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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 ?"
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.
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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.
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.
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