Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedimastert | Hacker News Reader

I've been wanting to make a photography zine of some pictures I've taken over the last couple of years, but I'm at a loss for layout tools. I used inDesign in college, but I'm really not looking to dip back into Adobe, even if it's "only" $20 a month.

Does anyone know some open source layout tools?

View on HN

Check out Affinity Publisher it’s not open source but it is cheap and pay once. Affinity’s tool are also great.

+1 on Affinity Publisher.

But I started with their (excellent) vector app (Design) and followed with Affinity Photo. So I'm sort of an Affinity fan now.

For classical layout, Scribus is fine. For more advanced stuff, Inkscape is really good at geometry and Krita really good at hand-drawing.

If you're familiar with web technology, headless firefox/chromium can export to PDF, following @print and @page rules. There's a bunch of new(er) CSS properties for print usecases. i don't have anything to show yet but i've been delighted trying it out

Do you have a scanner? I think traditional “paste-up” style zines have such a cool hand-made aesthetic. Plus, no licensing fees for a glue stick :)

I use Scribus. It can be rough around the edges, but I've made everything with it (magazines, pamphlet, art books...). https://www.scribus.net/

Depends what you already know. I have had good success producing pdfs with chrome and html, but if you want high-dpi images for print that may or may not work for you.

I would recommend investing the time to learn and publish it in LaTeX (in all seriousness).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com