[Scribus] GIMP and the future of Open Source DTP

[Tino Schwarze]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 11:27:15PM +0100, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:

> > > I might add that it is not only for the preprint area where full CMYK and
> > > spot colour support is lacking in The GIMP, but I learned from Web
> > > Designers that The GIMP lacks proper slicing tools, filters etc. for RGB
> > > based work, too. Either these lacking capabilities are very difficult to
> > > develop, or they are not of first priority for the GIMP developers.
> >
> > I think that these issues are almost solved with the 2.3.6 (future 2.4),
> > including the slice tool.
> 
> Let's hope they are. However, it must not be forgotten that the GIMP 
> developers ignored the requirements of professional printing and colour 
> managment for a long time. If you browse the mailing list, you will recognise 
> that they used to respond to such requests with something like "That's the 
> printer's problem, not ours".

I suppose it's not an issue of developer attitude but preference and
personal need. After all, they're working on GIMP in their free time, so
they probably implement things first they consider useful. And if you're
not into printing business, CMYK is not interesting - apart from that
you'll probably mess up the implementation if there is no personal need
(nor interest).

IMO there just has been no developer who considered CMYK a necessity and
had the time to develop it accordingly. So there is nobody to blame.

> > As alternative, try Krita. It's taking image editing to the next level (on
> > Linux). koffice 2.0 and kde 4.0 will be just great.

Sounds interesting. Depending on KDE4 (or newer-than-SuSE-10 KDE) will
possibly be a showstopper for me... :-|

Bye, Tino.