[Scribus] Scribus in the Art Lab

[pixelnate]

Gregory Pittman wrote:
> One of the things a university education is supposed to do is to open up 
> your mind, and hopefully in the case of art students, open to the idea 
> that the creativity is in the mind of the student, not in the software. 
> For a student to get hung-up on whether or not they're learning the 
> commands for this or that other piece of software suggests they should 
> have just gone to a technical school.
>   
Incorrect. A university is for learning. A degree is earned through 
judicious study of the subjects offered. You learn what they tell you. 
If anything, a university education closes your mind. It imbues you with 
the ability to understand things you did not know when you went in.
> And if this were the case, why would you ever check back again, and why 
> ever bother to leave messages suggesting that Scribus can never succeed? 
> You may be talking to the wrong audience.
>   
You have me wrong here. I want Scribus to succeed. Now that Adobe owns 
Macromedia there is no competition in the marketplace. Linux is fast 
becoming a player in a number of venues. In many markets, linux is the 
best choice of platform. In desktop publishing this simply is not the 
case. Right now the tools only offer a compelling alternate to some of 
the lower end apps on the Windows environment. That _is_ changing. As 
linux gains more marketshare, and perhaps even surpasses Apple in the 
number of installed seats, the big players will not be able to ignore 
the platform.

If apps like Scribus and Inkscape hope to compete at the Adobe level 
when Adobe joins the linux game, much progress must be made. The folks 
with Inkscape as getting (very valuable) help from the Xara folks, and 
the Scribus devvers are doing really well by themselves. The people that 
need to get on the ball are the Gimp folks. That app is not usable for 
high end print graphics, whether you want to label the tools as 
professional or not.

You misunderstood me. I think Scribus has a future, but I also think 
that the professor in that article was a fool for trying to pass off the 
OSS tools as 1-to-1 alternates of the commercial dtp apps he is trying 
to avoid purchasing licenses of. The tools are just not on the same 
level. I am perfectly happy to learn another set of keyboard shortcuts 
or a different interface to get my work done. I am very comfortable in 
Blender, and find it very intuitive once you get used to it. I have used 
Lightwave, Strata, Pixels3D, and 3Dstudio (from DOS days to present), so 
I am used to learning new ways to get work done.

What I can't abide by are the OSS apologists who think that OSS tools 
are the best tools in the biz. Many are and others simply are not. There 
are some really cool things that Inkscape has. I love the gradient tools 
(unmatched by Illustrator) and I really like the way it handles boxes 
with rounded corners (also superior to Illustrator), and the Tile Clones 
tool is also something I would like to see in Illustrator. However, the 
current layer scheme is terrible, and it is impossible to see CMYK 
colors in even a rough approximation of how they will print.

And I reserving any judgement against Scribus until v1.4 comes out. The 
simple lack of the ability to set a bleed is enough to keep me from 
doing any real work in it at the moment. That said, I am _really_ 
looking forward to the 1.4 release. I like that you can also specify ICC 
profiles in the layout doc. That was lacking in Quark for a long time. 
But I don't think that it is the responsibility of the layout app to do 
color space conversion. Kudos for the inclusion of it, but IMHO, this 
is/should be happening in Gimp.

Anyway, I am rooting for the OSS dtp devs, just not depending on them... 
yet.

~Nate