[scribus] Gimp etc.

[John Culleton]

The way I use Gimp and other tools is by
creating files and then importing them into
another program. For example on my current
project the file from my customer was a pdf of an
older version of his book. with type blue in
color. To get a file with black text and change
the running heads to the new title I burst the
pdf file into individual pages using pdftk. Then I
imported each page pdf into gimp and used
gimp tools to clip the edges and change the
text color to black.This is easy in gimp. I saved
this page file as a pdf file. If the file needed
further editing such as fancy artwork I did
this in scribus and again saved as pdf. I
reassembled the pages into a single pdf via the
Context version of TeX (Scribus can't handle large
numbers of pages in a single file at reasonable
speed yet). 

This is the 'nix way of doing work. Trying to
write code to move data in a special format from
one program to another via subprogram calls is too
much work. Exporting a file from one program and
importing it into another using a standardized file layout
like pdf or svg or in some cases plain ASCII text
simplifies the workflow and puts less burden on
each program. 

-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
Book layout, typesetting and Indexing
Free list of books for self-publishers:
http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html