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Scribus Free software DTP application.

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drag

Elite Member
A interesting article here.

It's a article from Oreillys talking about a fairly mature desktop publishing application for Linux.

Scribus is roughly equivelent to QuarkXpress and PageMaker. You wouldn't use it for doing vector graphics or any photo editing, instead you import SVG, Tiff, PNG graphics from other applications and do layouts and fonts with it.


For example you wouldn't want to do fonts in Gimp or Photoshop. That would be a mistake, the only time you'd want to do that is if you building a photograph composite and, say, need text for a street sign or flaming text or something like that. Only do text in those aplications if it's going to actually be part of the picture.

Instead you to the text in a text editor, like a article or a blurb, and then import the photos into Scribus/QuarkXpress/Whatever and do the layout. This would be the final pre-press step before handing it off to the printers.

Ever want to do professional looking PDFs? Do a layout for building displays or boxes like your video games come in? Make a professional-looking CD album cover, Fliers, or Posters? These are the type of programs you need.

Looks like Scribus is best for making PDFs and Postscript documents. You can work with stuff like Gimp and Inkscape to make nice documents using a Linux OS and completely free OSS software.

It doesn't seem to me to be up to QuarkXpress type stuff. Mostly because of printing support. Gimp's lack of CYMK support isn't going to help much either, but that doesn't have much to do with Scribus directly.

One nice thing that they mention is that since Scribus uses XML files you can repair and work with these things using a text editor to correct problems.

These publishing files can be extremely complex and fragile.

As I can personally attest to thru working with Quark Express, file corruption is not uncommon and not fun to deal with. There are a whole bunch of tools to recover these types of file corruptions, but they often don't work, or have adverse effects.

So I think it would be something worth checking out.
 
Depends. I've never realy gotten so far as to actually publish anything, and it's been a long time since I last messed around with this sort of thing. But usually it depends on what your using it for.

Most printers/publishers are going to be particular about what formats they are going to deal with. Which is why things like .tiffs are going to probably be around forever. It's a pretty stick-in-the-mud industry.

On one end your going to deal with artsy types working their day jobs, on the other end your going to be dealing with people who sell advertisments and do stuff like that who are the type that should be forbidden from ever touching a computer, and yet on the 3rd end your going to get to deal with people who are using printing presses that use DOS PC's as controllers from the 80's, manual printing presses from the 70's and before that, and then also some of the state of the art printing, plotting, and small-business-decal-making-machine technology. And all things in between.

I've always Phear'd printing, and printers. Anything not digital is a threat...

They usually use what works best for them. If they find something that works, they stick with it. Thats the general attitude that I seem to gleam from people I've talked to. That's why the stack is decked against things like Scribe and Gimp.

So since QuarkXpress is about as close to a industry standard as you can get and they do pains to make sure that it is great for printing stuff, they'll accept stuff in that format. Sometimes they'll need your working files from photoshop and stuff like that.

But it seems that PDF and postscript documents are pretty close to universal. The interesting part is that if you were a complete nerd about stuff you could probably crank out decent PDF files by hand with a text editor and some scanned photographs. The fonts can be embedded, so are the pictures and layout information is all there, so it makes it possible to use PDF's to do all sorts of interesting things.

That way with a PDF you can deliever a packaged deal on the doorstep of some printer that has all the information in it that they'd need to create other forms of documents with it. Right now PDF's are the defacto standard for all technical documents on the web.

Not sure of the details of all this stuff. It's been YEARS since I've studied it and back then I realy didn't pay that much attention. Decided before I finished my degree that I didn't want to make McDonald ads for a living so I went into computer networking technology after that. I am trying to adjust what I knew then to what is going on now and have lots of gaps in my understanding.

Although I am still curious of it, but you don't hear much about it.
 
I know some publishers/printers are very picky. I've heard horror stories of people getting laughed out of a print shop because they brought some non-Mac format or something. Oh well. Gonna have to play with scribus later.
 
Definately. They figure they are hardcore and many are very anal about stuff. As in a greased BB doesn't have a chance.

This is one of the oldest industrial-level use for computers.

If your going to work with somebody always ask ahead what sort of thing is going to be expected of you...
 
There was a time when you could use a Mac and get away with it 99% of the time. But things always change, especially when Quark for OS X was delayed... Doing your homework is definitely a necessity.
 
Ya that was a stupid thing for Quark.


rant/

I remember the gigantic pains I had to go thru just to get Quark Express working in classic mode. A real mode-killer.

And the fonts! Try explaining to a 19 year old art student about fonts, font types, packaging, liscencing concepts + telling them that yes you can use fonts that are located in the OS X font folder, BUT you have to also copy them to the OS 9 font folder, but you can't have so many otherwise Quark can't use them. and on and on and on and on.

one place I spent 70% of my time working out compatability issues with classic mode, OS X, and W2k and SMB authentication modules for mac and getting apple talk working, when you ended up having conflicting settings between OS 9 and OS X on the same freaking computer. (these were originally macs that have been upgraded all thru the versions of Mac OS from OS 9 (some maybe pre-9) all the way up to 10.2.4 version by version by version)

Then on top of that you had to deal with Windows 2000 arp rarp setting commiting suicide and badly configured switches that you couldn't touch because they were the IT guy's and they hated macs and everything to do with anything not Windows. Then you have a poor girl whose entire semester of work went down the tube because the networked hickupped as she was copying her quark file from her mac to the windows server.

And then you had a bunch of ho-ha's that thought it was to inconveneint too copy the fricken files over from the server and instead just work completely from the share point on their desktops... while the network was overloaded as it was + the server was going down ever 10 minutes.

Oh, did I mention the quark express having a hard time dealing with printing out of classic mode and geeks booting back up into OS 9 and screwing up all the file permissions and corrupting files in OS X by doing so???

/rant.

No wonder so many people started using InDesign...

It was fun for me though sometimes. I was the hero and my bosses were the the antichrist when they were forced to change the password setup 3-4 times during a semester because of the IT people...

But it ended. I still miss the macs.

rantX2/
This was back with the big scare of places getting sued because of MP3's and illegal movies being burned to dvd. All the colleges were sent threating letters demanding liscensing/montoring compliance or lawsuites.

Which of course they freaked out about. That and invalid liscenced software.

Their solution?

Buy into a scam were some company came up with some liscencing monitoring software. It was to monitor who logged into what, and downloaded what, and what software was installed, and a uninstalled. They were planning on installing it in every computer imaginable.

Oh, and they didn't have a OS X version that worked yet. But they would in a couple weeks when it came time to install it on all the computers. And of course the school paid for it in advance.

And on top of that I am a white male, so I am in the apparently evil half of the vast majority, so my likelyhood of advancement outside a slight raise to go work hell desk was pretty freaking slim.
/rantX2

So I bailed. Still miss those macs though.
 
Wow, I would have gotten fired. I've gotten fired in slightly better situations. 😛

There is a reason Apple still sells PowerMac G4s that boot OS 9 on their site. It's amazing that some people haven't moved on yet.
 
Of course it won't work on OpenBSD. Maybe I should have installed FreeType 2.1 (which seems to have possible patent issues) in a non-standard location :|

EDIT: Screw it. autoconf is a horrible horrible thing.
 
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