests have been squashed."
Maybe it wasn't such an important upgrade after all...
Is a port to Windows. Indeed, switching people to another OS entirely would be ideal, but sometimes change requires a transitional phase. And it would allow Scribus to compete with the big boys.
1) The CEO preferred to milk the Mac market for a while longer, which may have in part been because...
2) The development positions (but not the developers) were moved to India at or immediately before the start of the port effort. The new crew had serious problems getting up the learning curve for the legacy Xpress code and OS X simultanously.
In fact, the whole sorry story is a case study for when not to offshore a software project.
Luke, help me take this mask off
one more
So, you can steal great software, and it is better than OSS - and if you stole the one (pardon! infringed) I will bet your photoshop licence aint "legit" either. Yet you can gripe that you can't be Open Source cuz it isn't as good. I am stunned. How about I forward your email and website to Adobe and we see what thier lawyers think of your post? OS doesn't fit you, and OS doesn't WANT your kind. Go get your hacks, and stay on MS, your time is coming.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I'm installing it via Fink right now. But the lack of a Cocoa version will probably make me uninstall it soon afterward.
What I would really like is a Cocoa DTP solution based on TeX/LaTeX. Oh well, I can always dream.
/me puts graphic designer hat on
.. Scribus is always is the final touch.
..
... in 99% of cases it will get done within the week. In my experience every bug and rfe has been taken care of by the next morning.
Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus are a lethal combination.
In the past two months ive produced all my Press-ready PDF's in Scribus thanks to imported artwork from inkscape and some content from gimp.
Being able to have these tools on as many computers as you like is an awesome inclusion. Now I can work from home, from work, from Uni even my grandparents place to get a project finished on time. And when it comes to publishing
my advice for anyone who questions the features in scribus
submit an rfe
Tell me a software vendor that does that for you ?
- Andy Fitzsimon
Cinepaint seems to handle it just fine.
Stop complaining about GIMP or Photoshop. If ya don't like GIMP's UI, then shell out the cash for PS. If you like GIMP, USE IT!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I tried Scribus but the font rendering on screen was terrible. This was with Fedora 2, which I expected to have reasonable font support (most apps look okay). I am not blaming Scribus, the problem is most likely that I installed a version built with the wrong options - built without Freetype support or something like that.
Anyone know where to get a build (preferably RPM binary package or RPM source package) of Scribus for Fedora/RH-like systems that shows good-looking, outline fonts on screen?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Adobe's world is in printing and images. GIMP is giving photoshop a run for its' money. In addition, GIMP is picking up steam and it is free.
Now, along comes scribus and it is also getting there. In the next year, it is certain that at least 1 major printing company will move to it on Linux. That will help validate it. Companies will decide that the OSS tools are good enough for now, with the future looking great. At that time, Adobe will probably decide that they need to port to Linux, but it will be several years too late.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Macromedia was sued by Adobe over the use of similar interface elements (I think it was the small triangular button in the right of the windows, that gets you a popup with advanced features for that window - completely non-intuitive, btw).
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
(proper link)
Gimp uses a more advanced algorithm that works for more complex paths; the algorithm you've linked to plots one pixel for every step along the x-axis, unlike the gimp's version, which only plots orthogonally.
Personally, I'd argue that the one the gimp draws looks more even. It's a little thick at the arches, while xpaint's is a little thin. Both are imperfect, but a pixel circle has to be.
If you prefer xpaint's algorithm, you might argue for the possibility to choose your line-drawing algorithm from within gimp. Maybe that feature will come, one day. I'm not a gimp developer (though I'm kind of interested).
Anyway, you went from "Gimp can't even [...]" to a rather specific (and narrow) request; a request that xpaint (a free program!) can already handle, so there's rather low priority to add that functionality to the gimp. Maybe you should look into helping out?
I'm using the latest release of Scribus (1.2) and whilst I'm not entirely happy with it (I can only get a print out by porting PNG's to windows, but I think that's epsons fault!) I can tell you it has tracking facilities.
I'm pretty new to all this but kerning is where the individual letter displacement can be adjusted, tracking is where lines of text can be spread (like justification in a wordprocessor) to an arbitrary length (eg to match the width of a graphic).
<serious> Scribus has this, if this isn't tracking please tell me what is? </serious>
It's entirely likely that you're right. I refer to two specific features I know are absent.
(1)The inability to control the maximum permissable interword spacing or willingness to hyphenate (reduce rivers in justified text).
(2) The inability to manually tweak interword spacing at a particular location, eg when adjusting a headline to look right.