[dot] Scribus Team in the Spotlight

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1166101297/

From: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> onThursday 14/Dec/2006, @05:01
Dept: dee-tee-pee


Scribus Team in the Spotlight
=============================

   Scribus [http://www.scribus.net] is known as the most mature open
source WYSIWYG page layout application. This interview with members of
the Scribus core team focuses on upcoming releases 1.3.4 and 1.3.5,
standards in pre-press, success stories and many other important issues.
This article was originally published in Russian
[http://www.linuxgraphics.ru/readarticle.php?article_id=24] for
linuxgraphics.ru [http://www.linuxgraphics.ru].

     Let's face the fact - people are pretty tired of the mythical "Year
of Linux on the desktop". Many can barely believe that open source
software can be used by artists for real work. At the same time whole
publishing houses have switched to GNU/Linux. More specifically,
Nonluoghi Libere Edizioni has been using open source applications
[http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/26/1716257&tid=150&tid=39]
from the very beginning, but PressPeople is a completely different
story.

     This Portuguese publishing company delivers several monthly and
weekly magazines in different formats. Those magazines are devoted to
subjects like cooking, teenage life and society, for example. Each issue
has a circulation of 20,000 copies or more. PressPeople already use
GNU/Linux for all their desktop work except desktop publishing.  Thus,
twenty plus workstations are used for a variety of tasks like writing,
image selection and other editing. They migrated to GNU/Linux with
system integrator Angulo Sólido  [http://angulosolido.pt/], for
stability and cost efficiency reasons.

     A pilot project is running for migrating an existing print workflow
to Scribus [http://www.scribus.net/]. It started with teaching sessions
with end users and then moved on to practical tests with Scribus 1.3.0,
where some issues were found. Gustavo Homem, an Angulo Sólido
representative, says that most of them were related the GUI usability.
He noted PDF exporting capabilities of Scribus have shown no relevant
problems so far.

     As a result an issue list with client priorities and wishes was
produced. After some analysis the system integrator specialists got in
touch with one of the most active Scribus developers, Craig Bradney.