Desktop Publishing for Unix? 26
weierophinney asks: "In a past job incarnation, I was a graphic
artist and page layout technician for a small guidebook publisher. We
were a Windows-based shop, and I used
Macromedia
Freehand for drawing maps, Adobe Photoshop for scanning and
sizing images, and Quark XPress
for book layout. I have since moved on to web programming, but
occasionally want to do something that would use these tools. While I
use GIMP regularly, I have yet to find a -good- free, open-source,
alternative to the 2D vector graphics programs I used, or a page
layout program with the power of Quark XPress. Is anybody in the
Linux community doing publishing or using such tools, be they
commercial or otherwise? Is Linux a viable option for small
publishers (where profits are often slim and money for software
upgrades is sparse)?"
Kontour (Score:4, Informative)
Kontour can be found in KOffice, at http://www.koffice.org/kontour/
Hope this helps slightly... I'm in the same boat as you, actually... and I am totally 100% linux at work now... If you have any more questions, feel free to e-mail me.
DTP (Score:1)
DTP is really the one domain where I do not know of any working Free app. Sucks hard, IMHO.
There isn't anything anywhere near Quark, InDesign, Pagemaker etc. There is, however, KWord, which is a frame-based word processor and allows more powerful layouts than, say, MS Word, but still...
Another program you might want to check out is called Impress [ntlug.org], but frankly, I didn't like it.
On the other hand, there's LaTeX or Docbook, which are fine for some areas where Framemaker would be used in Windows-Land (actually, there was a beta of Framemaker for Windows - while Adobe won't release it officially, perhaps you find this somewhere lying around).
So the best would be to start a new project - I will be happy to beta-test it when it's ready :)
Good luck!
Re:DTP (Score:2)
You mean this FrameMaker? [adobe.com]
Right tool, right job (Score:5, Informative)
I spent 1991-1997 as a graphic artist, and I did all my work on Macs: various versions of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quark mostly, with brief excursions elsewhere, but always in the Mac way.
Since then, I've kept up the graphic arts stuff as a hobby, mostly, doing fill-in for my company's marketing department or mocking up user interfaces, stuff like that. I use Windows 2000 at work, and I do my software engineering with XEmacs under one flavor or another of Unix.
When I want to mock up a user interface, I fire up Illustrator on my iBook. Similarly, I did some quick-and-dirty marketing brochures for a last-minute event earlier this fall, and I did those in QuarkXPress on my iMac at home.
I wouldn't try to do office-type stuff-- spreadsheets or whatever-- with my Mac, even though Office v.X is very nice. Likewise, I wouldn't try developing software with Windows tools, even though lots and lots of people do.
And I have never had any success using Windows or Unix tools to do graphic arts. I've even tried Photoshop 3 on an SGI under IRIX; it was essentially the same application as Photoshop 3 for the Mac, but I couldn't find my way around it worth a damn.
See, the keyboard was the wrong shape, and the toolbars weren't exactly right, and it just felt wrong. I was so used to Photoshop on the Mac that the same program on another platform was virtually unusable for me.
I learned my lesson well, and I've applied it ever since. I choose the tools that work best for me for the job I'm trying to do, because I get the job done faster and better if I work that way. My desk at work has a PIII workstation under the desk with two graphics cards and two 21" monitors set for 1280x1024. I toggle back-and-forth between the Windows desktop and Exceed, which is showing me the IRIX desktop on my server in the lab. Beside this stuff I have my iBook, which, at work, I use exclusively for email.
Every task I do, I could do with different tools. I use the ones I use because they work well for me. If I sit down at somebody else's desk, I spend as much time fiddling around as I do actually working. God help them if they expect me to use a different OS, or a different editor, or a different email program than the one I'm most comfortable with. You'll hear me bitching all the way down the hall.
If you're comfortable using Freehand or QuarkXPress under Windows, keep using them. Don't change your tools unless you have a really compelling reason. For myself, I don't count "I hate Microsoft" as a compelling reason, so if that's your argument, don't bother.
This is just my opinion: use the tools that work best for you, and don't worry about anything else.
To be is to do (Score:3, Interesting)
Alas, almost nobody gets this. Most people subscribe to this technreligion or that, and follows it blindly. Oh well.
Re:To be is to do (Score:1)
A Powerbook for all the graphic and media stuff. (Try to get that DV cam recognized on Linux...).
A Linux biprocessor for all dev and technical stuff.
And another linux box as a small router/server...
The best people are always the ones advocating the right tool for the right job, but this rule seems to have been forgotten it the IT field, and that's sad...
Quentin
Re:To be is to do (Score:3)
Re:Right tool, right job (Score:2)
I've written a number of books over the years, always on FrameMaker, both on Macintoshes and Unix machines. For the length of time spent in front of one machine or the other, the time to switch is insignificant. Frame and Photoshop both work essentially the same, it might take me 2 hours to get settled. Occasionally I get put in front of a windoze machine, and the learning curve of all the missing features is significant, requiring days or weeks, and the loss of productivity is noticable.
