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On Sun, 24 Apr 2011, Vivi Griffin wrote:
On 23 April 2011 21:14, Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Wifey is struggling with Scribus - after X years of using publisher (curtsey of her employer, DCC, who's just made her redundant), she thinks it's utter rubbish. And I have to say, watching her struggle to use it, I'm starting to think that too - a seemingly simple task she showed me in Publisher - inset some clip-art, resize it, move it into place - a doddle in publisher, required that Scribus launch gimp to do the image manipulation... So she's on the verge of spending £120 on publisher... Unless there is an alternative? It's probably the one thing that would stop her going over to Linux and give-up her XP desktop once and for-all, however... Any suggestions welcome...
By a strange coincidence, a friend of mine who has also just been made redundant by DCC also has a requirement to do desktop publishing but, he has just bought a brand new windows 7 sony vaio. I was planning to install scribus for him and give him some training on it. Publisher is so expensive and Serif's Pageplus seems to require registration so that they can bombard people with sales material. Therefore, I think I will try the Scribus route first, unless anyone else comes up with an alternative.
Just a wee note to give a follow-up on my wifes experiences ... She hates Scribus, really can't get on with it, and will very probably fork out the £120 for publisher...
It's not that Scribus (probably) can't do what she wants it to do, is more that what she wants isn't a full-blown DTP, it's just something to produce a page or 2 of mixed text and graphics - e.g. one thing she wanted to do recently was to make an image transparent to place on top of some text - she spent an hour trying to work out how to do this, and failled. If the solution is to export it into GIMP, then use some voodoo to make it transparent, then re-import it into Scribus, then it's a fail for her, as it's a simple couple of clicks in Publisher.
It's really hard to un-learn something, that might have been "sub optimal" in the first instance, and learn something new - and I suspect MS are going to rely on this - at least for another dozen years or so. My wifes been using MS all her working life (21 years for local authority now) and even when she moved from Gloucestershire to Devon, things were more or less the same and "just worked".
So I suspect that MS has won this round, and Apple have won the iTunes round too, so it looks like she'll be keeping a base PC that's MS, but using firefox/thunderbird for email, GIMP for some photo manipulation (but GIMPs printing is well screwed - printing anything from GIMP results in a B&W image - huh?), OpenOffice for word processing & spreadsheet.
Anyone know if a publisher license can be transfered to a new PC if she installs it on her XP box now and buys a new PC/Win7 box in a few months time?
Gordon
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