[Scribus] tutorial?

[tech at atlantictechsolutions.com]

At Wed, 28 May 2003 16:48:20 -0400 , John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> wrote: 

>Although I have several yeas of experience with TeX in its several
>variants I am an absolute newbie to the world of Scribus. So to get
>started I am looking for three things:
>1. A tutorial that will walk me through a typical project.

That is in the works at the moment. I have put together a quick start guide, but have added some new material which based on the latest features, so this has delayed its release. The other challenge is to keep with all the added new features :)

>2. A feature list that will allow me to see what Scribus has as
>compared to the other products available.

http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/specs.html


>3. A pdf version of the manual.

Franz has only recently addded some features which greatly help speed up composing longer documents like a manual. My aim is to release the docs for Scribus 1.0 as a fully interactive PDF - all created natively with Scribus. 

>Scribus It is described as being "like Quark or InDesign" but since
>these products are quite different that is not a sufficient
>description. My first impression is that it is closer to the
>capabiities of Quark.

It may share many concepts in the menu structure like Quark, but in my experience with documenting Scribus, its PDF Export features in power and ease of use are only matched by Indesign 2.0, so it has elements of both IMHO. Exporting directly from Quark is not its strength IME. 

>From my experience supporting DTP users professionally, Franz has done a brilliant job of masking a great deal of the complexity of creating high quality PDF, without handcuffing advanced users.  Distilling PDF with Quark, Pagemaker etc, is often fraught with errors for many users. 

You might be interested to see this: http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/pre-press.html
 
I think it is important to appreciate that Scribus is still a young and quickly developing project, which is entirely made of volunteers.

I am of the mind there is a place for both Tex and Scribus. We are lucky to have both freely available with active development and support.

Regards,

Peter