[Scribus] Subject: Big Project - Question/Comments

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Marshall,

> So, that leaves the PDF version.  My reason for wanting a PDF version is 
> mostly for possible printing ... either specific pages or the entire 
> project.  One person mentioned that the size of my project (5 MB of text 
> plus many, many images) will be difficult to work with.  It will be easy 
> to break the project into sections if that's what is needed.  People have 
> mentioned LaTeX (which I'm not familar with but willing to learn), LyX, 
> OpenOffice, AbiWord, Scribus (of course), www.rsane.com, and 
> www.docbook.org.  Keeping in mind that I have no experience with creating 
> PDF documents which of the above applications is easiest to work with for 
> PDF output?  Is there a difference between the above applications in the 
> quality of the PDF produced (from one person's comments it seems that 
> Scribus produces the best quality PDFs ... true?)?  Is there a difference 
> between the above applications in supporting whatever options there are 
> with the contents of PDF documents?  Again, as time passes there will be 
> multiple changes to the content.  Does that fact make a difference in 
> which application I choose to create the PDF document?
> 
> One thing that I have in mind is that I probably won't be producing a 
> complex PDF document in the initial version of the project, but I may want 
> to include more complexity in future revisions.
> 
> Is there anything else I should be considering as far as creating a PDF 
> document goes?

There is one thing you should be absolutely clear about and this is 
printing: Where will your project be printed and how?

Do you want to print on your personal printer or do you want to give the 
PDF to a commercial printer? If the latter is true, you have to consider 
if you want to print colours. LaTeX, LyX and Scribus will produce high 
quality PDFs, but only in Scribus you can work with colour management. 
For more info, please have a look at the docs. Peter Linell has written 
a lot on colour printing. In case colours or, more precisely, accurate 
colours aren't that important, I would prefer LyX/LaTeX because you can 
easily handle huge amounts of tetxt. Please note that LaTeX files are 
plain text files with formatting commands which will eventually 
processed by LaTeX. This way, you can easily edit your LaTeX source code 
in an editor, as you can do with your HTML. It has also been mentioned 
that latex2html can produce HTML from your *.tex files.

As for OpenOffice.org, it can produce HTML and PDF, but don't expect any 
miracles: There are a lot of PDF options unavailable in OO.o and its 
HTML export has some serious flaws (at least OO.o 1.1.x, I haven't 
tested 2.0 final yet).

HTH,

Christoph