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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 ?"
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!
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.
My big disappointment with Scribus is that they've not done anything interesting with H&J (surely, at a minimum they could make use of TeX's algorithm?).
Interestingly, InDesign makes use of TeX's algorithm (by way of URW's HZ program) as the basis for their multi-line composer.
GIMP really needs to have a generalized model for handling colours as ink and ink mixes --- this would get them CMYK support ``for free'', but doing this sort of thing without running afoul of extant patents on colour representation is rather a thorny issue.
An interesting and viable alternative is to just use RGB w/ the colour calibration and allow the conversion to CMYK to be done in the RIP (which is the big advantage of the PDF/X-3 support).
For my part, InDesign rubs me the wrong way since it's like to a hybrid of two programs I don't much like, Quark and Illustrator. The UI for Scribus does seem quite promising, which is nice for an opensource program.
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)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
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.
It has to do with the world being Photoshop. I mean, I work in graphics and I can pretty well adjust myself to a new (for me) 3D program like moving from Videoscape 3d to Sculpt-Animate 4d to Turbo-Silver to Strata to Lightwave to Maya to Blender...see what I mean? There was no one dominate 3D program that totally dwarfed everything else. In 3D if you start with one program, it's not that hard to adjust to another along the way.
But with 2D paint/photo it's pretty much Photoshop, and everything else that's "not-Photoshop". Yes I know there are some out there that swear by Paint-Shop pro or The Gimp...but Photoshop is THE program. So I've found it very hard to switch from PS to The Gimp...not to mention some things the Gimp just can't do "yet".
But it's come a long long way.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
In 2004 there's no excuse for GUI software without unlimited undo.
"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?"
Right? Wrong. I think it would be a bad thing - one more item for somebody to maintain, more developer resources consumed. As a user, I would much rather see developer efforts continue to be concentrated on improving the GIMP in terms of both features and improving the existing UI.
Also, as a user, I like seeing them stick to their guns on the UI. I even prefer it to the PS interface. The irony is that if they cloned the PS interface, people like you would be lambasting them for being unoriginal, as happens with all copycat open source software. They are being innovative and making their own design choices, and they get it in the neck for not copying. It's a catch 22 situation.
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. The GIMP is not PS, thankfully.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
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
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.
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.
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
they put in to placate whiners like you
;)
No, they put it in, to achieve some consistency with host user interfaces. The fact that it placates whiners like me is only a sideeffect.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
I've used PhotoShop for a number of years now and I got used to it. I remember the hell getting started with it, however. Photoshop's UI sucks! It is not intuitive and it is entirely too modal. Trying to remember the exact sequence of things that have to be done to just ungrey the option on the menu I want drives me crazy sometimes. I would much rather see the gimp team stay with what they got than to copy an obviously flawed UI just because it is popular!
I stopped at PS 5.0, so if some of those things have been ironed out by now, don't flame me. I am working towards an all Linux workstation so I've been concentrating on gimp. And I agree with the parent; the gimp 2.0 UI is a great improvement.
Oh boy, why do people always start to say "Gimp isn't meant to be this or that" if some feature simply doesn't work or is simply completly flawed?
How about simply fixing the brokeness instead?
Gimp is a image manipulation programm and for that it should be able to do what ever stuff I need to manipulate images, if its broken it needs fixing, not users telling me that I 'do not need the feature'.