[dot] Interview with Scribus Team

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1096453300/

From: Fabrice Mous <fabrice at kde.nl>
Dept: dtp-on-your-desktop
Date: Wednesday 29/Sep/2004, @12:21

Interview with Scribus Team
===========================

   Used in production workflow of a commercial newspaper
[http://www.twintiertimes.com/]! Choosen as as one of their 'Cool
Applications' [http://www.trolltech.com/products/hotnew/scribus.html] by
Trolltech!  Nominated as finalist in the category 'Best Office Software'
for the Linux Format Awards 2004 [http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/awards/]!
More then 750 bugs/feature requests closed since the 1.1.2 version! The
professional DTP application Scribus [http://www.scribus.org.uk/] is
steaming ahead! Curious about the Scribus team? We have an interview for
you originally conducted by the kind people of Golem.de
[http://www.golem.de/] just before the Scribus 1.2 release.
   .imgboxrt{ border:1px dotted #000; float:right; margin-left:5px;
margin-right:10px; } .imgboxlft{ border:1px dotted #000; float:left;
margin-left:10px; margin-right:5px; }
     Scribus moves forward to a stable release 1.2. What was the premier
focus during the development?

     Craig Bradney:  To bring Scribus up to a level of usability,
reliability and functionality where all levels of users can use Scribus
as a serious DTP program on the GNU/Linux and *NIX platforms. We've
closed approximately 700 bugs/feature requests since we put in the bug
tracker after 1.1.2 was released. It's easy to see we have really put in
the hours over about 10 months to knock the bugs on the head and
introduce some really great features to Scribus.

     Scribus addresses an area with well established competitors. What's
your main goal - to fill a gap in within the software portfolio for
Linux or to drag people away from other dtp software?

     Craig Bradney: Both. The DTP area of software on Linux is not well
supported so there's certainly a gap to fill there. There are many
people that just have that last area of needed software to be filled on
Linux so they can jump ship into the FOSS world. This has been the case
for some of our developers, and also for many many users we have spoken
to.

     Peter Linnell: In the end, we really do not think in terms of
"competitors", more: "What can we provide to our end users and for
ourselves to make a great DTP application which is primarily, though not
exclusively for Linux?"

      [http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/scribus/scribus4.png] The
pages on the canvas show off the transparency tricks and gradients now
in Scribus

     Do you plan to support other operating systems than Linux?

     Craig Bradney:   Scribus currently runs on various flavours of
*NIX. We know people have tried Scribus on up to 128bit processors, and
on BSDs, AIX, Mac OSX via Fink, and Windows 2000 via Cygwin. We do have
plans for a native version of Scribus on Mac OSX and Windows, although
no firm dates or development processes have been put in place for those
at this point. Linux is our focus for now.
 Peter Linnell:   Scribus works very well with newer Macs on Fink in my
experience. We have a really good maintainer for our fink packages,
Martin Costabel.
     Scribus took a jump start and got lot of attention with the release
of Scribus 1.0. But, is the software ready for a production use today?
 Craig Bradney:   Yes, for sure. Certainly there will always be things
people need and of course the needs are higher at the top end of the DTP
market. We know of countless semi-professional magazines and personal
publications in production with Scribus. In more recent times we had
also the pleasure of helping a weekly commercial newspaper (20,000+
copies) in the USA get off the ground using Scribus.
     Scribus 1.2 is lights years ahead of 1.0. We are hoping a lot of
people can now switch to Linux using Scribus for their DTP work, or
finally just achieve great results with a DTP program rather than trying
to achieve these kind of results with a wordprocessor.

     Peter Linnell:  One of my magazine publishing clients has also
allowed me to install Linux workstations and Scribus alongside their
specially configured DTP workstations, both Mac and Win2k. They have
been really really supportive of allowing me full reign in a real world
pre-press department of a 4 color magazine. This has been invaluable to
test and to study Scribus' behaviour along side and within other DTP
applications.

     I have done quite a bit of testing of Scribus PDF and PS files with
specialist pre-press pre-flight applications, as well as an advanced
Fiery RIP. These pre-flight tools examine the files for conforming to
published specs and commercial printing norms. Scribus files are
*highly* conformant. In my professional opinion the output is in some
areas superior to commercial DTP applications. We also have three
commercial printers on our mailing list who have verified the same
results using imagesetting equipment.

     Who is developing Scribus and is any company directly supporting
the project?

