[scribus] Some good Scribus news from a longtime user

[Dirk Meerkotter]

Hi all

I've been a long time Scribus user and use it essentially daily to produce
a magazine - The Big Issue South Africa. I had the opportunity a month ago
to talk at the International Network of Street papers conference in Munich
and my talk was a call for all street papers (122 in 41 countries) to
switch to Open Source Software and I of course highlighted the importance
of Scribus and sang its praises.

The talk was very met with great enthusiasm and I hope that over the coming
months we'll see more magazines make the shift. To make this an easier
transition I am in the process of setting up a website with information and
forums etc. Specifically aimed at the street paper movement, but of course
relevant far beyond that.

The street paper movement, with 122 magazines in 41 countries, is a perfect
setting for mass embrace of Scribus and related programs and I hope I can
help to encourage that.

Among the street paper magazines are Big Issue London and many others that
have entered the mainstream in a big way and will carry the message of Open
Source far - IF we can encourage them to use it.

I am also happy to report that my work with Scribus was nominated for Best
Design award, but it was unfortunately taken by the Norwegian "= Oslo", but
I think that the mere fact that we were nominated shows that Scribus is
perfectly capable of holding its own with the best and hopefully next
year, we can clinch it.

As part of the website I will showcase the magazine work I do and I
certainly don't claim it's the best design out there, but will hopefully
serve as an example to other Scribus users and other designers of the
options and possibilities.

Of course, that being said, we all know Scribus has much room for
improvement, but we are on the right track and if we can get the support
from the International Network of Street Papers and have an active Scribus
community in that, we can improve the software to perfection.

Just wanted to share that

All the best

Dirk

PS. The attached picture is of me talking at the conference. The opening
picture of the slideshow was about the correlation between the recent NSA
scandals and the choices we make in the digital age.

PPS. The slideshow was ironically shown on a Windows machine, but, rest
assured, my own system is Linux ;-)
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