In the world of writing entire books, you have to use professional tools, like Frame, PageMaker, or QuarkX. When you have to pass your proofs off to a publishing house, chances are they'll be running Frame, on Macs for their editors, and on BigIron Sparcs for the typesetting/offset machines and printers. If you turn in your book with every chapter and index as separate word documents, they'll only assign some intern the job of converting it to a real system, and charge you for the privelege (it won't be a cut & paste job, they will actually re-type or save out the text only before carefully importing). Only the less knowledgable houses will try to do the publication process with mostly windoze based products.
I have never found an equivalent book publishing system on a FreeNix. vi/emacs and LaTex doesn't come close. StarOffice tries too hard to remain as crippled as micr~1.ofc. The requirements for a package that does indexing and ToCs, maintains complex rules across many chapters and appendices, and bind the whole thing into a neat bundle, requires more work and QA than any free/GNU/GPL project is capable of. I'm not sure if that is a troll or just a reflection on reality. Certainly I haven't seen one other post pointing to a freeNix package capable of meeting this ask
I'm avoiding the graphics/GIMP discussion, since foobar104 has more experience in that field.
If the original poster truly has a project (which costs $$$, earns him a salary, is up against a deadline, etc), then the best tool for the job will be a commercial software package, on a commercial platform. Apple, Unix, or 'doze, those are the only choices today. If I had another writing project, I'd treat myself to one of the new Macs, and buy an upgrade for Frame.
the AC
we had hopes for CorelDRAW (Score:1)
what with tex, troff, postscript and open standards one would've thought that cobbling some dtp/vector stuff together would've been pretty straightforward.
Hand editing troff isn't ideal for being totally creative.
For christmas I've been back to Corel to make the tshirts and crhistmas cards, trivial but I got a hankering for dtp again so this question comes at a good time for me.
Shame the GUI based answer seems to be Kontour or nothing. Text based DTP is good for techies but hard to convince my kids to learn troff macros to make a birthday card for Jesus!
.
Scribus (Score:3, Informative)
URL is: http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid [altmuehlnet.de].
sodipodi (Score:3, Informative)
around the SVG standard, saves in SVG, etc. Works well for
2D vector graphics for me.
http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, on to the subject: for the past two years, I have been using LaTeX, which is a package of macros for the typesetting engine TeX, orginally written by Donald Knuth of Stanford University. TeX was intended to be used as a typesetting tool for scientific papers, and to this date, the quality of typesetting mathematical and other formulae with TeX remains unsurpassed (the reason probably being that the commercial niche for that type of stuff is too small to be profitable).
TeX and LaTeX have become the de facto standard in the scientific world -- they are the official typesetting tools of the American Mathematical Society, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, many universities and scientific magazines produce all their official publications using a flavor of TeX.
As far as I am concerned, the main advantages of TeX and LaTeX are the (unsurpassed) beauty of the output, the tremendous flexibility, and wide availability of packages. Consider the following uses I have for LaTeX:
To me, the only application which can perform all these tasks, using a uniform description language, is TeX. The reason TeX is so flexible, is because it uses a mark-up language (HTML is another example of a mark-up language), which describes the text layout. It also allows for creating macros and extending the basic TeX capabilites.
One of the most widely used macro packages for TeX is LaTeX, which provides templates for many standard types of documents -- letters, articles, books, etc. But you are not constrained with that -- you can create your own templates and macros, or you can use one of the multitude of packages available, which can do almost anything, even typesetting musical scores.
In TeX, you also have the ability to include and manipulate images -- you are given the opportunity to include PostScript code, so almost everything you can do with PostScript, you can do in TeX (and there are high-level PostScript macros, so you even don't have to know PostScript).
But beware -- the greatest strength of TeX is probably why graphic designers may find it inappropriate for their needs -- due to its scientific roots, the description of the document is exact -- it's very difficult to force TeX to produce funky, non-standard text layout, like you can do in Word. And most TeX packages for creating complex graphic objects are geared towards diagrams and scientific graphing, so an artist would not be able to just freely draw something and place anywhere at will -- the design of the document is very carefully considered and calculated in TeX, and it is difficult to produce ugly or non-standard documents.
In recent years, people have been developing WYSIWYG environments for TeX, so now you have TeX front ends like LyX, which allow you to edit the layout in a more "visual" manner.
For more information about TeX, one can go to the Web site of the TeX Users Group [tug.org]. There are plenty of good resources in the Interesting URLs section, so that should be a good start.
LyX (Score:1)
Re:DTP for Unix == Mac OS X (Score:1)
Sketch; Context (Score:2, Informative)
Why not TeX plus MetaPost (Score:1)