[Scribus] imposition or reader?

[Peter Linnell]

On Saturday 03 April 2004 02:22 pm, linuxlingam wrote:
> dear all,
>
> am just thinking aloud to myself:
>
> a download of adobeacrobat reader 5.0.8, at a whopping 9mb, is happening
> in the background. so far, all the pdfs created from scribus look
> disappointing when rendered under linux-native utilities such as xpdf,
> kpdf, and several others.

Not so bad if:

a. You have updated Xpdf to 3.00, which has a new rendering engine and support 
for PDF 1.5 ( the first viewer on Linux/*nix to have that)

b. You are using latest GSview with latest GS 8.14
>
> also read on the scribus site that i could even consider running acrobat
> under wine.

True,  Acro 5.0.5 full version runs fine under wine. Acro 6 Reader is not 
there yet. 
>
> so all this makes me think: wouldn't it be great if rather than
> imposition, the pdf-viewing and rendering issue had its own GPLed
> utility? then scribus could be used as both dtp and as adobe designer
> 9the acrobat forms designer), and the scribusPDFviewer, or whatever you
> call it, the much-needed pdf-display and handling software. no need to
> write it from scratch. just advance the work of the existing pdf
> viewers.
>
> please, this is just my two bits on this. just a thought that occurred
> to me.


Rather than re-invent the wheel, test and provide useful constructive feedback 
to the authors of the existing viewers. 

For the adventurous, you can test the cvs version of GSview, which is being 
rewritten in GTK 2. It is very user friendly, though not feature complete. In 
chatting the the GSview author, who by the way has given the Scribus team 
some really excellent advice, he does want some useful constructive feedback 
from end users.

I have almost finished a doc on parallel installs of GS for linux distros. The 
idea is to allow Scribus and GSview to use the latest GS without breaking the 
shipped GS from most distros.

We have also a kind of chicken and egg situation. Until Scribus came along, no 
app in Linux land was capable of generating the kinds of advanced PS3 and PDF 
1.4 features Scribus does. So, for the free PDF viewers, there was no need to 
support them.

Cheers,
Peter