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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 ?"
..to a print edition of the quite insightful article.
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
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.
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.
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. :) I've used Pagemaker extensively before though (a couple years ago), and I think we have a real winenr here! :)
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 don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
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.
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?
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.
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.
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... ;)
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.
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
GIMP 2 has a menu at the top of every window. No need to right click.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I hear the "where's the line tool?" question for the Gimp quite often. I've asked it myself even (I don't claim to be anything graphics program-wise other than a novice) so I'd imagine the tutorial was written for all the many people who asked that very question. It might be written in a way that doesn't pander to the audience, but if you actually feel personally offended by this then you need to grow a skin.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You're in the minority...and I'm speaking of shops that use graphic programs.
I've been to many a shop where they are 3D-studio specific...then another that was Alias PowerAnimator specific (pre Maya), or one that was Lightwave centered. If you want a job in 3D you keep your options open.
But they all used the same paint program, Photoshop.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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
There's talk about better support for spot colours for 1.3 . As for PANTONE, there are unfortunately licensing issues that make it tricky.
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.
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!)
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...
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
/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
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