The first? [LWN.net]

The first?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 17:40 UTC (Wed) by wjhenney (guest, #11768)
Parent article: Scribus 1.0 released

"Scribus represents the first open source DTP application capable of generating professional "press-ready" results."

Hmm, so LaTeX, ConTeXt, et al. don't count? Strange.

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The first?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 17:52 UTC (Wed) by dr_lha (guest, #86) [Link]

I don't know what ConTeXt is, but LaTeX (therefore TeX) are typesetting languages, not DTP. DTP software is all about laying out things on a page how you would like to see them, with great control over the position of objects; with TeX the software makes the decisions for you in terms of layout, using complex typesetting rules (which can often mean if you have a specific layout in mind that breaks these rules you have to battle TeX to get it to do what you want). Both programs produce professional output, but represent very opposite ends of the publishing field, with word processors somewhere between the two.

The first?

Posted Jul 17, 2003 7:16 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

With TeX, *you* make the decision as to the position of every drop of ink. Plain TeX takes some of the grunt work off your hands, but leaves you with most of it. LaTeX is the one that tries to do everything for you.

But regardless, I'll agree; TeX is not a DTP application. It's a reasonably good *backend* to DTP applications, though.

The first?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 18:02 UTC (Wed) by utidjian (subscriber, #444) [Link]

Well yes, as a GUI DTP app it is the first that I have seen. LaTeX et al, are hardly DTP apps. I have been using the excellent LyX (http://www.lyx.org) for years. LyX is, IMHO, the best document processing application for creating scientific documents that are "press-ready" for journals or just local use. It doesn't require any LaTeX or TeX knowledge at all... but if you know the TeX language you can put it to good use with LyX.

Scribus now fills in the problem of having a DTP app on par with Quark. There are things that Quark (and similar programs from Adobe) are good for that LaTeX and LyX and Open Office etc... just can't do. Scribus is a niche application. As with Quark it won't be on everyones desktop. It is not a general purpose word processor.

-DU-...etc...

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 19:22 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]

Hello,

I am not deeply familiar with any of the Tex stuff but while it may be professional I am not sure that it is press ready. A quick look at Scribus sees that it handles concepts like spreads that are only important if you want to print off on a printing press. It also handles colour nicely by having native knowledge of CMYK colour spaces and ICC profiles. The fact that it can save files as PDF/X3 and that it uses it's own PostScript driver internally also speak well of it's ability to integrate well into prepress environments.

This is truly intended to be a competitor to Quark Xpress, Adobe InDesign, and the like. I would expect that most Tex output that becomes books in a store would go through a program like this at some point even if the author did not know it.

Justin Malcolm

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:17 UTC (Wed) by dr_lha (guest, #86) [Link]

I am not deeply familiar with any of the Tex stuff but while it may be professional I am not sure that it is press ready.

TeX is perfectly capable of producing press ready copy, and I have seen many books typeset with TeX and have myself had articles published directly from my LaTeX source. In my experience the LaTeX output from my laser printer has been identical to what was published. TeX has a unix style design (i.e. lots of small programs to do one big job), where I would use "dvips" to create postscript for printing on my laser printer from TeX's output, a professional publisher would use a different program to produce output for a printing press,for producing photo-ready copy or galley proofs.

What TeX is good at is producing textbook style typesetting with excellent support for equations, mostly in black and white (so things like colour seperation is not an issue). What it isn't good at is flashy colourful magazine or newspaper style layouts which is where DTP software like Quark Xpress rules the roost.

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:39 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Generally I believe "press-ready" is meant to convey that the product is capable of producing CMYK separations, handling trapping, spot color plates, and things like this. TeX, as wonderful as it is, doesn't do this.

Yes, TeX and associates can do all that stuff

Posted Jul 16, 2003 23:14 UTC (Wed) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

See, for example http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/papers/color.pdf

What does it mean to be press ready?

Posted Jul 16, 2003 20:28 UTC (Wed) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

TeX and LaTeX are regularly used to produce camera-ready output for scientific manuscripts. There is no need for the added expense of a page layout program, and the academic publishers who ask for TeX are not retypsetting the book using another program. Some journal publishers (AMS comes to mind) also work directly from LaTeX because the hardcopy and web editions are easy to produce from the same source file.