Scribus?
Vordark:
I've had a fair amount of experience with "free" software and am strongly of the opinion that such software is only free if your time has no value.
I'm looking to hear people's experiences with the Scribus DTP software. Do you love it? Do you hate it? How well does it stack up against the well-known commercial packages?
I've used Pagemaker and Quark Express in the past and have a fairly low tolerance for bullshit packages that require dozens of hours just learning the interface. If I download Scribus and try to use it to lay out a game I'm working on, how upset will I be?
Graham W:
It does the job, but it's unintuitive and annoying. I used it to lay out Play Unsafe.
I'd cautiously recommend Serif Page Plus, which you can try out for nothing, and costs 10 dollars.
Graham
Eero Tuovinen:
I wouldn't recommend Scribus - if you're prone to bursts of ranting and fevered sketching about how you'd go about in making a RATIONAL and INTELLIGENT program design (like I am), Scribus is pretty prone to bringing those habits to surface, even more so than QuarkXPress. This might be less severe for people who have acclimatized to the fine differences between Linux and Windows operating interfaces; it's probably much less annoying to use Scribus if you've used many programs that have similar approaches to organizing information and functions.
Then again, technically Scribus has few deal-breaker problems, so I can easily see many audience segments for whom the deal is still good. They might end up installing and re-installing a few times in a search for the current best non-crashing version and they might waste time searching for some functionality that simply doesn't exist in the program, but it's all free when a professional software could cost a thousand euros (depending on location) - it's definitely not a cut and dried issue.
jerry:
I don't use it for books, but that's less to do with Scribus than with the fact that I'm a barbarian who prefers word processing software to any page layout software for larger texts.
Previous to using Scribus (Mac OS X Aqua version) I'd only regularly used PageMaker around 1994-1997, which I loathed; towards the end of that period I actually switched to AppleWorks/ClarisWorks for page layout (its draw module was also page layout) because it was easier to use and actually had one or two key features that PM didn't, so take my experience with a grain of salt. I find Scribus much easier to use than PageMaker of that era; and about as easy or easier to learn than the trial version of InDesign from a few years ago, which I gave up on.
It has hierarchical styles, layers, and automation, and it outputs directly to PDF, so it fills my limited needs for page layout.
The biggest project I use it on is probably the rules cheat sheets for Gods & Monsters. I have a layer of common rules, a layer for each archetype, and a layer for the adventure guide, and a script that automatically generates the PDFs for each player by hiding/showing the appropriate layers.
I also use it for creating custom covers for upload to Lulu, and for distributing character sheets for adventures. That it's also free and available on most platforms is a plus for me, because I distribute the source files online, and it helps that I can distribute these files in software anyone can download. That sounds like it isn't a concern for you.
The main thing it does differently is that it doesn't "bundle" all pieces of the document together in a single file; if you insert an image, for example, it doesn't insert the image into the document file; it just inserts a reference. As a plus, if you update the image, the document also gets the update automatically; as a minus, if you move the image or the document file, the reference gets lost and has to be relinked.
Jerry
David Artman:
Quote from: jerry on May 19, 2009, 06:43:46 AM
it doesn't insert the image into the document file; it just inserts a reference. As a plus, if you update the image, the document also gets the update automatically; as a minus, if you move the image or the document file, the reference gets lost and has to be relinked.
As a quick FYI: that's the *right* way to do it. Embedding an image can make a file so bloated that it won't open, or bogs down your system. That's why, for instance, TIF files have a preview image that's lower resolution: so that DTP applications can insert by reference and yet you can still *sort of* see what the image is and have its size and aspect ratio.
If you look at even lowly Word/OpenOffice, it has "Insert As reference" as a (foolishly NON-default) option when you are inserting a graphic file.
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I find Scribus to be a very impressive tool... for page layout. NOT so much, for full-book design. So if I were doing a very "arty" RPG (or artful RPG components like character sheets, play aides, covers, maps) or something like a magazine, where no two pages have the same basic layout, then I'd grab it and never look back. But trying to do a large, consistently-structured book was more troublesome than it was to do in OpenOffice or FrameMaker.
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