[Scribus] [OT] how to deal with this postscript file?

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 22:43, David Christian Berg wrote:

> Can't you ask your school to distill it to a pdf? I mean I assume that
> in China everybody has the Acrobat distiller in some pirated version :)
> I just was in Thailand and was shocked with how openly pirated software
> was sold and used.

Frankly, I'm not sure Acrobat could handle the files either if they're
as bad as described.

> (this is actually one of the big threats to OpenSource: piracy. If
> people get proprietary software for free, why bother using open source?)

For one thing, because it's sometimes better :-)

The POST Newspapers, my employer, use Adobe Acrobat 5 and Acrobat
Professional 6 for our regular PostScript to PDF conversion. Despite
this, we use GhostScript and in fact increasingly rely on it as a
critical tool in our workflow. Whenever Acrobat Distiller chokes on a
PostScript file (not infrequent, I assure you), we feed it through
GhostScript and it happily processes it. We test the resulting file with
PitStop then send it off to the printers - works a treat.

On one recent occasion GhostScript saved us from likely missing press
deadline. Those who work in the newspaper industry know just how
expensive it can be to miss that deadline - let's just say you really,
REALLY don't want to go over deadline.

We are currently looking into switching over to using GhostScript for
regular production. It generates significantly larger PDFs from our
jobs, but does so much more quickly and reliably than Distiller. Being
able to run it on the very fast core Linux server is an additional
attraction.

If you don't have gs 8.3x, I strongly advise you to get hold of it. It's
fantastic.

Another reason to use OSS is flexibility. It is because of the
flexibility offered by having the code to the software and the right to
modify it (or pay someone else to) that I am interested in using Scribus
at the POST eventually.

I think there's rather more of an attraction to OSS than just price,
though that's definitely a factor. For example, if MS gave Win2k3 server
away for free, I'd still be using a Linux server for our network core.

--
Craig Ringer