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Graphics Software Linux

Scribus Cracks the Big Leagues in Print 201

Posted by michael from the read-all-about-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview on O'Reilly, The Scribus Team, who recently released Scribus 1.2 , reveal the first commercial adoptions of Scribus, GIMP, Inkscape, and Linux by commercial newspapers. Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?"
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Scribus Cracks the Big Leagues in Print More

Scribus Cracks the Big Leagues in Print

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  • Scribus is taking desktop publishing asunder. Now all there's left is GIMP getting a usable interface and we have ourselves the tools! :)

    • Re:Drawing software (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:22PM (#10153258) Homepage Journal
      IMO the real issues with GIMP are more with CMYK support, 16bit per channel , and other pro features.

      The interface isn't too bad with 2.0 - unless you're expecting a Photoshop clone.

      • Re:Drawing software (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kell_pt ( 789485 )
        CMYK support is of uptmost importance to desktop publishing, that's true, most prints are sent in that format. But I sincerely can't force myself to work adapt to the right-button interface. I like having the menu always on the same spot, if you know what I mean. I'm sure others will find it appropriate though - so that's not in question.
        As for Scribus, I've tried it before, but for most of my work VI and xslproc seem to do the trick, so I don't count. :) I've used Pagemaker extensively before though (a c

        • Re:Drawing software (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ScottGant ( 642590 ) <scott_gant.sbcglobal@netNOT> on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:57PM (#10153562) Homepage
          It has to do with the world being Photoshop. I mean, I work in graphics and I can pretty well adjust myself to a new (for me) 3D program like moving from Videoscape 3d to Sculpt-Animate 4d to Turbo-Silver to Strata to Lightwave to Maya to Blender...see what I mean? There was no one dominate 3D program that totally dwarfed everything else. In 3D if you start with one program, it's not that hard to adjust to another along the way.

          But with 2D paint/photo it's pretty much Photoshop, and everything else that's "not-Photoshop". Yes I know there are some out there that swear by Paint-Shop pro or The Gimp...but Photoshop is THE program. So I've found it very hard to switch from PS to The Gimp...not to mention some things the Gimp just can't do "yet".

          But it's come a long long way.
          • Yes but how would you compare your Hattori Hanzo sword to mine?

        • Re:Drawing software (Score:3, Informative)

          by damiam ( 409504 )
          GIMP 2 has a menu at the top of every window. No need to right click.
          • For a very long time too. I never understood the source of the constant right-click complaints when it's been invalid for ages.
            • For a very long time too. I never understood the source of the constant right-click complaints when it's been invalid for ages.


              GIMP 2 was only released this summer (2004), although prereleases have been just about usable it is not fair to say the complaint has been invalid for ages.
              Distributions did not pick it up immediately, so it comes as no surprise that many users have still not upgraded yet.

      • why not expect it? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:36PM (#10153396)
        PS is the standard for image manipulation programs, so I don't understand the reluctance of gimp developers to provide a 'ps emulator' mode for Gimp so people familiar with PS could feel more at home. Heck, even emacs has vi modes for crying out loud! It's not like actually getting more users for Gimp would be a bad thing, right?

        Personally I don't mind as much the Gimp UI (in 2.0, in 1.3 I minded it very much) despite the fact that I am more used to the PS keyboard shortcuts, but can't really use it as my primary app until adjustment layers will finally be supported (people have been asking for this feature for years and years, yeah, I know, if we want it so bad, why don't we code it)

        • PhotoShop's UI (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:49PM (#10153517) Homepage Journal
          My personal suspicion would be that they may feel they have better things to work on - like core functionality.

          IMO the really important things PS gets write - like the quickmask - are the important bits to look at.

          I'm a heavy Photoshop user myself, and I prefer it - but mostly because of the more polished tools like the masking, filters, and selection tools.

          Perhaps a group of users who really want a PS-like UI will get together and write one...

        • Re:why not expect it? (Score:4, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:58PM (#10153571)
          PS is the standard for image manipulation programs

          Erm, could you please expand your acronyms? I just wasted 3 seconds of my OSVT figuring out how this could possibly be a sensible thing to say about postscript, then another 5 seconds figuring out what you *actually* meant PS to stand for, then another 20 seconds posting this dumb comment.

