[scribus] Scribus in place of Pagemaker?

[danbob]

Hi all. I grew up with Pagemaker on the Mac throughout college, and then
moved to Quark for my professional career. After that gig was finished,
I didn't do any desktop publishing for a few years. My Macs went
obsolete, I got a new job as a technical writer, and now all my
computers are Linux but one. All of my machines are fairly old --
nothing fast at all....I"m running an AMD 3200+ with 2 gig of RAM.

I recently started a new publishing company, to produce a 320 page
paperback technical book I've been writing with a co-author for 2 years.
I 'eased' myself into Scribus by doing some full-color brochures, then
an illustrated 50-page owners manual.

My observations on Scribus are almost all positive. Almost everything is
similar to what I'm used to in Pagemaker and Quark. There are a few
tasks that take longer than in Quark, but there are many workarounds in
Scribus. For example, photo box styles (this book has over 400 photos
and CAD drawings): It was a simple matter to take the script from the
Scribus Wiki and modify it---so I can draw a photo box, insert a photo,
scale frame to image size, and hit the script button, generating both
the bounding box and the caption box, correctly spaced and gapped. For
all I know, this may be a feature now...but I DO NOT change versions in
the midst of a large project, no matter what the platform or software
package.

I've found that with my machine running Ubuntu with slow onboard video,
50 pages heavily illustrated is about the most I want to tackle in one
file in Scribus regarding RAM and processor time. No crashes (I've never
had a single Scribus crash) but slow performance. So instead I then
separate into 20 page chapter files, then combine the PDFs; at first I
used a Windows machine running the full version of Acrobat, but I can do
it now with Pdftk (PDF Tool Kit) after I got over the learning curve.

So far, every Scribus PDF I've generated (from 2400 dpi CMYK glossy
publications to this new 320 page book) has passed post-flight at the
printing press. We are waiting for perfect bound advance review copies
of the book right now. I've been met with some skepticism at various
presses ("are you SURE you can pre-flight and generate good PDFs with
Linux?") and then get the call back "It looks great, no errors." And
customer-generated PDFs save lots of money on pre-press.

So, here's the statement I've included on the 'Credits' page of our new
book:

"Open-source software statement: This book was produced almost entirely
with free, open-source software: Ubuntu Linux (www.ubuntu.com) for the
operating system, OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) for the word
processing and spreadsheets, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (The
GIMP, www.gimp.org) for photo editing plus pre-press photo processing,
Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) for diagram editing, and Scribus
(www.scribus.net) for layout and press-ready PDF generation. Even the
least nerd-like of our staff use only Firefox for a web browser and
Thunderbird as an email program (both at www.mozilla.org). None of this
software cost us a dime, and all of it is supported by enthusiastic
online communities of users and developers (and often the programmers
who wrote the software in the first place). We highly encourage all of
our readers to try and support open-source software!"

Cheers all -- I will announce this new book here on the forum when the
tractor trailer full of boxes arrives in early October.

DAN FINK
Buckville Publications LLC
http://www.otherpower.com/