I've heard it's the FOSS Miracle-ware for Making and Editing PDF files, but I have yet to see anyone else try and use it.It's basically to InDesign what GIMP is to Photoshop, and Krita is to Illustrator.Do any of you Anons here have experience with it?
>>447829>and Krita is to Illustrator.I'd say Inkscape is the FOSS equivalent to Illustrator since both are primarily designed for vector graphics, while Krita, designed for digital painting, competes with Clip Studio Paint.
>>447829never even heard of this
>>447874It's basically a free and open source desktop publishing application similar to Adobe InDesign and Affinity Publisher.https://www.scribus.net/
>>447829Tried it but gave me an error about Typescript or someshit like that, I have InDesign pirated so guess I'd be using that
>>447829Yo, I've been using it pretty extensively on one project for a number of months, but my experience is as an amateur with my only prior typesetting experience being in LaTeX. It tends to feel pretty obtuse, lacking shortcuts and conveniences in a similar way that GIMP is described (though this could partially be a consequence of me going in blind and not digging deep enough for the settings).If you have any specific questions about it, you can ask, but I may be a bit clueless. I'll dump some of what I've made with it (pic related).
>>447887
>>447887>>447888I guess what I wanted to mention about these two are the features related to text flow, where on the top right of the first pic you can see the text flowing around the inserted image, and again in the second pic where it was instead done manually.In pic 1 it's done simply with a feature associated with the text boxes, so that any objects overlapping the text at a higher z-level will cause text to re-flow. It's easy to turn on, but is limited; to get the margin between text and image in pic 1 I had to add a second object behind the actual picture and adjust it to the margin I wanted.In pic 2 I adjusted the text boxes themselves manually (pic related), which isn't hard but can be a pain, being somewhat finicky.
>>447889One general complaint I have is related to importing text with styles.I'm working with a lot of separate source documents for the text content, which I keep as TXT files. There's no way to automatically encode formatting (e.g., textit{} for italics as in LaTeX), so I have to manually adjust that stuff. Text also isn't updated if the original source file itself is updated, so you're stuck doing your fine-tuning with Scribus' own pretty limited and janky text-editing features; note that you can, however, update imported images if the original has been changed (which may be for better or worse; not sure if there's a global option to change this). If you use something like a DOCX file, you can import everything including formatting, but then you'll import all sorts of styles from it; this is probably something you can prevent from being an issue by properly styling your DOCX file in your program of choice, but I personally hate using word-type editors and don't trust it to work uniformly.
>>447890There's an option in Scribus to save the contents of your text boxes externally, but this just spits it into an unformatted text file, as opposed to, say, an external document preserving the format and styles applied. Sucky.Headers/footers are also a pain, in that you can use Master Pages to define some basic elements (like margins, a dynamically updating page number, a fixed set of text), but you can't do things like automatic section titles, like what I've shown with each piece having its title in the footer; you also can't edit any text boxes that come from the master page, so inserting these titles actually requires properly positioning the text box on each and every page (simple enough with copy-paste, but still more of a pain than it should be).It is possible that this function is buried somewhere in features I haven't seen, since you can generate things like a table of contents based on the internal naming of pages, and this title issue seems closely related. But I don't know. Bear in mind that I was clueless about things like baseline grids (uniform grids for line-spacing across all pages) until very recently.
Did you report these issues on their forum?Seems like these could be something put under priority to resolve faster if the main developers are more aware of them.Or at the very least someone dedicated could make an add-on that will get popular enough to get integrated into the real thing.But that's just my suggestion.
>>447897Nah, haven't tried. The running headers/footers thing is something I think I've seen discussed on there, but from what I've seen a lot of these issues are normally "resolved" by somebody posting their personal script for doing it. I don't think my requests are all that unique, so it's hard to imagine them not being requested before, even if that's rather lazy of me to assume (though, again, I've been on their forums quite a bit before while looking for things).
>>447898Won't hurt to try.Who knows what you might achieve if more people are aware of it.Who knows, maybe they'd agree with you that needs to be resolved, and it might help push for a more permanent solution.
How do print shops react when you send them a PDF / project file from Scribus?
>>447907Or Inkscape?
>>447907How the fuck is someone supposed to tell that somebody did something in a particular program? It's not like the thing is watermarked. And if you mean that as a proxy for "something an amateur did" then I'm sure they still just take your money and do what they'd do anyway. Maybe if you look like a real child they'll ask if you set your margins and bleed correctly.I've never taking a full typeset document for printing, but for things like posters they've asked for size, paper weight, number, and colours, which is about the extent of it.
>>447883You probably just need to install Ghostscript
I've been using Scribus at my job for 6 years now, but only like a couple of times per year. I made two magazines and one smaller one, as well as a bunch of cards & mail stuff. The thing that absolutely pisses me off about Scribus, as well as Gimp, is the fact that it always forgets what fucking font it's supposed to use as soon as I write at the very beginning of a text box, this caused me to learn the habit of writing after the first letter and deleting the first letter afterwards. Other than that it's very clunky, 1.4.6. to 1.5.2 was quite an improvement, but the program is still so much inferior to Indesign. I also have some huge problems with precision in Scribus, like I stopped measuring distances because the fucking tools are so bad and just went with colored blocks most of the time to measure equal placement of objects, something my previous boss would have killed me for, but I didn't have to use Scribus back then. It is useable, but terrible to learn and even worse to teach to others. It really needs a major update.