          Please, please, on behalf of readers everywhere....

          (Oh, and BTW, OSVT = oh-so valuable time, ROFL)

        • Re:why not expect it? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @05:14PM (#10153714) Homepage Journal

          The folks working on Gimp have other things that they would rather work on than gimping (ha) PhotoShop's interface. Basically the Gimp developers know that current PhotoShop users aren't particularly interested in switching to the Gimp, and so they are aiming at the masses below the current PhotoShop users. If the Gimp can become popular with the folks that don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to edit photos then they will win in the long run.

          Eventually PhotoShop might even have to emulate the Gimp :).

          So the Gimp hackers work on the functionality that they need to compete with PS (like adjustment layers), and they have created an interface that they think will compete well with PS (instead of merely stealing PS's interface).

          • So the Gimp hackers work on the functionality that they need to compete with PS (like adjustment layers),

            given that the BZ [gnome.org] for adjustment layers was created in early 2002, and has had no activity since late 2002 (set to Milestone 'Future' in early 2003) I'm not sure just how interested the Gimp developers are. Given just how majorly important this functionality is for any serious Gimp/PS user this is very disenheartening. At times it feels as if the Gimp developers are 'just' developers and don't really h

          • Re:why not expect it? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Friday September 03, 2004 @07:37PM (#10154674) Homepage
            Even as a long time Gimp user (~5 years), with basically no Photoshop and only a little CorelPhotopaint knowledge I have to say that the Gimp interface just sucks. Yes, it gets the job done and it could be worse (think sodipodi ;), but there is just so much in it that could be improved. While WiW might not be the solution, having to have at least 5 or 6 windows open even if I am just editing a single image just sucks extremly, docking helps a little bit, but its not a solution, just a little workaround and worst of all there is currently no way do dock stuff to the image window itself, so palett and brush window have to be floating around, annoying.

            Speaking about 'working on core functionality', sorry, but I havn't seen much of that happening, they might have rewritten the core of Gimp once or twice, but basically none of that is visible from a users point of view. There is still no macro recorder, you can't resize brushes, you don't have a toolbar for custom buttons, there are no advanced brushes[1], you can't even draw a 1 pixel circle with it, you can create new tools as plug-ins, etc. Sure, some of this might require some work, but simple stuff like drawing primitives is only missing because the developers seem to be extremly hostile to anything that doesn't fit their philosophie (which in most part seems to be based on NIH[2]). Userfriendliness seems to be something that they try to avoid at all cost.

            After all one should not forget that the Gimp interface never seems to have been much designed, it just happens to be started that way and never ever touched again.

            I just hope that one day there will be an alternative to Gimp, maybe compatible to Gimp plug-ins, so that we could finally get rid of Gimp.

            [1] http://www.levien.com/gimp/wetdream.html
            [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here

            PS: This might be a bit more flaimbait then I really mean, but reading about how people tell how Gimp is all good and fine is just extremly frustrating, since it is cleary not.

            • Re:why not expect it? (Score:3, Interesting)

              by cyclop ( 780354 )

              I totally agree with you. Perhaps we don't need another program, I think the idea of a PS-like-mode for the Gimp would be at least a good start.

              But I wonder : Why there are *at least* 4 good free (beer/speech) word processors (OO.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, Lyx) , 3 vector graphics programs (Sodipodi, Inkscape, OO.org Draw) and so on... and only ONE decent free image manipulation program (let alone the ImageMagick, it is a good tool for many things but definitvely NOT an usable photo manipulation thing)?

              • Re:why not expect it? (Score:3, Interesting)

                by grumbel ( 592662 )
                My wishlist would be:

                - have brushes or tools in general as plugins
                - allow the user to customize the toolbox

                Given these two things you couldn't create a PS-lookalike, but it would give at least basic flexibility into the users hand and would allow people to add stuff like linedrawing and such without depending on the good-will of Gimp developers. It wouldn't be much, but it would be a start and really shouldn't be that difficult to create.

