[Scribus] Re: Test and Hello ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2003-03-02 at 22:49, Steve Herrick wrote:
> I also am not using Scribus professionally (I'm curious if anyone is), but I
> would like to in the near future. I'm still struggling with fonts displaying
> correctly (versions 0.9.5 - 0.9.8 beta). 

I'm also new.  I just installed the 0.9.8 beta and came across the same
issue on Red Hat 8.0.  I'm going to try 0.8 next.

BTW, what distro is Scribus largely developed on?  Debian?

> InDesign is the last reason I haven't switched to Linux 100%.

Tell Adobe.  Everytime you think something like that, remember tell the
vendor!  You'd be surprised how much it matters!

If they get enough requests, they've got to port it.  Unlike Intuit they
don't have a "we'll crush you if you port to Linux" threat from
Microsoft (like Intuit does from Microsoft on Quicken/Quickbooks,
despite the 2M+ requests for ports).  Adobe is fairly independent from
Microsoft.

Until then, I'm getting an iBook because of things like Adobe InDesign
and Macromedia Dreamweaver.  But even Macromedia ported its
server/development software (e.g., ColdFusion) to Linux out of demand. 
Hopefully the desktop software will get their shortly too.

[ There isn't a good HTML "WYSIWYM + Content Manager" app for Linux
either, although several SourceForge projects are working on one.  You
either have WYSIWYM (e.g., Mozilla Composer) or non-WYSIWYM Content
Managers (e.g., Quanta, Bluefish, etc...) ]

> When Scribus is ready for the big time, I'll be free at last.

If you only need a "typeset" program instead of a DTP app, check out
LyX:  http://www.lyx.org

The new 1.3.0 is finally available in a [near-]complete Qt version. 
I've used it to write articles and books.  It uses ~25 year-old LaTeX as
its "base language."  It also produces "feature rich" PDFs _natively_
(including all those bookmarks, hypereferences, etc... all from its TeX
markup).  That's the power of TeX underneath.

But yes, Scribus will be a great complement to LyX for when I clearly
need DTP instead of typeset.  Typeset doesn't let you "layout" as it
does it all for you.  Word processes like MS Word try to be a cross of
both typeset and DTP and _fail_ at both.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith  (suffix-free title for your protection)
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org          http://www.thebs.org
-------------------------------------------------------
Linux "standards" are like American political parties.
Sure, there are endless choices, but most people will
usually "standardize" on 2-3 out of sheer feasibility.
It is the natural law of chaos and sigma statistics.