[conspire] (forw) Re: [Surrey] DTP on Linux

[Rick Moen]

Sam says that the problem with Scribus (the most-recommended
and open source tool) is that he cannot figure out how to make text flow
between pages.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2022 15:21:08 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Surrey] DTP on Linux
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Samuel Penn via Surrey (surrey at mailman.lug.org.uk):

> Does anyone have any experience with doing DTP on Linux? If so, do you
> have any recommendations on what software to use?

In addition to anything people might suggest as native code, I will just
add that it's worth considering running a familiar DTP program that you
know meets your needs, in a guest OS within a VM.  When you need a
specialised tool, sometimes you should just use what's known-good.


A very long time ago, I was really good with Ventura Publisher, the
original (and IMO real) version that ran under Xerox GEM (formerly
Digital Research GEM), and in fact came with a GEM runtime by default.
Sometimes lately, I've had a mad, retrocomputing desire to re-find
Ventura Publisher for DOS-GEM, and run it as pseudo-native Linux code.
You see, GEM got released as GPLed open source in 1999.[1]  So, all I would
need is an installable Ventura Publisher (GEM version, not Win16
version) copy -- the final version of which was v. 4.1.1 in 1993.

I should stress that I have no idea whatsoever whether that is
practical.  Quite possibly it's _utterly mad_, and not within a Roman
mille passuum of practicality.
http://www.deltasoft.com/downloads-gemworld.htm

After 4.1.1, Ventura Software, Inc. was acquired (1993) by Canadian firm
Corel Software, Ltd., and the codebase was released for Win16 only as
"Corel Ventura 4.2" with no improvements but dropping the OS/2 and
DOS-GEM versions permanently.

I lost interest in Ventura Publisher after that, but, FWIW, it's also
possible to run Corel Ventura for Windows (Win32) under WINE, and the
final release, version 10 (2002), is confirmed to be able to do that.

Anyway, Ventura Publisher was competitive with Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe
InDesign, and Quark, Inc.'s QuarkXPress, to put it in context.

I've heard mention of an aspiring open-source alternative to Scribus
named Laidout (https://laidout.org) and another called Passepartout
(sadly unmaintained since 2007), and other called SILE Typesetter
(https://sile-typesetter.org/), but I don't know much about any of
those.  There's also a Linux/x86_64-native proprietary thing called
VivaDesigner (from Viva GmbH), another called PageStream, another called
Pagination, another called BroadVision QuickSilver.

Or, of course, you can bite the bullet, get a Macintoy, and pay the
Adobe tax.


[1] By Caldera Systems.  "I wonder what happened to them?", he asks,
archly.

----- End forwarded message -----