                About the multiple programms for other regions, its basically a

            • Re:why not expect it? (Score:3, Informative)

              by Sunnan ( 466558 )
              you can't even draw a 1 pixel circle with it

              Do a circular selection, then Edit -> stroke selection.

              • Re:why not expect it? (Score:3, Informative)

                by grumbel ( 592662 )
                If you select '1' as 'Stroke Width' you get a two pixel width circle, not a one pixel width one. Even using a one pixel brush and the pencil tool doesn't give you a one-pixel width circle, but something like a 1.5 width one. Changing the anti-aliasing seetting of the selection doesn't seem to improve things either. Selecting a 'Stroke Width' of '0.5' and enabling antialiasing gives you actually a 50% transparent 2 pixel circle, which is quite far away from an 'optimal' result.

                Anyway, nothing of the results

        • Re:why not expect it? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Deusy ( 455433 ) <charlie.vexi@org> on Friday September 03, 2004 @05:16PM (#10153736) Homepage
          "PS is the standard for image manipulation programs, so I don't understand the reluctance of gimp developers to provide a 'ps emulator' mode for Gimp so people familiar with PS could feel more at home. Heck, even emacs has vi modes for crying out loud! It's not like actually getting more users for Gimp would be a bad thing, right?"

          Right? Wrong. I think it would be a bad thing - one more item for somebody to maintain, more developer resources consumed. As a user, I would much rather see developer efforts continue to be concentrated on improving the GIMP in terms of both features and improving the existing UI.

          Also, as a user, I like seeing them stick to their guns on the UI. I even prefer it to the PS interface. The irony is that if they cloned the PS interface, people like you would be lambasting them for being unoriginal, as happens with all copycat open source software. They are being innovative and making their own design choices, and they get it in the neck for not copying. It's a catch 22 situation.

          The GIMP UI is good. It's not a barrier to productivity with the GIMP - the only barrier is people's refusal to let go of something familiar in PS. The GIMP is not PS, thankfully.

          • ummm, no (Score:3, Insightful)

            by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 )
            I think it would be a bad thing - one more item for somebody to maintain, more developer resources consumed.

            in general UI developers tend to be UI developers, not people that would be interested in writing CYMK support or implementing adjustment layers. You are falsely assuming that the pool of Gimp developers is finite, I am sure that if there was a clear componentization of the Gimp (clear, defined boundaries between UI and back-end) it wouldn't be too hard to allow an 'UI useability group' to operate
          • I too like to see the GIMP folks not giving ground to those that say GIMP should be a clone of the PS interface.

            That sort of thinking bought us OpenOffice.

            *shudder*

            I do think that more general usability concerns should not be put out of sight, however. Clearly the GIMP folks do too, given the clear improvements in 2.0.
        • Photoshop-ish Keyboard Shortcuts for The Gimp 2.0

          http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php
    • Get bloody real.

      Now Linux only should do the following and maybe it could begin to take the world asunder:

      It needs a real Vector drawing program. Like illustrator or Freehand or Xara. There are a few candidates. Non of them are there yet.

      And now for the rub. That program needs to integrate with Gimp. Well. For instance, Gimp need to be able to place vector images as a layer and actually remember that it is a vector image. Ie, you could drag and drop or copy/paste an vector image into a gimp image and the

  • More comfortable link.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:18PM (#10153218)
    ..to a print edition [linuxdevcenter.com] of the quite insightful article.
    • Thank you!

      It's articles like this that make me yearn for karma whores... Black on red?!?

    • And on the same matter - a nice one [joelonsoftware.com] on user interface desing, which the scribus people can actually attest to complying to...

      From my minimal experience with DTP - this rocks!

      get a free ipod! [freeipods.com] This really works... [iamit.org] 2 more gmail invites left!

  • /.ed (Score:3, Funny)

    by chillmost ( 648301 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:20PM (#10153239) Homepage
    Post-nuked just got nuked

  • Google Cache (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hal The Computer ( 674045 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:21PM (#10153247)
    3 comments and it's gone.

    Here is a google cache of thier website [google.com].
    • Sorry, I should have been more specific, it's a cache of the scribus.net website. The interview was still up when I wrote this.

