[scribus] WTactis and Scribus struggle

Thu Jan 13 16:34:00 CET 2011

On Wednesday 12 January 2011 12:59:40 Lukasz Jastrzebski wrote:
> Gregory!
> So I left with LaTeX and Scribus.
> Both "should work" theoretically. And LaTeX will never be easy for
> potential contributors or indie developers.
>
I should note that there are many forms of TeX. LaTeX, the most 
popular version, is optimized for academic books and papers. It is 
difficult to manipulate once you get out of that area. Other versions of 
TeX have broader targets. I have used plain pdftex for everything from 
serially numbered armbands to novels.  I use Context for complicated 
technical manuals with illos and tables. 

In general you can do almost anything with almost any piece of 
software. I get book covers prepared in PowerPoint for example. But 
there are horses for courses and for a project like yours I would look 
at a version of TeX other than LaTeX.

Contributors to TeX, past and present, must number in the hundreds, 
perhaps the thousands. Most of these are "indie developers". 

TeX is old enough to have many books written about it. Scribus has 
just one so far plus my e-book AFAIK. So the resources are there for 
learners. 

TeX is a tagged input program, much like html.  In html you can say 
"Hello world!"
thus:

<html>
<body>
Hello world!
</body>
</html>

In plain pdftex you could do it thus:

Hello world!
\bye

LaTeX has more folderol before getting down to cases.
-- 
John Culleton
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