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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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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...