  • print world (Score:4, Funny)

    by theMerovingian ( 722983 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:21PM (#10153251) Journal

    Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?

    Now, if only they could make it in the printer [catb.org] world!

    Stupid drivers... mumble mumble mumble
    • While there are definitely problems with CUPS, the problem ESR ranted about was actually a redhat config interface not created by the CUPS folks at all. They didn't even know about it.
      • Are you implying is that CUPS is AOK and printing on Linux is fine? Surely you can't mean that. Most printers aren't supported well or at all, and CUPS is one of those programs that usually doesn't work without a lot of fiddling and never gives sensible error messages. If you're lucky you get some uninformative message in the access_log which repeats every 10 seconds forever.
        • <blockquote>
          <b>While there are definitely problems with CUPS</b>, the problem ESR ranted about was actually a redhat config interface not created by the CUPS folks at all.
          </blockquote>

          No, I'm not trying to say everything is peachy. (mmm, peaches....). If you have a quality laser printer (or other PS printer), then things are OK - but job feedback and error reporting remains terrible. On the other hand, you'll get excellent print quality and printer settings discovery equal or superi
    • Alright, alright. I agree with you, but you should look at what's happening.

      Linux people are getting it. More projects are doing more beta testing than mindless feature addition (see Firefox). The great part about the open source movement is that the geeks start the project, and a lot of them are very pedantic about stability and security. So, you get a text based library and program interface that never, never fails to work. But you have to remember

      $ program -xvjpf

      or some other non-intuitive command set
      • The article mentions that one area where the Scribus folks think they're ahead of Quark and PageMaker is stability. I've written several books in PageMaker, and it was definitely the worst piece of junk ever in terms of stability. I was constantly having problems with crashes and file corruption, and when your file is in a proprietary binary format, there's not much you can do to recover from corruption (except go to your last backup).

        I love TeX/LaTeX (and have written some books with it, as well), but I'm

  • Painful as it is... (Score:5, Informative)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:25PM (#10153285) Journal
    One of the most useful filters I can think of would be an import filter for MS Publisher.

    I know quite a few small businesses that use this software and take it to press. Yes, most print shops moan about it, but they still accept the EPS files.

    Publisher is used because of convenience (it is there); ease of use for small setups as opposed to Quark or Pagemaker; and integration w/Word and Excel. It is an abomination, but it is still popular.

    A filter for Scribus could help me move a couple of shops off of Windows boxes.

    • importers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:37PM (#10153413) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately, good import filters are incredibly hard. Look at how much trouble OO.o has with Word ... and they can afford to get things wrong.

      Even Adobe's filters for PageMaker (for which they have the source code) are far from perfect. Their Quark filters often result in pages that need a lot of tweaking.

      If a small error is found in the print job, it's not fun. At all. Even if the client approved the wrong proof, they'll bitch, moan, be generally difficult, and waste your time.

      Also, good clients who can properly check proofs, provide good quality samples, etc are rarely the ones using Publisher in the first place.

      In my experience the best importer for DTP is Acrobat Distiller.
      • "In my experience the best importer for <b>Publisher</b> is Acrobat Distiller"

        Sorry. It's 6am here and I've been up all night.
      • Look at how much trouble OO.o has with Word ... and they can afford to get things wrong.

        That's a pet peeve of mine. Maybe they think they can, but you know what? Me and almost every one of my colleagues has tried OOo -- after which they concluded it was too much of a hassle with the far-from-perfect im/export filters.

        The OOo guys are setting the wrong priorities, if you ask me.

        And to make this post on-topic: if the Scribus guys want to have some of that MS Publisher market share, I couldn't agree more

        • I don't think OO.o's importers are good enough either. The point is, however, that they can afford to be a few mm off, a point size out, etc. If you can't afford that level of change, you're using the wrong application in the first place, as Word may cause more changes than that when you simply change your page setup (or someone with different printer margins opens the document).

          OO.o's filters still need a _lot_ of work. Some of what people complain about, though, is really their own misunderstanding of th
    • One of the most useful filters I can think of would be an import filter for MS Publisher.

