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Mark Jose wrote:
> On Monday 08 January 2007 12:30, George Parker wrote:
>> On a related issue, does anyone know of a free software package for Desk
>> Top Publishing on the lines of Framemaker?
>>
>
> No idea about Framemaker, but Scribus is a DTP program which comes highly
> recommended by those who use it. Perhaps worth a look?
Personally I hate Scribus, but I suspect it depends on what you are
tying to achieve.
If you have a house style for a newsletter, or similar, established,
then Scribus is probably great. Since you can define the template you
need once, you know the typefaces and layouts you are using, and Scribus
lets you vary it nicely as needed.
When I've tried to use it to do "one off" designs (not that I'm a
graphic designer) I've found it difficult. I think part of the issue is
lack of WYSIWYG handling of text. Perhaps I just don't get it, but it
doesn't do it for me.
For me OO Writer, and Inkscape work better for the one off pieces.
Particularly Inkscape if there is a load of text to position precisely
(don't tell the Xara guy at work -- but hey they haven't got the new
document handling stuff from Xara into Debian yet, indeed they haven't
got anything into Debian AFAIK, apart from some demos in "non-free", but
"non-free" isn't *in Debian* ).
If you need highly structured documents I'm assured braving the highly
structured mark-up languages is the way to go. So {La}TeX family of
beasties, but these generally have a big upfront investment of learning
how to do things right, which then repays itself a thousand fold when
you have to switch paper sizes to keep your Americans happy, or other
arbitrary change.
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