[scribus] Materials for a talk about Scribus

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:45:31 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

>I have long participated in a local LUG. We have two meetings each
>month where we have someone speak on an aspect of open source software.
>It has come to the attention of several of my friends in the LUG that I
>know more about Scribus than anyone else in the group. Therefore, it
>has been suggested that I give a talk for an hour and a half or so on
>Scribus.

My talk isn't until December 2, so I have lots of time left.

I have decided that I am going to start with 15 minutes or so on
general DTP terminology and issues. I decided to do this because the
audience is mostly programmers, corporate network administrators and
other such Linux-heads. A couple of them have written books, but they
did them in TeX. There isn't a designer or press person in the lot.
I'll be surprised if anyone has heard of things like line screens,
banding. dot gain, or knows much about graphic image formats. I need to
get the audience up to speed with some basics first.

Then I am going to spend 15 minutes or so on the basic idea of
Scribus. In this section I will point out how Scribus is page-based,
among other things that make Scribus different from word processors or
TeX. I will show them some work (my own and some done by others)
demonstrating the kind of thing that Scribus excels at.

And finally I am going to launch Scribus and rebuild a flier that I
designed in Scribus for the local LUG. Each member of the audience will
have a paper copy, and I will use Scribus on screen to demonstrate how
it was done by creating it from scratch as a brand new document. The
flier is an 11x17 inch sheet printed duplex and folded to make four
letter size pages. It embodies a great many Scribus features and will
take at least half an hour to do in front of the group. 

I have an hour and a half, after which the group adjourns to a local
pub for the correct beverages. If I am done early I will get heartier
applause. 

The first two sections (general DTP stuff and how Scribus works) have
been completed in an OOo Impress file. It would be wonderful if someone
could look at the file with an eye to finding errors and providing
feedback. I exported it as a PDF and it is only 325 KB. To avoid
embarrassing myself with the errors that are probably in it, I'd rather
send it off-list to whoever volunteers to look at it rather than make it
publicly available at this time.

After the talk I will make the PDF public somewhere - on the Scribus
website if room can be found for it.

Any volunteers?