      Which version of MS Publisher? IME it tends to have problems opening files created by a different version of the program.

  • InDesign? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:31PM (#10153338) Homepage
    Peter Linnell:
    InDesign has progressed remarkably, but really given the resources Adobe has at its disposal, it should [be] no less than stellar.

    Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.

    So far it sounds like Scribus is setting the bar at beating PageMaker and Quark. That's great, but when Scribus also overtakes InDesign, that's when I'll cheer loudest.

    • InDesign is much better than anything else out there, sure.

      However, it's PDF abilities are unimpressive given it's origins, and that's what Peter was referring to. It's TeX-derived typesetting engine is currently unbeaten in graphical DTP ... well, except maybe by FrameMaker.

    • Re:InDesign? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WillAdams ( 45638 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:42PM (#10153459) Homepage
      My big disappointment with Scribus is that they've not done anything interesting with H&J (surely, at a minimum they could make use of TeX's algorithm?).

      Interestingly, InDesign makes use of TeX's algorithm (by way of URW's HZ program) as the basis for their multi-line composer.

      GIMP really needs to have a generalized model for handling colours as ink and ink mixes --- this would get them CMYK support ``for free'', but doing this sort of thing without running afoul of extant patents on colour representation is rather a thorny issue.

      An interesting and viable alternative is to just use RGB w/ the colour calibration and allow the conversion to CMYK to be done in the RIP (which is the big advantage of the PDF/X-3 support).

      For my part, InDesign rubs me the wrong way since it's like to a hybrid of two programs I don't much like, Quark and Illustrator. The UI for Scribus does seem quite promising, which is nice for an opensource program.

      That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)

      William

      • TeX (Score:3, Informative)

        by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
        It seems the Scribus folks are well aware of how TeX does things, but alas it's not as easy as grabbing the guts and dropping them in.

        Improvements along these lines are being looked at for future versions though.

        • Re:TeX (Score:2, Informative)

          by WillAdams ( 45638 )
          Why not?

          Just define a boxed area and the text to go in it --- spin off a tex process feeding it the text and the dimensions, get back a .dvi which you can then parse to get a set of text characters broken up by line, along with hyphenation points if any, use said data to typeset the box --- won't be fast, but it'd at least work as a proof of concept.

          You probably don't want to be applying the algorithm on-the-fly anyway, a change in text at the end of a paragraph can change a line break at the beginning, w
          • And just how do you make the resulting application remotely interactive? This approach harks back to the outline/preview modes of early vector drawing programs. H&J should be done on the fly, and this can't be managed by farming out work to an external program that gives output that must then be processed to get the desired information. Besides, what do you do with uneven column sizes between pages and irregular text wrapping?

    • inDesign and Quark (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @06:19PM (#10154182)
      Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.

      Agreed. I publish a newsletter for a club with 3,000 people. inDesign handles everything so nicely and has a variety of features Scribus could never hope to match (for example, I doubt you can choose between display modes, ie fast for displaying low-res previews of your 600DPI photos so you can scroll around and edit text, or high-res for showing off what the final product will look like). I've got styles defined which let me typeset the whole thing consistently; article title is one style, author's name is another. They all inherit qualities from their parents, so if I want to make it New Times Roman tomorrow, it's one click and a quick trip through the pages to check for any text box sizing problems. Its PDF support is absolutely amazing. It supports color management, something linux bumbles almost completely. It takes Adobe Illustrator, EPS etc directly. My only complaint is that it doesn't have support for imposition, and Adobe says that's because it's not designed for large documents over a few pages- yeesh, what a bunch of bullshit. Tip- if you have to put a faq entry in about why you pulled a feature from your program(it was pulled in 2.x), you shouldn't have pulled it, dumbasses.

      The authors showed themselves to be utterly and hopelessly clueless when they said the following:

      In fact, it has evolved into a worthy competitor to the print industry's premier layout programs for the PC and Mac: PageMaker and QuarkXPress.

      PageMaker hasn't been "the industry's" premiere ANYTHING for years because it DOES NOT RUN ON OS X. QuarkXPress has been consistently loosing market share and only companies who are tied into it irrevocably are still using it. It's a pathetic, buggy, overpriced, underfeatured dinosaur piece of bloatware.

