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Linux Software

A Printshop Equivalent for Unix? 59

Posted by Cliff from the cliparts-banners-and-greeting-cards...oh-my! dept.
mcorliss asks: "I'm trying to convince my wife to switch from Windows to Linux. However, one program she loves is Broderbund's PrintShop, which I haven't found a Linux equivalent of yet. Does anyone know of such a product, preferably one that's free and fairly easy to use?" For banner creation, there's Gozer and AAType, but they aren't the easiest of things to use. Unless you consider The GIMP, software for designing greeting cards (another PrintShop specialty) seems to not have appeared for Unix. So is there an all-around equivalent for PrintShop for Unix users? If not, can you get close to that same functionality using a specific set of Open Source software? If it turns out neither of the first two questions produce encouraging answers, would anyone be interested in starting an Open Source project to fill this niche?
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A Printshop Equivalent for Unix? More

A Printshop Equivalent for Unix?

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  • Same thing.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2002 @06:30AM (#4271651) Homepage Journal
    My Aunt is a bigtime print shop poweruser. She gets updates in the mail. They send her reams and reams of disks. I swear she can do things with it that can't be done in Photoshop...

    The sad part is, she has actually shown a strong intrest in Linux.

    I tried to get Print shop running under wine but was stopped dead by what else, Linux's dismal printer support.

    You want to get mad, try loosing all your formatting in a program that essentially does nothing more than formatting.

    I think that is the key though. Print shop does little but formatting, with some stock pictures, formatting templates and a heavy dose of ease of use thrown in.

    Keep that in mind if you think of something that might work. Whatever replaces print shop, must replace print shop, not quark.

    • one way around printing in windows apps on linux
      is to use Adobe Acrobat (writer) to
      "Print to PDF" in wine. then open up
      acroread or ghostview and print.

      this is all in theory, and adobe acrobat does cost money...
  • She could always use a color FIGlet and output to a printer. ;-)
  • heh. i remember playing around with printshop 1 and 2 back on old apple II's back in 2nd and 3rd grade. fun stuff.
    • I completely rememeber PrintShop for the Apple ][. It was (for its time) an incredible bit of programming. It took your Okidata Microline dot-matrix printer (was there ever a quiet version of one of those?) and a ream of continus fold, tractor feed-able paper, and would make huge banners, computer with "fancy" computer graphics. I believe at that point the manual even suggested that you should then "color" in the lettering on the banner (for best appearance, of course).

      It also made greeting cards (provided you could handle the proper folding technique).

      I think that is what's missing nowadays. Not enough people making banners from their Okidata printers, with huge blocky graphics on them. It really was a neat idea once.

  • Why Free? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2002 @07:53AM (#4271828)
    PrintShop isn't free, but you use it. Why must a Linux program be free?

    This attitude explains why there are so few Linux versions of software.

  • ...so I don't know what it can do, but you could take a look at xwgui [automatix.de].

    This is an arrange the photos and print them out type of software, but it lets you do other things besides, and it has some assistents for specific tasks, that I presume you can add to.

    Unfortunately, it uses the XForms widget set, so it looks pretty ugly. Also I had to mess about with my fontpath to put my 75dpi before everything else in order to see some of the dialog boxes properly.

    I would love to see this app ported to qt or gtk, and a few other features added.
  • Sound like a good project. The great thing about Linux is that if you want something you can write it yourself. You can do the same for windows but it is just not as much fun. If someone does this they could be a huge hit with the schools. Who knows maybe you could even sell it. Or at least sell the mannual.
    • That's another part of the dogma that keeps Linux off desktops. Software can be developed for any bloody platform, not just Linux. When someone says 'Oh boy! Linux gives me the freedom to develop any app I want!", they're just mouthing disingenuous propaganda.

      What potential Linux users hear is this: "If I want that program, I'll have to learn to program myself, or wait for some anonymous Linux developers to do it for me."

      So the choice becomes:

      1. Quit my day job and take a couple of years learning to be a competent developer;
      2. Wait for someone else to write what I want for Linux;
      3. Keep on using a commercial platform and shop around.

      Guess which option wins.

  • Have you looked at Scribus [altmuehlnet.de]? I've never used it myself (having only recently decided to look at TeX/LaTeX for my own publishing needs), but it sure looks like it's aiming at the same target you want to hit.

  • Why switch? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2002 @11:02AM (#4272829)
    I'm trying to convince my wife to switch from Windows to Linux. However, one program she loves is Broderbund's PrintShop, which I haven't found a Linux equivalent of yet

    One thing you need to ask yourself is why, if her Windows software does what she needs, do you want her to switch? Remember that what is the right solution for one person, such as yourself, may well not be right for someone else. Are you trying to convince her for an ideological reason of your own, to "convert" her? Because that just sounds like a recipe for strife, particularly since dual-booting is so easy these days.
    • One thing you need to ask yourself is why, if her Windows software does what she needs, do you want her to switch?

      Maybe he can't afford the endless upgrade path Windows leads a user on?

      • ... or doens't want to submit to the onerous licensing that micro$oft included in the latest bug fixes.

        I find myself in the same situation: My wife uses Windows to
        1) Surf (including getting email via the web)
        B) Use Quatro Pro for budgets and stuff
        Third) Use Wordperfect for letters and other docs.
        There is no reason she couldn't do that stuff in openOffice on Linux, and we wouldn't have to give Micro$oft the right to inspect our hard drive and remove any files they think are suspicious.

        My biggest problem, though: my kid's games. They are in kindergarten and 1st grade, so they aren't quite ready for Doom yet (I don't think). I've looked around a little, and it seems that there are very few options for kids games outside of Windows (even for the Mac).

        So the kids will learn to duel-boot ;-)

  • Can you spare $300? (Score:4, Informative)

    by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2002 @12:27PM (#4273588)
    VMWare costs $300, half that if you're a student. You can set it up so that whenever she launches VMWare, it automatically launches PrintShop. That way, she can use Linux for everything but PrintShop.

    The question is, is that worth $300 to you?

    • I recommend Netraverse win4lin for this type of application. It is about one third the cost (~$100 bucks.) I'm a web developer and I use it to test sites in several versions of IE, but it will run just about any software. see http://netraverse.com I am in no way affiliated with the company (other than being a happy customer)
  • Even if it's libre (or even gratis!) people buy print shop for the clip art. The functionality is pretty simple, I'm sure any QT or GTK app developer could hack something together in a month. However, it'd be useless without spending the 30 dollars on clip art.

    Mind you, were I to do it, I'd probably print to ps and launch a program to print. Not to mention the burden of supporting perhaps one of the true "newbie-type" applications for Linux. "It won't print!"

    augh...

  • I use CUPS for overall printing control.

    I generate PDF or PostScript (or raw prn) files from a variety of applications. For a recent birth announcement card, I used Gimp and got very, very good results.

    No doubt you could use [La]TeX, too.

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