One thing I love to do is make various little books of my artwork, and sometimes t-shirts or other silkscreening. It is relatively inexpensive to make small runs of books that can often pass for high quality printing with careful photocopying, and perfect binding. I looked and looked for some program that filled my needs, and didn't cost thousands of dollars like Quark, Photoshop, or InDesign running on a Mac. That left me with Linux on a cheap computer. While searching for some desktop publishing software, I encountered several possibilities. What follows are highly biased and inflammatory reviews of them:
These are all far out of my tax bracket, especially since my gas bill, for instance, just DOUBLED recently, so the following comments are based on guide books that I borrowed from the library, plus vague recollections from using Quark at art school in the mid 1990s. Practically all of the alleged design pros use these programs. Hey, if you've got the money, why the hell not?
Adobe InDesign
www.adobe.com/products/indesign/
Weighing in at $699, not to mention the money needed for the operating system and Mac hardware, this program demonstrates
what can be acomplished with an appropriate budget. Featuring an easily expandable, modular design, it looks fairly easy
for developers to add on all kinds of useful things.
Adobe Pagemaker
www.adobe.com/products/pagemaker/
Formerly Aldus Pagemaker, until Adobe aquired it. Most development is being done on InDesign. PageMaker seems
to always have been marketed mainly toward Windows users, and catty graphic designers the world over may scoff
at using such non-mac programs. In any case, development is basically over now.
QuarkXPress
www.quark.com/products/xpress/
Features a fairly uncluttered user interface, ....
Ovation Pro
pilling.users.netlink.co.uk/ovationpro.html
For Risc and Windows
2005: only £100 (£60 for windows). I don't even know what Risc is, so moving on..
PageStream
www.grasshopperllc.com
PageStream is slightly out of my starving artist price range. It is currently $100 for the standard release,
and $150 for the professional release, or the free Demo version, which demos the standard version, but you can't
save files. It has lots of neat features such as recordable scripting. You can specify
all kinds of other things, like per object overprint, and trapping parameters.
The interface is more or less reasonable, and screen refreshing is, well,
refreshing. On the whole, it looks like a very nice program. PageStream has been around a really
long time, and is available for Linux, Mac, Windows, and Amiga!!
Passepartout (pronounced pus-par-too)
www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout
Passepartout in its current incarnation (0.6) only puts things together. You cannot edit text on the fly, for instance.
You have to make all your text in XML format. What good is that?! I'm an artist, dammit! What do I care for
international mark-up language conventions? <rant> Computers and software should behave in service to artists,
and not the other way around! </rant> Anyway, for quick projects, this program is great. It is easy to use,
even with the trouble of manually formating text in XML. Plus you can output postscript or PDF.
There is a plugin to convert Abiword text to a form that Passepartout can use, which is handy.
Another nice feature in this program is a very nice font previewer, which displays a big list of the name of the
font in the font as well as the file name and the Postscript name. For the minimal options presented to the user,
this program does a great job. Passepartout files are very simple, so it is easy to create little external
scripts to take a bunch of images,
and throw them all together into passepartout files, and print from there. One remarkable feature of this
program is the Help->Inspiration option, which allows you to play a little game of worms, if your workload
drags you down. Other programs can learn from this very useful feature. It is very important for software
to inspire the proper work ethic, which the inspiration feature does admirably.
OpenOffice.org
openoffice.org
Sun's OpenOffice, the descendent of StarOffice is a great replacement for Microsoft Office. There
are many components to OpenOffice, among them a
word processor, formula maker, paint program, and more. All the components have a consistent interface. It does take easily
twice as long as any other program I use to start up. OpenOffice provides all kinds of features, and in so
doing suffers a little bit from the syndrome of feature bloat, sacrificing efficiency for lots of fluffy doo-dads.
Thus, it is a natural
open source replacement for Microsoft Office. To be fair, on the whole it is
quite capable, but certainly not for older systems. oowriter has text on a line, pdf export, a kind of
drag and drop scrapbook, and many more features that really do come in handy. Apparently lacking (maybe its
buried in there somewhere) are page layout systems other than single pages or left/right pages. Not sure about
linked text boxes either..
Kword
www.koffice.org/kword
Kword is more a generic word processor, and is a part of the KDE office suite.
The interface is pretty straightforward. It is not designed for text wrapping
around and within complex shapes, and you cannot rotate whatever you put down. Plus laying down images is a little
troublesome, because there is not an obvious way to insert an image at its intended dpi. Otherwise, Kword is
relatively crash-free, not too feature overrun, the screen updating is good enough. It is quite well suited
for simple reports, letters, and such.
Xara Xtreme
www.xaraxtreme.com
Xara Xtreme looks to be a really snappy vector art creation program. It is in the process of being
ported to Linux under the GPL. The programmers boast of rendering 5 times faster than anything else
out there, but we'll see after it gets fully ported. It is currently (November 2005) available for
Windows for $75, and the current linux version can only preview files. Xara features very nice
gradient and feathering capabilities that no other program has. It is a breath of fresh air to
look at them. It seems the Xara people and the Inkscape people will be collaborating to make some
really kick ass software. They decided to go open source in response to Adobe (makers of Photoshop,
Acrobat, the Postscript language and PDF, and whose programs are rather gargantuan) swallowing up Macromedia
(the makers of flash), feeling that the open source community and Linux will help make software that far
surpasses the purely proprietary alternatives.
Inkscape (and its predecessor Sodipodi)
www.inkscape.org
sodipodi.sourceforge.net
If either of these programs had wrapping text frames and a multipage spread editor, my foray into
programming Laidout would have been all over before it began.
