publisher drop-in replacement

Phil Bull philbull at gmail.com
Thu Sep 2 15:04:42 UTC 2010


Hi Tom,

On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 12:03 +0000, Tom Davies wrote:
> Scribus sounds fairly perfect for my company's requirements.  They
> seem to love pdf.  I thought people would point me to some sort of
> LaTex tool but i have no idea what LaTex is about.

LaTeX is a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) tool. It's great for
writing scientific papers and that sort of thing, where you have a rigid
style guide to adhere to, but it's difficult to use as a layout tool
like Publisher where you want to use a different layout each time.
(Publisher is a WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, tool.)

Other open source publishing packages include OpenOffice.org Draw (it's
not great for this, though) and Passepartout (which I think is now
unmaintained). Xara LX can do DTP too, although it's not designed for
it. Scribus is probably the best option.

It's also worth noting that any Ubuntu app should be able to create
PDFs, albeit in a limited manner, because you can print to PDF. That's
no substitute for proper PDF support though, which Scribus does have.

> I couldn't find Framemaker, Quark Xpress or Indesign in the fairly
> standard repos (plus Medibuntu) on my Ubuntu system here but Scribus
> was easy to find and the Windows download for it was also easy to
> find.  I think OpenOffice is not quite what people are looking for.
> The Scribus site looks nice too :)

Framemaker, Quark Xpress and Indesign are commercial packages, probably
the most popular ones in the publishing industry.

Also, regarding reading Publisher files, it seems that nothing else
supports them. There are some online services that can convert Publisher
files to other formats for you, but that's about it I'm afraid.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm





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