[Scribus] Content to PDF

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 17:14 +0000, John R. Culleton wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 August 2005 11:44 pm, Asif Lodhi wrote:
> > Hi Scribus Developers,
> >
> > I know there are tools out there that convert various formats to PDF -
> > I know of text2PDF, at least.  I am positive there are more out there.
> >  The question is:  do these tools produce press-ready PDFs through
> > xpdflib or whatever?  Alternatively, does linux's built-in pdf library
> > xpdflib (or something similar - I can't recall the correct name -
> > sorry!) support such Press-ready conversion?

Probably not, but GhostScript will make press-ready PDF from suitable
PostScript input. It can't do all that much in the way of conversions
though - it'd be interesting to see, gs able to do things like managed
RGB->CMYK conversions as part of the ps2pdf process.

> What would be the purpose of such a tool? The program enscript
> will take a text file and print it out on a PostScript printer. 
> Or it could output a PostScript file or rtf file or whatever.
> There are multiple formatting options within enscript.
> 
> Once you have a Postscript file you can convert that to pdf with
> the Ghostscript tool ps2pdf. But for any useful output you need
> formatting by e.g., Scribus or TeX or whatever. 

Yep. You can, however, do that formatting programatically. There are
reporting tools out there for that - one that comes to mind is
ReportLab, and there are many others for various languages with various
features. I'm not sure how press-oriented their output is (in the case
of ReportLab, I think the answer is "not very") though.

Asif, personally I'd be inclined to look at enhancing existing tools to
produce output more suitable for press work. GhostScript might be a very
good starting point - and if you talk to the gs folks, you might find
yourself able to get many changes back into the mainline gs.

--
Craig Ringer