open source desktop publishing software

[timopod]

Hey all

I'm mostly a lurker here, but I actually have something worth a post. I saw a post about free software such as open office and such. I dunno if you guys know of this already, but here's an open source desk top publisher (page layout), called scribus. It's a Linux program thats been ported to mac osx and windows 2000 sp4/xp. I just found the link a while ago and have not had a chance to use the program. i know it exports to high quality pdf's, and thats a good thing. Hope it helps.
http://www.scribus.org.uk/

See ya
(wow a forum with a spell checker! GREAT!!)

[MatrixGamer]

Does anyone know if there is any difference between a PDF made on a program like this and one made on something like InDesign?

I'm a printer and book binder and not an editor so a PDF file is fine for me to do a job. The only drawback is that I can't change any design points that mess up printing. For instance, the job I'm working on now (Science versus Pluck - a miniatures rule set) has some tables with black type on dark gray. Not good - it duplicates all black. I can't change it so it's there in the printing. Oh well...

Of course if he did send me the source file I'd have to have that program. I'm still using Pagemaker so all the InDesign files folks make would still not help me.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

[jerry]

Does anyone know if there is any difference between a PDF made on a program like this and one made on something like InDesign?

There will be differences depending on the quality of the software's PDF engine; and PDF is complex enough that different software packages will make different choices at various points in the PDF creation. I suspect that Scribus will have at least a decent PDF engine, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet. There appears to be a paper about Scribus and prepress considerations at:

http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/scribus_v1.2/pre-press.pdf

And the authors appear to be aware that their software "will be judged on the quality of its postscript and PDF output":

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/09/02/scribus.html?page=2

While there will be differences, however, it is still going to be PDF. PDF is (or is supposed to be) a standard. I've used Acrobat Pro and Illustrator to open PDF files from a variety of software packages; mainly because I don't have the original, and even if I did I couldn't use it.

Jerry

[Docbrown]

I'm a printer and book binder and not an editor so a PDF file is fine for me to do a job. The only drawback is that I can't change any design points that mess up printing. For instance, the job I'm working on now (Science versus Pluck - a miniatures rule set) has some tables with black type on dark gray. Not good - it duplicates all black. I can't change it so it's there in the printing. Oh well...

I'm just going to jump in here for a quick comment. If you have the full version of Acrobat (not just the reader), you should be able to use the Text Touchup tool to change the text in a pdf. Or try right-clicking on the text with the pointer, and selecting Properties, and you should be able to change the color of the text (not sure what the command would be on the Mac side.)

Of course, if the text has been converted to paths/curves, or if they are using some weird font that you don't have, you're out of luck.

[timopod]

I work in a mac lab up at college. So Monday I'll be more then happy to try making some pdf's in different programs and see what I get. I'll let you if i can see anything.

[Andrew Morris]

From my first-hand observation, there definitely is a difference in PDF-making software. When I used Open Office's built-in PDF converter, screens (background tints) never came out right. They would always be converted into some sort of checkerbox instead of a solid screen. I switched to CutePDF Writer, and that seems to work fine.

Now, it's entirely possible I just missed some option or setting in Open Office, so realize this is just my experience. I'm not claiming to be an expert on PDF converters.

[talysman]

Clinton mentions in the Self-Publishing Essay that he used Scribus for The Shadow of Yesterday. I haven't seen the PDF version of this, so I can't tell you how it compares to other PDF applications.

One thing I *can* say about Scribus is: unless something's changed in the last month, the Windows version of Scribus is not as complete as the Linux and OSX versions, plus you have to compile it yourself. What I haven't heard anyone mention, however, is that Scribus is included in the Knoppix live cd version of Linux. I booted a Knoppix cd and verified I could get Scribus up and running with no hassle. So here's what you would have to do:

• Sketch out your basic layout idea on paper first.
• Write your text in a text editor under Windows or in Open Office.org (but use minimal formatting in OO.o -- bold, italics, underline, etc. Don't mess with pictures, headers, footers, sidebars, or chapter titles.)
• Save each chapter in a separate file. If you use sidebars, save each one in a separate file.
• Make sure you have some kind of FAT32 drive or partition to save stuff to under Linux, because Linux can read NTFS but writing to NTFS is still buggy. An external USB drive should be OK.
• Boot to your Knoppix CD and mount the FAT32 drive as writable.
• Do your layout in Scribus. Save your layout in progress to the writable drive/partition. Save your final PDF there, too.

As for Open Office.org's PDF capabilities, I didn't notice the background tint problem Andrew describes, but I was using images as backgrounds, which may be different. I did notice that the font I used for the cover of Last Breath would not show up in the PDF, however. I wound up using PDF95 to print from OO.o to PDF and it worked fine.

I also previously tried a Ghostscript print redirector under Windows, back when OO.o didn't have built-in PDF capability. That worked fine, but all the PDFs were in grayscale rather than color. This may have been a configuration issue, because I think Scribus uses Ghostscript, too.

[Adam Biltcliffe]

I'm not very sure about the technical details of this, but I have seen some PDFs in the wild which are defective in that they display OK in Acrobat but when converted to PostScript (notably, by being printed on a PostScript printer) the text becomes mangled. Typically this involves all the characters being replaced by boxes or digits (which I would guess is indicative of some problem with embedding fonts, but I don't know enough about the format to be sure).

I mention this because the advert for The Shadow of Yesterday in the back of my copy of Polaris displays exactly this problem, which might be a reason to be cautious of Scribus if that's what was used to create it.

[timopod]

Ahhh ok, cool cool thnaks for the info. It's the only open source page layout software the I know of.

[Bryan Hansel]

I downloaded the windows version of Scribus v 1.3.2 (current) to check it out and had these two main observations:

1. The read me states that Scribus is very picky when it comes to fonts.  It then goes on to tell you not to use shareware/freeware fonts, because they probably won't work.
2. The file format for windows is not finalized yet.  So, if you create something now in windows, it probably won't be able to be read in newer versions.  It stated that the format will be finalized in 1.3.3 or 1.3.4.

I only played around with it for a little while, but overall, it seemed very user friendly, and looks to be a nice free desktop publishing program.  It looked to have everything that I would want for most layout projects.  I'm more used to InDesign, but this would work just fine.

Bryan

[timopod]

yep, I took this morning to play around with the windows version also. It's very useful and very user friendly. I suggest going to the wikki and using the getting started. I also found a whole host of other programs to do image manipulation and even vertex graphics. There should be no reason now why a product one if us turns out can't match any thing on the market (except maybe time or a real job or having a life outside game design)