[Scribus] Novice Enthusiasm

[Craig Ringer]

 > By last year I started to realize that
> there is a difference between
> word processing and DTP,

Aah... if you know how to condense that concept into something that can 
be mailed to customers, it'd be worth some serious money ;-)

It's amazing how often I get "print-ready" ads in MS Word format. Our 
accepted formats list EXPLICTLY forbids MS Word and MS Publisher for 
graphics & complete ads.... but why would they read something like that? 
Anyway, everybody knows that EVERYBODY uses MS Publisher, unless of 
course they use Word for all their DTP and printing needs. *sigh*. 
They're usually in US Letter page format too (because it's honestly kind 
of hard to convince a computer that it's not in the USA, and should use 
the paper the whole rest of the world uses), and if they're tweaked to 
A4 the layout breaks.

OpenOffice 1.1 should be a bit of a 'ray of hope' there, since I'll be 
able to tell the customers 'download OO.o, open your file, and save it 
as a PDF.' All fonts embedded, all local printer funny business dealt 
with, etc.

Alas, I don't see any hope of getting such customers using Scribus. 
Among other things, they'd have to be running on some *nix first, and if 
they were UNIX users they wouldn't be sending us Word documents in the 
first place. Not that I like getting TeX either, but at least it's easy 
to make a PDF from.

Craig Ringer