Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed (Mad Penguin)
Scribus is a desktop publishing program for Unix and Linux. It is built with the Qt libraries and is run natively in the KDE desktop environment. Scribus is published under the Gpl and is similar to similar to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Scribus has an unusually small development team and is mostly the work of a German programmer called Franz Schmid. The Scribus team are positioning the program as an easy to use DTP publishing program for the Linux and Unix operating systems with support available for professional publishing features." (Found on KDE.News)
Posted Apr 27, 2004 21:10 UTC (Tue)
by ordonnateur (guest, #6652)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 27, 2004 22:37 UTC (Tue)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 28, 2004 2:28 UTC (Wed)
by malex (guest, #15692)
[Link]
Posted Apr 29, 2004 0:06 UTC (Thu)
by Baylink (guest, #755)
[Link] (2 responses)
So I know whereof I speak when evaluating DTP software.
I've been a systems admin and support person for longer than that, so I know whereof I speak
when evaluating software and reviews.
And I've been an active writer and weblogger for about 4 years; you can evaluate my prowess therein yourself.
So I came to this review with some pleasant trepidation; I am happy and sad for the reviewer.
All of the shortcomings mentioned above by others are pretty much accurate, but they stem,
IMHO, from failing to understand the domain -- by which I mean both electronic publishing, and
applications complex and powerful enough to support complex tasks like electronic
publishing.
Much of the reviewers ire seems to be inspired by the fact that Scribus isn't MS Publisher.
Well, neither are PageMaker, FrameMaker, Ventura, or Quark. Therein, of course, lies a tale.
The analogy I like to draw notes that you can cut wood a lot faster with a bandsaw than with a
handsaw. Of course, you can also cut your hand off a lot faster -- bandsaws are power tools,
intended to make complex tasks much more tractable. This implies that they require more
training to get the best use out of.
DTP software, for example, will serve you *much* more effectively if you utilize paragraph
level styles for as much as you humanly can (a lesson much less difficult to teach to anyone
who's done HTML design). Many DTP software manuals fail to teach this effectively.
But this is, ultimately, the target market for a package like Scribus, so I'm actually pleased
that the reviewer had problems -- it increases the odds that the package will actually be able
to do what I need it to. :-)
With any luck, I'll be doing a hard drive upgrade (6GB is pretty cramped these days) and
possibly a laptop upgrade (primary computer; 96MB and P-266MMX not real pleasant either) in
the
next couple weeks. If I succeed at that, Scribus will be on my list of things to play with,
and perhaps our grumpy, if well esteemed editor, will see fit to publish my own meanderings on
the package, from the standpoint of one who's spent extensive time with it's erstwhile
competitors.
But who knows, maybe it's just me.
So many things are just me.
Posted May 4, 2004 9:50 UTC (Tue)
by Peter (guest, #1127)
[Link] (1 responses)
Perhaps I'm just too easily amused, but that line (and the one that
always follows it) still makes me smile.
Posted Jun 14, 2004 17:48 UTC (Mon)
by Baylink (guest, #755)
[Link]
:-)
Just what qualifies someone who has been 'using Linux since 2001' to write a review of software. Come back when you've been using publishing software for 20 plus years and I might think it worth paying attention.
Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed (Mad Penguin)
Yeah, since 2001 isn't all that long compared to some of us (I started Using Linux since....
with Linux in 1995, Unix in 1991), but who cares?
Anyone with DTP experience is qualified to review Scribus. What does 20
years of publishing software have to do with anything? The users are the
ones that matter.
Unfortunately your argument does not really apply to this case. It seems Accuracy of the review
that the reviewer has made some solid journalistic goof-ups such as the
flashback into his computing experience and the "grandma" reference.
Another example of his lack of research: "LittleCMS is a program which is
used to create PDF files from the documents you create in Scribus."
The majority of his article seem to have no "added value" over what is
written on the front page of the program manual. This has also been
exaggerated by the "slashdot discussion" effect. Frankly, some Scribus
developers have spent hours on the /. explaining the omissions and
misconceptions, correcting erroneous DTP and scribus references and
facts. All in all, review like this seem to do more harm to the potential
users of the software than good. In addition, he could've run a
spell-checker, but chose not to.
To finish on a positive note: reviewer's remark about the lack of
templates spurred one of the contributors to Scribus to investigate the
MSPublisher templates. Then he started creating a set of Scribus
templates from scratch. So, for casual users of Scribus, there will be
the stepping stones to build their simple documents on. This kind of
critique is a Good Thing (TM) and is useful as compared to calling the
interface "Ugly" instead of going to the BTS and filing bugs against the
UI.
Well, my personal first DTP app was Ventura 1.2, under GEM, back in, oh, 1989 or so. Did
extensive work with it and 2.0, took a long hiatus, came back and did a bunch of work in 5.0,
then took a professional vacation and spent 2 years art directing a medical newspaper using
PageMaker6/Mac (26 editions each quarter, each between 12 and 20 pages, 2 half-sig's in 4c).
Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed (Mad Penguin)
Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed (Mad Penguin)
But who knows, maybe it's just me.
It's just you.Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed (Mad Penguin)