Really if I had sense, I'd just work on getting
such features included, but its too late now! For those who don't know, several sodipodi developers forked
from SodiPodi a few years ago, feeling some impatience with the speed and direction of development of SodiPodi.
Inkscape specifically aims to be a faithful implementation of the Scalable Vector Graphics specification,
(the current spec does not allow for multiple pages, the bastards).
Sodipodi (for which development seems to be just about stopped) aimed at being a small but powerful
vector graphics editor, capable of running on wimpy computers. For that, it succeeds quite admirably.
For instance, the installed size of the Debian inkscape package is 17M (the executable is about 5M),
whereas the Sodipodi package is only a little
over 3M, and the executable is just a little over 1M! I find Sodipodi a little faster, I suppose owing
to its being written in C rather than C++, and is generally a little more streamlined.
What might tip one toward Inkscape is text on a line,
future animation capabilities, an interface with lots of sugar, and very active developement. Fancy,
innovative new features popup with every passing month, it seems. With Xara opening up, look for
Inkscape to become quite phenominal. Room for improvement: printing! my god it shouldn't be that
hard to configure where and how you print things!! no multipage editor, though the SVG 1.2 spec includes
multipage capability, so it will be fair game for Inkscape soon.. Exciting feature: cloning
in any of the 17 two dimensional crystallographic groups (think Escher)!
Holy cow, who else does that? BUT Inkscape currently
does not allow previewing of the repeating cells, thus requiring a lot of guess work in the manner of: "tile 3 this way
and 2 this way, rotate 36 each iteration, uh uh?" Still a very commendable feature.
TeX/LaTeX/LyX
TeX: www.tug.org
Lyx: www.lyx.org
While I glossed over TeX for a long time, I ultimately stumbled on the book Digital Typography by TeX's creator
Donald Knuth. This book collected several articles and essays by Knuth about his TeX and Metafont systems, which
really shocked me for their depth, elegance, and adaptibility. Really I should have known better than to simply
dismiss the command line, but being an artist can do that to a person. The legend goes that Knuth needed a system
to typeset his complicated math books, particularly his ever expanding tome The Art of Computer Programming, so he and
his assistants simply spent
years and years (roughly 1978-1995) developing TeX and Metafont just for that purpose.
To do this, he researched quite indepth how
traditional designers and typesetters did things, and adapted many of those methods to the emerging technology of the
computer. A variant of his line breaking algorithm has even now gotten into the commercial world via Adobe's InDesign!
However impressive it is, WYSIWYG it ain't. To become proficient, prepare to spend enormous amounts of time learning
the syntax of TeX, or LaTeX. They take code in plain text files which controls the typesetting.
There is a somewhat visually oriented interface to LaTeX called LyX, and rumors of another
one called Texlite. All of these things
are geared more for text and math-text dominant projects, where the precise manual positioning of graphics and such
are not needed. Impressive programming, wonderful for what it was designed for, but not so hot
for graphics intensive projects. It should go without saying that Donald Knuth is, after all, a computer scientist.
Scribus
www.scribus.net
The Scribus website and the Scribus wiki have many useful links on the subject of desktop publishing, and keeps
abreast of other desktop publishing news, which is handy. Scribus has many things to recommend it.
It is perhaps the longest running and most udpated DTP software project in the open source world.
It is Python scriptable, which is very convenient, as is Scribus' PDF capabilities,
story editor, color profile management (one of the very few open source programs
to have color profile integration), and font manangement. The color wheel in Scribus very cleverly
allows previewing, even for various types of color blind people! How cool is that?!
Each release gets better and better. There is
a wide user base, active development with a long list of feature requests and bug fixes.
However, as a starving artist when I began writing Laidout years ago, I had a really
cheap computer, and Scribus running on Qt was always very slow on my system.
My major complaint is that the interface was not well suited toward efficient design work.
There is only minimal facility for
spread editing. There is no option to do such simple page dispositioning as printing out your
pages to be in a foldable booklet form, which is extremely unfortunate in this era of
photocopiers and zines.
Also, objects with strange outlines are a bit of a chore to edit easily.
For instance, if you want to edit the shape of
some frame, you must double click on it to enter a special edit mode, then
also have selected one of the many different
types of node settings like straight tangents, or non-straight and non-equal tangents, and you can
move only control points OR nodes! To speedily edit
shapes, which I do constantly, one should not have to move away from the thing one
is editing to find a button somewhere, then move all the way back to what
one is editing to make the changes. I imagine the configurable keyboard shortcuts would
somewhat mediate that problem.
Fix those things (assuming they are not quirks in my Qt setup, or my lack of experience with the program), and
Scribus will be a rather nice program. Stay tuned.
None of these programs do everything that I want, though Inkscape is fine for single page, non text heavy vector graphics. For page layout, Passepartout is fine for small stuff, and Scribus is fine for certain kinds of larger stuff. Often if they do what I want, they don't do them the way I want them done. Bits and pieces of all of them are quite nice, but never all in the same place. Either I just didn't want to figure out how to configure my system to run these programs right, or I just didn't want to read the f'ing manual, in any case I decided none of the word processing and desktop publishing programs I could find really satisfied my somewhat picky technical and aesthetic requirements for not only the final product but also the method of work. I frequently use Inkscape and Passepartout for various little tasks, but more is needed. Application diversity is a good thing anyhow. I would try to program for Inkscape, but I have zero experience with Gtk/Gtkmm. Things change, though. I am all for porting the more unique aspects of Laidout to other programs, particularly the spread editor. That will HAVE to be ported to Inkscape sooner or later, since the proposed SVG 1.2 specification makes multipage documents possible, making it fair game for Inkscape.
Any self respecting desktop publishing software will have these characteristics (they are not all yet implemented in my Laidout program, though!!):