Libre Desktop Publishing
scribus.net
scribus.net
As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up just fine almost 15 years later.
In what format did you embed the Lilypond output? I tried it first as EPS, but the print result was really disappointing because Scribus (at the time at least) rasterised EPS instead of actually embedding the vector graphics.
Could you clarify those middle steps? Or even just name the technologies or formats used. Thank you.
Her biggest complaints: bold/italic, and hitting return in a text box switches back to the default font.
To be fair to her, she's not what you'd call "into tech". Not clueless by long chalk, but not into exploring every inch of a product. I've offered to sit with her and go through some of the issues, but she just stick to her current workflow and bitch about it occasionally. Part of me knows what she feels like. A lot of people never learn vim, bitch about it when they find themselves on a remote server having to edit a long config file in vim, but still never learn vim.
In the case of Scribus, her biggest gripe isn't a bug it's a "WON'T FIX STOP ASKING"
The only time open source really works is where it happens to intersect with some commercial interest.
In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place.
What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades.
For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.
I highly recommend going for the development branch that provides a lot of useful features still missing in the stable branch. And it's quite stable as well. Do frequently save your work, though.
I've moved a student newspaper template from an old InDesign template to scribus several years ago and it worked very well. InDesign had many comfortable tools but it would regularly crash our old machines and the volunteers working for the paper could't use it on the go on their private computers.
Scribus was easy to install, ran also on Linux, had a lower impact on the machine's performance (or it would crash before the machine, so save frequently :) )
The nearest equivalent I can see is LibreOffice.
PDF is NOT a digital-native format.
For a start, PDF was designed as a way to digitally send documents in print-ready form with embedded fonts and, in the case of PDF/X, other prepress-specific requirements. I get it may seem like I'm using "digitally" there as a mere technicality because the indented output is still physical print, but this is a computing-era solution to a computing-era problem.
Less pedantically, though, I'm pretty sure that in 2022 a lot of PDFs are never printed, but are just viewed on-screen. They allow "print-like" typesetting and layout, but they're still being not just produced digitally but consumed digitally. Both my A/V receiver and my car have huge manuals that are delivered as PDFs, but I doubt either NAD and Honda are intending me to fire up the old laser printer to read 'em, right? (I don't think either one is even a standard printer page size.)
Furthermore, the OP specifically mentioned accessibility! Accessible PDFs are absolutely a digital-native thing, since what makes PDFs accessible includes features like document structure tags, fully searchable text, interactive form fields, navigational aids, and alternative text image descriptions.
In that situation, digital accessibility in PDFs is hugely important, even just little things like having your contents page actually link to the other pages in a document.
> while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic
I could see LaTeX but with tweaking in Inkscape being useful for posters and flyers.
It may not have the bells, whistles, and polish of a multi-million dollar commercial effort, but if you can't use a software like Scribus without getting angry and annoyed, then computers are probably not for you.
This is a bit like when young people express wide-eyed astonishment that bookmarks were physical objects.
"Publishing" tells you what you need to know if you know that the word as used in the internet era is a slight repurposing of a word which has a distinct pre-internet meaning.
More specifically, "Desktop Publishing" is a late 1970s, early 1980s term for packages that made it possible to do any kind of controlled-layout publishing from a computer at all.
Publishing used to be a multi-person job where layout, typesetting, and multiple other tasks where done on dedicated workspaces by seperate people.
Desktop-publishing is really that: being able to do it on the top of a single desk (as a single person).
Man, I kinda want to setup one of those giant touch screen tables and some sort of AR hybrid. Pretend I'm doing it the old way but with none of the downsides.
Sweeping scissors pantomime and minority report motions. Blank pieces of paper with different content projected unto them by... lasers, dependent on where on the table they happen to land.
Glue sticks that are actually remote control knobs.
Other tools that can print don't often offer all of these features, or if they do they don't provide as much control over them.
Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded backgrounds for readability and emphasis.
Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images were a pain without it.
Basically print, with a mixture of text and images.
Notably this including things like adjusting the spacing on a particular line in order to prevent a line break, hyphenation, word wrap, or even creeping on to another page. It's not just about setting fonts and margins, but goes deeper than that.
We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
But Scribus is very serious about PDFs: https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/
> Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification.
No idea what that is but might be worth checking out.
This is its killer feature! I've had compliments from multiple pro printers regarding my print PDFs produced with Scribus. Even though most usual PDF pipelines are Adobe based, Scribus PDF files are superior.
Back in the day I heard tell of someone who did their thesis on a Macintosh (this was back when they were still Macintoshes).
Nothing to note on the surface, but the person used the program MacDraw to author it.
Why there is no Visual Page Layout tool, which allows to layout empty boxes to page template visually and then "pour" stream of text to these boxes which will be break to lines & pages (boxes) with TeX algorithm? It looks like perfect combination of visual layout (which is much easier than TeX/LaTeX tools if you need magazine-style irregular layout) and TeX perfect typography.
I've tried Scribus when I was in charge of technical part of one samyzdat magazine, and it was good in layout and absolute nightmare in putting text in this layout. To be honest, it was something like 15 years ago. On the other hand, news on this site says about new text layout engine in branch 1.5 (year 2016!) and stable branch is still 1.4 (latest release in 2019). As far as I remember, I've tried version 1.3.x. Many-many years ago :-(
Posters, pamflets, booklets, books, magazines, etc. Early web publishing was actually desktop publishing software adapted to the web. I remember dealing with web designs that were done in photoshop where our job was converting those layouts into frame and table based implementations. That's why CSS is such a convoluted mess. It tried to bridge the gap and confronted web designers targeting screens with units that make a lot more sense for print than they do for the a screen with dimensions measured in pixels.
Until CSS, em, rem, etc. were not things that people designing graphical user interfaces concerned themselves with a lot. Unless they were creating desktop publishing software. Likewise notions of padding and margins are of course lifted straight from that world as well. The notions that they can go negative (!!) and can be set to "auto" were hacks to deal with the fact that screens don't have fixed dimensions that you can plan for, unlike paper. Likewise, absolute and relative positioning were hacks as a well. People still use that stuff but it leads to very brittle hard to maintain layouts. The subtle implementation differences between browsers make this even harder.
Of course, despite being rooted in this stuff, CSS is not actually that commonly used for print. You can do print with CSS and people have done so but it's just not that widely used for print and probably a far too limited for professionals working in that space.
I find it interesting that I had never even heard of Scribus. That's how niche this stuff has become. Unless you really need something like it, you'll never come across it. I don't think I've used anything like it in close to 20 years. I wrote my Ph D. thesis in Adobe Framemaker. That was a mistake as that particular version is now a combination of obsolete and obscure, which means I can no longer open the files I created. I'd probably need an emulator and the exact version of the software I used at the time. Luckily, I have a pdf and no actual need/desire to actually revise the text.
Has it improved recently or is it much of a muchness with its 2018(ish) incarnation?
I have always found it very easy to use, but I spend years at a job where I wrangled Quark and PageMaker as part of my job; it felt very familiar and comfortable.