      I tried Scribus last time a new version came out, and it crashed constantly, and was extremely poorly documented. inDesign is ROCK solid and --does not crash--. Further- the documentation is astoundingly good and easy to search; probably the first electronic documentation I've actually found useful, especially as someone who's not a publishing 'pro'. I picked up inDesign essentially from scratch and within a week had a newsletter people raved about.

    • Uhh...? Is this to imply that InDesign ISN'T stellar? Every Quark and PageMaker layout artist I know who has tried InDesign CS has moved to it with a glad heart. It's a great program.

      I haven't found this to be true. InDesign has some nice features Quark doesn't, but it has no killer feature and provides no compelling reason to switch, especially for an organization which has a lot of time and money invested in Quark and Quark-specific workflows.

      My opinion is that Adobe thought there was enough ill wil

  • Features? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:33PM (#10153366)
    I've used Quark and InDesign, and strongly prefer InDesign. In particular, InDesign seems to have a much better hyphenation (not the dictionary, but better choice of hyphenation spots to keep paragraphs from being ugly), better font kerning, and support for transparent images. Does anyone know how Scribus compares in these areas? Basically, how pretty does Scribus output look?
    • Scribus is doing OK on typsetting, but I don't personally think it's the strongpoint of the program. There's lots of work coming on that though.

      It has quite good hyphenation and very good, going on excellent support for typsetting non-latin languages.

      Work on smarter widow avoidance etc is being discussed for 1.3.

    • Re:Features? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
      OK, now to respond to your comment properly.

      Hyphentation and other fine typsetting: InDesign is the king. Scribus is getting well up toward Quark though.

      Transparent images: I'm pretty sure these are well supported, as transparency in general is, but I don't use them myself.

      Kerning: quite good, and a h-scale function is also provided, but no tracking controls yet.
      • I'm using the latest release of Scribus (1.2) and whilst I'm not entirely happy with it (I can only get a print out by porting PNG's to windows, but I think that's epsons fault!) I can tell you it has tracking facilities.

        I'm pretty new to all this but kerning is where the individual letter displacement can be adjusted, tracking is where lines of text can be spread (like justification in a wordprocessor) to an arbitrary length (eg to match the width of a graphic).

        <serious> Scribus has this, if this i
        • It's entirely likely that you're right. I refer to two specific features I know are absent.

          (1)The inability to control the maximum permissable interword spacing or willingness to hyphenate (reduce rivers in justified text).

          (2) The inability to manually tweak interword spacing at a particular location, eg when adjusting a headline to look right.

  • There's still a lot to be done in API:s though.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:39PM (#10153428) Journal
    There's a lot to be done in the field of API:s.

    Basically, I'd like to see a good and definitive API for vector graphics. This is something still very lacking.

    Preferably, the API would handle:
    * High-quality printing
    * Export to PS,SVG,PDF
    * Bitmap rendering (for on-screen drawing)
    * Support transparency
    * Be well integrated with the font API:s.

    Basically, a unification of all 2d graphics things into one single device-independent API.

    Apple already has something similar to this in Quartz [apple.com].

    Supposedly, Cairo [cairographics.org] is supposed to do this, but given that there is no real documentation or roadmap for it, it's hard to say how, when or if it will ever get there.

  • I dunno... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:47PM (#10153497) Homepage
    I do quite a bit of graphic design (including text layout), and while I can definitely see myself using Scribus and I'm sure Inkscape or one of the other mature OSS vector drawing programs would be more than adequate once I got used to it, and a great solution if I weren't stealing Illustrator (i.e. if I were running a design shop and I needed to make sure all my licenses were legit), I just never got to like Gimp. It's significantly gotten better over the years but it still seems like a poor substitute for photoshop. Although, I would say that it's definitely gotten to the point where I could see it becoming a suitable all-around substitute for photoshop in the next few years.

