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 ?"

Comments

Re:Drawing software

[Craig Ringer]

IMO the real issues with GIMP are more with CMYK support, 16bit per channel , and other pro features.

The interface isn't too bad with 2.0 - unless you're expecting a Photoshop clone.

Re:Drawing software

[Kell_pt]

CMYK support is of uptmost importance to desktop publishing, that's true, most prints are sent in that format. But I sincerely can't force myself to work adapt to the right-button interface. I like having the menu always on the same spot, if you know what I mean. I'm sure others will find it appropriate though - so that's not in question.
As for Scribus, I've tried it before, but for most of my work VI and xslproc seem to do the trick, so I don't count. :) I've used Pagemaker extensively before though (a couple years ago), and I think we have a real winenr here! :)

Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

why not expect it?

[MarcoAtWork]

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)

Re:why not expect it?

[Jason Earl]

The folks working on Gimp have other things that they would rather work on than gimping (ha) PhotoShop's interface. Basically the Gimp developers know that current PhotoShop users aren't particularly interested in switching to the Gimp, and so they are aiming at the masses below the current PhotoShop users. If the Gimp can become popular with the folks that don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to edit photos then they will win in the long run.

Eventually PhotoShop might even have to emulate the Gimp :).

So the Gimp hackers work on the functionality that they need to compete with PS (like adjustment layers), and they have created an interface that they think will compete well with PS (instead of merely stealing PS's interface).

Re:why not expect it?

[grumbel]

Even as a long time Gimp user (~5 years), with basically no Photoshop and only a little CorelPhotopaint knowledge I have to say that the Gimp interface just sucks. Yes, it gets the job done and it could be worse (think sodipodi ;), but there is just so much in it that could be improved. While WiW might not be the solution, having to have at least 5 or 6 windows open even if I am just editing a single image just sucks extremly, docking helps a little bit, but its not a solution, just a little workaround and worst of all there is currently no way do dock stuff to the image window itself, so palett and brush window have to be floating around, annoying.

Speaking about 'working on core functionality', sorry, but I havn't seen much of that happening, they might have rewritten the core of Gimp once or twice, but basically none of that is visible from a users point of view. There is still no macro recorder, you can't resize brushes, you don't have a toolbar for custom buttons, there are no advanced brushes[1], you can't even draw a 1 pixel circle with it, you can create new tools as plug-ins, etc. Sure, some of this might require some work, but simple stuff like drawing primitives is only missing because the developers seem to be extremly hostile to anything that doesn't fit their philosophie (which in most part seems to be based on NIH[2]). Userfriendliness seems to be something that they try to avoid at all cost.

After all one should not forget that the Gimp interface never seems to have been much designed, it just happens to be started that way and never ever touched again.

I just hope that one day there will be an alternative to Gimp, maybe compatible to Gimp plug-ins, so that we could finally get rid of Gimp.

[1] http://www.levien.com/gimp/wetdream.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here

PS: This might be a bit more flaimbait then I really mean, but reading about how people tell how Gimp is all good and fine is just extremly frustrating, since it is cleary not.

PhotoShop's UI

[Craig Ringer]

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...

PDF and PANTONE

[. visplek .]

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.