[Scribus] Scribus in the Art Lab

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Dienstag, 4. April 2006 18:41 schrieb pixelnate:

[snap]

>
> I wasn't trying to be an Adobe or commercial vendor apologist. 

I'm not sure anybody did understand you that way.

> I would 
> much rather work in Ubuntu on my AMD box than get on the Mac. In fact, I
> would leave the entire Mac world behind me if I could get the Adobe CS
> suite to run in Ubuntu/Kubuntu or get ahold of an equivalent toolset. I
> know the tools don't make the designer, but they do _enable_ the
> designer who knows what they are doing. When I am finished with my mondo
> Illustrator file, I will post an image, and you will be able to see what
> I am doing that requires Illustrator. If somebody can enlighten me on
> how to duplicate what I have done there, I will not only eat my words,
> but I will make a tutorial to build it with OSS tools.
>
> OSS tools are certain to woo users away from the world of proprietary
> software and vendor lock-in. That is why they are so scared of linux,
> et. al. The reason why I got involved in this discussion was because I
> see so many people screaming that all of the open source apps everywhere
> are always the best tools for every job, 

Did you hear anybody scream here on the list ;) This is the wrong forum for 
flame wars :)

> and the fact of the matter is, 
> that is simply not the case. 

That's true, but I suppose we are all pretty much aware of the deficits of the 
OSS alternatives, and some if not most of us are trying to help improving it 
by writing code or documentation, by testing, by suggesting better ways, etc. 
But that doesn't mean it's not fit to do the job. It only takes a bit of a 
time (and I expect this time not to be too long) to mature. With respect to 
printing, Scribus is more than ready, while GIMP, Inkscape e.a. still have to 
catch up in this area.

> This professor seemed to me to be one of 
> those kind of people. I mean, why would he go and trash everything he
> had just to load Ubuntu on the machines with all OSS tools, 

That's not the impression I had from the article. I think he taught them a 
very valuable lesson: Creativity means to "think different" (I know, TM). If 
you learn to achieve your goals with different means and in ways other than 
the mainstream does, you have an advantage over others who just do what 
everybody else does. More so, if you don't depend on a certain tool to do 
what you want (and that means you know what *you* want, not what the software 
can do), you can prove real comptence. And that's what university studies are 
for.

> when he 
> could have installed all of those same tools on the Mac with OSX and the
> students would also have been able to work in Photoshop, etc. when the
> job required it. Sure there are some X11 issues, but they don't really
> get in the way all that much. As I see it, he robbed Peter to pay Paul,
> when he didn't really need to.
>
> ~Nate

Cheers,

Christoph