     Craig Bradney:   In order of joining the project:

    * Franz Schmid (Germany) - original author, main coder, "Our
      Linus"
    * Peter Linnell (US) - docs writer, tester, webmaster for
      www.scribus.net, DTP IT consultant
    * Paul Johnson (UK) - code tester, reviewer, has done lots of work
      on performance and profiling, setup CVS and the Salford web
      server.
    * Craig Bradney (Australian living in Luxembourg) manages IRC and
      the bug tracker, bug testing, docs proofing, webmaster for
      docs.scribus.net
    * Petr Vank (Czech) -  has written the special typography plug-ins,
      and other plug-ins, also works on the Python Scripter API within
      Scribus.
    * Riku Leino (Finland) - wrote the new templates plug-in, the html
      importer plug-in and is working on the text importer API.


    * The School of Music, Media and Performance, University of Salford,
      UK - webhosting, CVS and FTP
    * Netraverse (with Win4Lin for testing purposes).
    * Linux New Media AG (Germany) made it possible to present Scribus
      at CeBit 2004 and support us with nice articles in their magazines
      :)
    * Peter and Craig have their own companies which help support
      Scribus in various ways. We are discussing how to offer commercial
      support for Scribus in the future.


     Mostly the project moves ahead under its own steam fuelled by the
enthusiasm of the team and the various contributors, translators, and
help and encouragement from users out there. Of course, we are all lucky
to have supportive families too!

     We have spent countless hours every single day since 1.0 was
released. Adding up those hours would be too scary to do. We have added
some great team members and had the support of contributors who all put
in as much to the project as they can.

      A look at the new story editor in Scribus 1.2 with Chinese text.
Scribus supports Unicode extensively. Indic Script and full CJK support
are on the todo list.

     What about compatibility with other DTP software applications?

     Craig Bradney:   In terms of import/export type functionality, none
really, but thats not just a "we can't do it" answer. It fits more to
the idea developed from experience that even commercial companies with
full access to sources of older versions of products just can't get
import and export filters 100% correct even with their large teams and
budgets. In most people's experience it's faster and a much more
accurate result is achieved when you take the leap and switch software.

     Peter Linnell:   DTP files internally are very complex. Far more
than most application files. Second, EPS and PDF  is a more common means
of export/import. Scribus does very very well on that mark, in some
cases more capable than commercial DTP apps. For example, many EPS files
can be imported, then edited as native Scribus objects. No other page
layout application can do that. Third, the commercial print world (or at
least the smart ones, in my opinion) is embracing PDF as an exchange
format. PDF solves many interchange/cross-platform issues, especially
fonts. Scribus, with its powerful PDF exporter makes cross-platform
issues disappear.

     Those who say we should have a importer for DTP app X, belie their
inexperience with DTP file conversions. I have rarely had good luck with
them, except for the simplest files. Even importing between different
versions of the same app can be tricky. Moreover, this would require
reverse engineering a closed and complex format. It is our thought that
precious developer time is better spent on making Scribus better.

     The fact that Scribus generates excellent PDF is the true
"compatibility" test. In some cases, it is not Scribus, but other DTP
apps which are lacking in newer PDF feature support. We have run across
this in supporting the handful of newspapers which are now using
Scribus. Their printers were using older versions of pre-press tools
which could not support all the PDF features Scribus is capable of
creating. This has also been an issue for the  latest versions of other
commercial DTP apps. We have made notes in the docs addressing this
issue.

     Craig Bradney:   As for usage patterns, we want the general methods
to be similar for DTP users to come across to, but most of all we want
our features and ideas to shine through very strongly.

     Where we have and will concentrate in future versions is on support
of formats that do make sense to give access to. For example, we have a
new import system, thanks to Riku, which allows us, or anyone, to write
simpler code and make an import filter for your favourite text or
graphic file format.

     What are the most important needs that you plan to address after
the 1.2 release? Will there be a 1.2.x series?

     Peter Linnell:   Yes, Franz has already branched 1.3 and 1.2.x. So
we plan to release a 1.2.1 version in the coming weeks. Mostly bugfixes,
but also new import plug-ins from Riku. Petr Vank is working on
extending the Python scripter.

     Riku Leino: With 1.2 we started on single plug-in system to group
those plugins together which handle the same type of things. The first
such plug-in group done was the Get Text plug-in API for importing
formatted text to a text frame. After I finished the html and csv
importer plugins, there is now an OpenOffice.org Writer importer under
development which will most likely be included with 1.2.1.

     Craig Bradney:   To name just a few:

    * Higher end DTP needs such as true on-screen joined facing pages to
      name just one
    * PDF 1.5 support
    * Higher level of CMYK image import support
    * More import filters for text formats and image formats
    * Support for larger organisation usage (leaving this one wide
      open.. we have nice plans shall we say)

     The wish list for the 1.3.x development series goes on forever.. we
discuss all the nice things we want for hours some days. Look forward to
an updated roadmap later this year :)