  • The problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:51PM (#10153529) Homepage
    The thing about the gimp is that photoshop is such a standard that it has a harder time making inroads than other open source design programs. I mean, with page layout and vector drawing there are a few different programs popular with designers (i.e. for vector drawing many people use Illustrator, but many people also use Freehand or CorelDraw, or other programs). With photo manipulation though, the huge majority of professionals use Photoshop.

    • "The thing about [InDesign] is that [Quark] is such a standard that it has a harder time making inroads than other [DTP] programs. I mean, with page layout and vector drawing there are a few different programs popular with designers (i.e. for vector drawing many people use Illustrator, but many people also use Freehand or CorelDraw, or other programs). With [layout] though, the huge majority of professionals use [Quark]."

      A common sentiment until recently - InDesign will go nowhere because everyone uses

  • Who said? (Score:4, Funny)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Friday September 03, 2004 @04:55PM (#10153550) Homepage Journal

    Who said Linux could not make it in the print world ?

    Joe.

    Joe did...

    Bad Joe... ;)

  • PDF and PANTONE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by . visplek . ( 788207 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @05:05PM (#10153616)
    Since I work in the digital printing business I have to love Linux because open source started with a printer driver. :) But the really important thing is that my few Linux customers can deliver me the perfect file: A PDF. Making a PDF under Linux is very easy and doesn't require expensive software like Adobe Acrobat. I got a lot of my customors to use PDFcreator (sourceforge) but a lot of them just have to hand over MS Word and MS Publisher documents. They are both a big problem. Especially Publisher. Even a (Ghost- or PostScript) PDF made out of a Publisher file is messy. I like Scribus a lot and it's just something you have to get used to. For the lack of CMYK support: I don't care that much. The CMYK Offset printing has tough competition from machines like the HP Indigo 3050. These baby's print from RGB files and make really stunning prints. My Windows Office clients using MS Word and MS Publisher can design their own stuff and have it printed with Offset Quality and speed as long as they take the effort to make a PDF file. My Linux Scribus, KOffice, OpenOffice, etc. customers too but they have less problems with making a PDF file. The thing that that is still a problem is the lack of PANTONE color support. This would make it possibe to have stuff printed with just two colors insted of four making the prints a LOT cheaper.

    • spots and PANTONE (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
      There's talk about better support for spot colours for 1.3 . As for PANTONE, there are unfortunately licensing issues that make it tricky.
    • Since I work in the digital printing business I have to love Linux because open source started with a printer driver.
      s/open source/Free Software
      1. My Linux Scribus, KOffice, OpenOffice, etc. customers too but they have less problems with making a PDF file.

      A PDF printer is included in KDE. OpenOffice and Scribus have direct support for PDF.

      For programs that don't handle PDF or don't use the KDE kprinter print system, setting up a PDF "printer" isn't hard. In the worst case, they can add a Postscript printer and run ps2pdf on it...though that should not be necessary except in odd situations.

  • Every few months, I take a look at Scribus and it has shown amazing improvement over the last year.

    A question for those who know how to use it: Does anyone know how to resize an image in a frame?

    The closest I've been able to come to is editing the image (spawns The Gimp), and changing the size there manually.

    (I haven't delt with news copy since college -- so maybe the answer is "If Scribus supported resizing the image, that would be a bad idea.".)

    • resize an image (Score:4, Informative)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @06:01PM (#10154054) Homepage Journal
      Right click on frame -> show properties
      (The properties pallette is your friend.)
      Click on image tab of properties palette.
      Play to heart's content.

      Also note the "Scale to frame size" option.

      I'm referring to post-1.2 CVS but it should be the same in most versions IIRC.
      • "Right click on frame -> show properties"

        Just nitpick on your excellent program.

        It is almost always a bad idea only have dialogs accessible from a context menu. This query being a case in point. The Gnome HIG talks about this and other things.

        (We in AbiWord have been told off fo doing this too. Now we no longer do this.)
        • Tools menu -> properties

          The scribus folks keep an eye on the GNOME HIG, though don't strive for "compliance" as such. Also watch the Apple HIG as it has some good ideas too.

