[HN Gopher] Libre Desktop Publishing
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Libre Desktop Publishing
Author : hucste
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-04-05 10:11 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scribus.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scribus.net)
| dcminter wrote:
| Hmm. You know, it's been a few years since I last tried it, but
| when I did it was anything but user friendly, and I wasn't trying
| for anything complex.
|
| Has it improved recently or is it much of a muchness with its
| 2018(ish) incarnation?
| rodgerd wrote:
| > but when I did it was anything but user friendly
|
| I have always found it very easy to use, but I spend years at a
| job where I wrangled Quark and PageMaker as part of my job; it
| felt very familiar and comfortable.
| bovermyer wrote:
| It has improved, but it's still nowhere near as good as
| InDesign or Affinity Publisher.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| In the past (2007-2010) I used it for magazine layout (https://dc
| plislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/dcplislandor...). Since I
| was in charge of ad layout, I would have a number of page
| templates and could fit things in based on common ad sizes.
|
| As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with
| wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what
| I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up
| just fine almost 15 years later.
| unixhero wrote:
| I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for
| it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind
| of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
| chrisanthropic wrote:
| In the past I found it useful to design and layout a pen-and-
| paper role playing game book and export it as a print-ready PDF
| i could send to the printer(s).
|
| Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images
| and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded
| backgrounds for readability and emphasis.
|
| Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images
| were a pain without it.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
|
| This is a bit like when young people express wide-eyed
| astonishment that bookmarks were physical objects.
|
| "Publishing" tells you what you need to know if you know that
| the word as used in the internet era is a slight repurposing of
| a word which has a distinct pre-internet meaning.
|
| More specifically, "Desktop Publishing" is a late 1970s, early
| 1980s term for packages that made it possible to do any kind of
| controlled-layout publishing from a computer _at all_.
| recuter wrote:
| Do you mean you could like, doodle around on a computer and
| get the output on the page the same as on the screen ancient
| one? Instead of using scissors and glue and paper cut outs?
| :)
| maweki wrote:
| Or lead lettering. Yeah.
|
| Publishing used to be a multi-person job where layout,
| typesetting, and multiple other tasks where done on
| dedicated workspaces by seperate people.
|
| Desktop-publishing is really that: being able to do it on
| the top of a single desk (as a single person).
| recuter wrote:
| Cool!
|
| Man, I kinda want to setup one of those giant touch
| screen tables and some sort of AR hybrid. Pretend I'm
| doing it the old way but with none of the downsides.
| trynewideas wrote:
| Publishing in particular, instead of the more general print,
| means creating for mass publication workflows usually involving
| a press. This usually involves pre-print, different outputs
| options (including spot colors, separate plates for four-color
| CMYK printing, registration, and color profiles to match or
| limit display colors to inks), and printing with bleed for
| trimming. Many of these tools also provide advanced options for
| typesetting, like wrapping text around images or shapes with
| specific hyphenation rules, or aligning text on a baseline grid
| for consistency across pages.
|
| Other tools that can print don't often offer all of these
| features, or if they do they don't provide as much control over
| them.
| Tomte wrote:
| Magazines, books, leaflets.
|
| Basically print, with a mixture of text and images.
| pwthornton wrote:
| We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at
| work. I imagine this could work for that as well.
|
| We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control
| over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our
| reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to
| be extremely polished.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal
| system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them
| are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and
| there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe
| Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ
| would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess
| I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....
| sigg3 wrote:
| I've used LaTeX and pdflatex with very good results, and
| I'm a total newb.
|
| But Scribus is very serious about PDFs:
| https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/
|
| > Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that
| supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification.
|
| No idea what that is but might be worth checking out.
| luluganeta wrote:
| > Scribus is very serious about PDFs
|
| This is its killer feature! I've had compliments from
| multiple pro printers regarding my print PDFs produced
| with Scribus. Even though most usual PDF pipelines are
| Adobe based, Scribus PDF files are superior.
| thunfisch wrote:
| I've used Scribus several times for album cover/booklet stuff.
| Worked really great, my biggest complaint is the inability to
| reduce transparencies. Almost all print shops expect you to
| deliver PDF 1.3, with reduced transparencies. That bit me hard on
| one of the projects, where I noticed this a bit late, and the
| last 24h before submission deadline were quite stressful :)
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I used it before knowing about ConTeXt for things at uni, and it
| was glitchy but actually great. At one assignment, the teacher
| told us to create a typography test layout and he provided us a
| gazillion of fonts in a CD. Its Python scripting feature saved my
| ass - while others spent like 1.5-2 weeks doing that, I just
| needed a couple of hours.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I make my academic posters in scribus. Not sure what other tool
| would make sense (other than LaTeX, but while I use LaTeX for
| papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would
| be that ergonomic).
| jl6 wrote:
| I really wish there was libre software with the layout features
| of Scribus, but oriented to producing digital-native content
| formats (primarily PDF, maybe HTML). Scribus can output PDF but
| last time I looked into this, the PDF was viewed as something of
| a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest
| in the PDF itself (no support for accessibility features, for
| example).
|
| The nearest equivalent I can see is LibreOffice.
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