[Tfug] Desktop Publishing Software

[Claude Rubinson]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 03:47:54PM -0700, Paul Lemmons wrote:
> Welcome to the insanity wagon. I am in exactly the same boat (church 
> publication, no ascetic sense, Linux user).

Good to know that I'm not the only one.  Maybe we should form a
support group!  Or an intervention service to prevent others from
making the same lapse in judgement. :)

> I use Scribus. It meets all of your requirements. On a scale of 1 to
> 10, though it would probably get about a 7.8. Some of that, however,
> may be ascribed to the fact that I am not a natural at building
> publications. It does get the job done, though.

I think that it's always difficult to amateurs to figure out if it's
the software or our own incompetence.  Hearing, "It does get the job
done, though" is surprisingly reassuring.

> My biggest complaint is that there are not enough templates and
> keeping a publication up to date is hard work :)
> 
> In conjunction with Scribus I find myself in The Gimp a lot
> too. Artwork is never exactly as I would want for the pub and
> Scribus comes with none. If you have a good clip art source, that
> can help a lot and save you many hours. People do not read things
> without pictures :)

That's a good point that I hadn't really thought about.  Our general
newsletter doesn't have any graphics and it would definitely spice
things up if it did.  In another response on this thread, Chris
brought up Inkscape which seems like it might make a decent choice for
manipulating clip art, etc.  I expect that this will be a pretty
low-resolution publication and simple vector graphics should be
sufficient.

Ugh.  Now I'm thinking about two new programs rather than just one.

C.