          Thanks or the pointer though.
    • No answer, but another question. I'm a long (long, long) term Corel draw user, from version 2 up to version 9 at the moment. In scribus, how do you draw 'artistic' text, ie. text which is not in a frame, and which can be dragged and resized by the corners. I made a text frame and converted it to vector, but there's no way of editing the text afterwards, and if I try 'convert to text' Scribus bites the dust (all versions since about 1.0)

      If I could get Corel running under Wine that would be a small help

  • I use Scribus for school DE class. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Martigan80 ( 305400 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @06:20PM (#10154191) Journal
    Right now I'm taking a DTP class and everyone else uses Publisher, 2000/2002/xp/2003. One big problem is that not all versions are compatible with each other. So when we do group project some people can't see the others. (I know save as jpeg and such but some people in the is class can't) Any how I love to export to PDF function-along with embeding the fonts! For this class I have not had a problem yet!

  • The big leagues? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by theantix ( 466036 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @07:43PM (#10154701) Journal
    Uh, how is this cracking the big leagues? From what that article said, they had their first roll-out on the Twin Tier Times [twintiertimes.com] which seems to be a brand-new small time newspaper in a small town (region?). I'd say they are just cracking the minor leagues, but nowhere near the big leagues yet.

    This is not to take away from Scribus, me and my fiancee used it to create our wedding invitations. It's a very capable program and fun to use -- even for a Gnome zealot like myself. But the Twin Tier Times is *not* the New York Times.

  • InDesign all day long (Score:3, Informative)

    by LazyPhoenix ( 773952 ) on Friday September 03, 2004 @07:48PM (#10154723)

    I work for a 100k+ daily circulation newspaper doing ad design with InDesign 2 as a front end for our proprietary database workflow system (made half-assedly by DTI [dtint.com] but that's another story).

    An earlier post knocked ID for being a cross between Illustrator and Quark, but that's a large part of what makes InDesign great -- the familiar Adobe-style UI, useful vector abilities from Illustrator, and it's not Quark!

    I'm constantly exporting files to PDF for customer proofing and haven't experienced any trouble with it's PDF creation, or it's ability to import a PDF image, and I'm using 2.0 not CS.

    I've not had the chance or need yet to use Scribus and Gimp in a production environment, but my toying with both have been positive. Gimp 2.0 seems, to a daily photoshop user, to be quite powerful and feature-rich, if not quite Photoshop. Scribus is still, from a new-to-it perspective, playing catch-up in terms of instant usability, but I love the inroads that linux and open-source in general are making towards having a competent toolset for professional designers. Not that I want to sit in front of the computer and do design at home after working all day, but hey, you never know...

    Saying that Scribus should work on Publisher support is nuts. We don't even allow Publisher files as graphics-standards submissions. In my experience, if it comes in designed in Publisher, it's gonna be the print equivalent of a GeoCities teenager's website: an eyesore.

    Scribus and GIMP should keep their eyes on the workflow and output needs of professional designers, and we'll see more /. stories about firms moving to OSS solutions.

    Speaking of which, does the GIMP have much functionality along the lines of creating web graphics slices along the lines Macromedia's Fireworks? That would seem a wise avenue to go down...

  • If Scribus and Gimp keep up they way they're going, I might be able to not upgrade to InDesign 5 and Photoshop 10. But until then I'll stick with the stuff with the high-end abilities and fluid, productivity-enhancing GUI.

  • Scribus Combination (Score:2, Interesting)

    by brisgeek ( 701090 )
    /me puts graphic designer hat on

    Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus are a lethal combination.

    In the past two months ive produced all my Press-ready PDF's in Scribus thanks to imported artwork from inkscape and some content from gimp.

    Being able to have these tools on as many computers as you like is an awesome inclusion. Now I can work from home, from work, from Uni even my grandparents place to get a project finished on time. And when it comes to publishing .. Scribus is always is the final touch.

    my advice for
  • Adobe's world is in printing and images. GIMP is giving photoshop a run for its' money. In addition, GIMP is picking up steam and it is free.

    Now, along comes scribus and it is also getting there. In the next year, it is certain that at least 1 major printing company will move to it on Linux. That will help validate it. Companies will decide that the OSS tools are good enough for now, with the future looking great. At that time, Adobe will probably decide that they need to port to Linux, but it will be sev

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