[fsug-calicut] DTP package

Hello,
    Anyone want to try this out.

ajith


On July 15, 2003 the Scribus project had a milestone release. They
released Scribus 1.0. I have used Scribus both personally and
professionally since the early development times. 8.0 was when I first
used it. 1.0 came with so many bug fixes and has become so refined I
decided to do a review of it.

What is Scribus?

Scribus is a open source Desktop Publishing Lapp. It is written in QT so
it can run on a variety of Operating Systems. It is developed by Franz
Schmid and his team of many contributors.

Scribus is meant to one day replace Adobe InDesign, Quark Express and if
it continues on its current path it will meet its goal.

Installing Scribus

Click for a larger view Scribus does not have any prebuilt RPM's or
binary packages available for it. The source code is downloaded and easy
to configure and make. But for some people RPM's or . Debs are an
efficient way of installation. The configure script looks for QT 3.0.3
at least, CUPS, Tifflib, FreeType2 and LittleCMS. It is good to have
these but CUPS and LittleCMS are not required, but you will not be able
to utilize all the features of Scribus without them. SuSE Linux 8.x has
all the necessary packages and they are installed by default, but Red
Hat Linux and Debian Linux do not have TiffLib or Little CMS and they
need to be downloaded and installed. LittleCMS packages can be
downloaded from here.

To install CUPS and QT on Red Hat install the KDE Desktop and KDE
Developer packages. I have compiled Scribus for SuSE Linux 8.1 and 8.2,
Yellowdog Linux 3.0 and Red Hat Linux 9. There are some reports that
Scribus can be installed on Mac OS X through Fink, although I have not
tested it or had a look yet. There are efforts to port Scribus to Cygwin
and Windows 2000 Professional. Basically any machine that you have that
has QT on it you can compile Scribus.
Features of Scribus

Scribus has a very clean interface and very easy to learn. Scribus has
some professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, create PDFs
easily, Encapsulated Postscript import/export. Graphics formats that can
be utilized by Scribus are, jpeg, PNG and Xpixmap. One feature that I
like is that the Scribus file format is based on XML, meaning that if
you have a document that got damaged you can recover some of that
document using a text editor. You can also embed fonts into PDF. PDF/X-3
files and you can assign presentation effects and you can encrypt PDF's.
You can create Python scripts for Scribus and you can import and export
SVG's. With PDF's it can also handle transperencies. Scribus as of 1.0
now has the Multiple Document Interface, where you can work on multiple
documents at one time.

Performance

I found Scribus 1.0 to work very well in comparison to the developer
builds. Everything worked properly as they were supposed to. I had no
adverse effects and no unexplained crashes. It loads rather quickly and
all the fonts on my system were picked up and ready for use by Scribus.
All the distributions I tried Scribus on, it worked well except for Red
Hat 9. I had problems with Font rendering, but after a visit to the
mailing list, I found out that it is a Red Hat problem with its font
engine. Printing with Scribus was handled very well. It kept everything
in format and the output looks professional.

Peeves

As usual with all software, everyone has their pet peeves or things they
would like to see changed or added. The major peeve I had was with the
tool bar icons. They look old. They are the same Icons that you would
see with KDE 1 or KDE 2, this makes the Application look dated. They
should update the tool bar icons to something more modern, either
crystal or an aqua type theme.
Uses for Scribus

To be honest, I do not see Quark Express users or Adobe InDesign users
flocking to Scribus. But, if you use PageMaker or Microsoft Publisher,
then you will find similar functionality to Scribus and will probably
find Scribus to be a great alternative. I use it personally to create
all the howtos on my site. Professionally my company uses Scribus to
create our brochures and press releases and we use it to create our
customer manuals, basic lightweight Desktop Publishing. Schools and
Churches who also do lightweight publishing and are on a tight budget
and cannot see spending, hundreds to thousands of dollars on a
commercial product , will find this tool very useful. If you work on
Magazines or newspapers or are a professional publisher, I suggest you
wait. One of the things I have heard is that Scribus does not import or
export Quark or InDesign files, but I have never had a lot of luck in
that department with the commercial products anyway.

Conclusion

I was very pleased with this application. This application is another
step in the right direction. While it may not be ready for Quark or
InDesign users, give it time. It will only be getting better. Massive
Linux adoption on the desktop is becoming closer to a reality and
products like Scribus and OpenOffice are only going to make the
transition a lot easier for some people.

About the Author:
Roberto J. Dohnert is a Unix/Linux Consultant and software developer.
His first introduction to UNIX based systems dates back to NEXTSTEP. He
is a member of the GNU Darwin Distribution and has made several
contributions to that and other projects. His personal webpage is here.


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