[scribus] Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

["Christoph Schäfer"]

> Gesendet: Freitag, 14. August 2015 um 20:05 Uhr
> Von: "Ben Gorman" <jamminactor at gmail.com>
> An: scribus at lists.scribus.net
> Betreff: [scribus] Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
>
> May all the blessings of the Digiverse shower upon you in a beautiful,
> though less ominous, Matrix-like rain of code!
> 
> Srsly—though I'm certainly late to the party, as a sometime graphic
> designer frustrated with profit-driven commercial companies, I just wanted
> to voice my appreciation for the effort and vision that the Scribus team
> has evidently undertaken to date (and, we hope, continues to do). I have
> not yet investigated the software itself, but I'm eager to find out what it
> can do, and (I hope) whether it can supplant the shiny-flashy,
> subscription-based stuff I'm presently forced to use for work.
> 
> Which shall remain nameless. As if you don't all know who I mean. Grrrr....
> 
> Just THANK YOU for doing this service for humanity.
> 
> Cheers & good coding to you all.
> 
> Ben


Hi Ben,


The corporation whose name you didn't wish to mention isn't among of the worst offenders in corporate abuse. It's a mixed bag, even though many professionals are quite frustrated with its recent policies (subscription and server glitches etc.).

As it currently stands, Scribus isn't a replacement for ID yet, especially when it comes to typography. On the other hand, InDesign cannot serve as a replacement for Scribus, because it doesn't support many of Scribus's features.

I might have ignored your posting hadn't there been two more or less recent incidents that caught my attention. The first was an article in a printed magazine I regularly write for. It was created with ID CS 6, and exposed a bug in ID's (and, as it turned out, Illustrator's and Acrobat's) font handling for PDF export. I googled the problem, and it turned out that the issue has been known since at least CS 2, but Adobe never bothered to fix it. In this case, I couldn't have cared less, because the printed magazine was OK, and only the downloadable PDF revealed the problem. The text was still readable, though, but Courier really isn't an attractive font ;) 

Things got ugly, though, when I bought the Season 3 Soundtrack of "Battlestar Galactica". The first track on the album uses vocals in Armenian, and the lyrics are being printed in the booklet in English and ... PDF/PostScript font codes in Courier. Nothing to see of the beautiful Armenian alphabet! I'm at a loss as to why the publishers actually greenlit the release with the obviously faulty font handling, but there I am (as a customer), who's been shafted to some degree.

That being said, Scribus is one of the most reliable programmes on earth when it comes to PDF creation.


Christoph