From: Don Marti dmarti@zgp.org
To: linux-elitists@zgp.org
Subject: Re: [linux-elitists] Quark for Linux?
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 13:37:03 -0800

begin Modus Operandi quotation of Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 02:08:53PM -0500:

> Is there an open-source desktop publishing app out
> there?

Scribus looks pretty promising based on the screenshots. Haven't
tried it.

"Currently, it is still in its early stages of development, but
rapidly maturing and very useable. Already, it has the ability to
layout newsletters, create corporate stationery, small posters and
other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to
output to professional quality imagesetting equipment."

http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/about.html

--
Don Marti Even if we don't get DMCA reform, loudly
http://zgp.org/~dmarti demanding DMCA reform is going to get the
dmarti@zgp.org injustice of the DMCA in front of the next
KG6INA jury. Make noise. It counts.

(Taken from a Web forum:)

Your best bet would be scribus, http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/
(They're at version 0.9-something, now, and it's actually quite stable.)

It works very well for simpler DTP projects. Don't know how well it
can handle newspaper publishing. It has a lot of the basic features of
Quark and InDesign such as master pages, paragraph styles, CMYK output,
etc. Last time I looked at it (version 0.8), I don't believe you could
create multicolumn text boxes -- you had to link the text from one
column to the next. I guess a workaround would be to store a set of
linked boxes in the scrapbook (the equivalent of a library).

Scribus is a nifty little app. It can export to EPS and pdf. I think
it imports only plain text files though, and it also imports TIFFs, EPS,
and whatnot.

Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 19:47:04 +0800
To: Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com
From: "Daniel O. Escasa" descasa@techie.com
Subject: Re: [plug] DTP package

Hi Rick.

Anyway, here it is. I don't know how useful you'll find it, but in any
event, please feel free to post it to your linuxmafia.com site.

OK, I've played around with Scribus a bit. If there's one feature that
could use improvement, it would speed. My mouse clicks took a measurable
amount of time to register, although it did seem to respond well to my
keyboard input. Screen refresh was excessive, and slow as well. If it
were considerably faster, I'd have been able to take it through its
paces more. Or maybe I should close all the other large programs --
Evolution, Mozilla, and PolarBar. 233MHz AMD K6-2, 128MB RAM. Might need
a machine with 3x those features to get any serious work done on
Scribus.

Good news is, like Ventura Publisher, it maintains the aspect ratio of a
graphic inserted into a frame, and doesn't distort it to fill the frame
like PageMaker does. Why do you suppose professional layout artists use
VP and not PM? Both the PDI and the Phil STAR do, or at least I have
reason to believe that, because of a distinct bug that they never seemed
to fix but has a workaround anyway. Back to Scribus: bad news is that
you have to add pages manually. VP would create as many pages as you
needed for your document. With PM and Scribus, you'll have to
estimate the number of pages -- if you overshoot, you'll delete the
excess, if you underestimate, you have to add more pages.

Rick Moen adds: A little-known option: Axene's Xclamation,
http://xibios.free.fr/english/xclamation.html . This Motif/Lesstif-based,
frame-oriented DTP package was quietly open-sourced under the GNU GPL at
some point in the past, but seems to have been oddly ignored. C++
source code tarballs are available at http://xibios2.free.fr/ , and
I've mirrored them at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/apps/axene/ .
If someone would bother to compile and package binaries, the program
might be quite a bit more popular.

http://www.ntlug.org/~ccox/impress/
ImPress is a WYSIWYG layout program designed especially for Linux. It
allows you to create presentations and Postscriptdocuments using fully
scalable graphics similar to programs like Macromedia Freehand, Corel
Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Visio. It is different from raster graphic
packages like gimp, Adobe PhotoShop and Jasc's PaintShop Pro in that it
deals with graphical objects which can be manipulated on a canvas rather
than just layers of paint.

Tcl/Tk-based page-layout application with both vector and raster
support.