[scribus] off list Re: ! ;-)

[joseph harris]

Hi John,

I promised Greg I'd wind up my on list contribution to this line 
of discussion, since it is away from the list's purpose. But I 
see you have misinterpreted me.

I have no beef with Scribus. I think it is a program that isn't 
just under constant development and with tremendous flexibility, 
but for professional use is probably now the best program to use 
for control and quality of final product.

I was only trying to address your questioning why more people 
don't use it. Though I originally wanted to take up civil 
engineering I have not been able to continue my bent for 
technical areas, and now need time and thought to handle the 
technical.

But I have had to mix with and deal with a very wide range of 
people over the years and can assure you that technical bent, let 
alone ability and competence are a very long way from common.

I think, faced with the nature of modern society and the swamping 
of people's experience by the big commercial companies that 
Scribus already has a surpisingly high interest, as shown by the 
download figure.

Users of DTP vary trememdously because the term includes 
everything that may be prepared on a computer, printed out and 
distributed - whether the circulation is one, one million or 
more.

And to define a publication is impossible, since one tends to 
start with the answer one believes in; satisfying but circular. A 
great deal of DTP - in the sense DTP programs or WP add-ons are 
used - is local, occasional and of small circulation. The work 
produced is mostly limited by the program, though I think that is 
rarely stretched by the limited ambitions of much that is 
published.

Producing work limited by the hardware and 'software' available 
is not new. For a longtime the typewriter, the duplicator and the 
carbon paper were the only bridges between the handwritten and 
the printed. The development of small offset changed that 
dramatically and the rise of the computer user changed that 
again.

For a simple document i would still use WordPro97; it would do 
all that was needed more or less automatically. But Quark would 
be the normal stop for book to be printed by the larger printers 
and now scribus would definitely be in my sights.

The other thing limiting take up of Scribus is marketing. There 
is no way the time at this stage is going to be spent on that, 
and i am not even sure it should be done. This really is my other 
point. Not that Scribus should become a dumbed down popular 
program, but that that would be the price of making it popular.

If you think of Quark, the leader in the publishing field for 
decades, slowly being copied and challenged by Pagemaker, Serif 
and others you see the dumbing down process in action. Quark was 
uncompromisingly for professionals; Serif [a good example of the 
process] copied aspects of Quark (as did the others, even if they 
avoided copyright issues), and reealised there was a layer of 
semi-professionals who would love to have a less costly answer to 
print-ready. I think typesetting and WP have a similar 
relationship.

Then Serif [or whoever was first] realised there was a whole 
bunch of amateur users of print that might buy the software to 
lower costs or even to achieve different results... Since it 
costs a lot of money for commercial development the program had 
to meet the wants and abilities of the new user.

Non-technical and not wanting to learn much to be able to use the 
program. Quark itself has had to do some dumbing down to meet the 
competition. A penalty of the commercial marketplace.

As you are really saying scribus is not in competition with 
these, nor should it be. But that is where the big numbers are.

Best wishes,

Joseph


> joseph harris wrote:
>
>> More often than not ease is a key demand, and the windows 
>> format does generally deliver ease of use, ease of d/l, ease 
>> of installation and up and running with no worries about 
>> whether all the needed files are there. The trade off, as I 
>> said, is limited choice in the program.
>
> OK, but your beef then isn't with scribus but with linux and 
> cross platform OSS.
>
> Under windows, scribus IS trivial to download and install.
>
> The grief comes because scribus is cross platform and some 
> platforms are easier to build on than others. But whoever is 
> building the windows installer is doing a great job. 
> Installation is less trouble than the normal ways of installing 
> Pagemaker, InDe or Word.
>
>
> Cheers, J/.
> -- 
> John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, 
> AIEMA, MEI
> Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. 
> http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
> Carbon Trust Consultant: Energy Audit, Carbon Footprint, Design 
> Advice
> Energy Efficiency Accreditation Scheme, (EEAS), Registered 
> Assessor
> Phone: 0845 4561332   Mobile: 07785 563116   Skype: 
> t4sustainability
>
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