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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at work. I imagine this could work for that as well.

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.

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I've used LaTeX and pdflatex with very good results, and I'm a total newb.

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.

> Scribus is very serious about PDFs

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.

This is not true. Dont forget PDF is format developed by Adobe. There is no reason Scribus output would be superior. Its probably simply that you are more mindful, experienced, systematic user where adobe gets used by complete amateurs more often who have no idea about output.

I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....

...rummaging around my anecdote drawer...

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.

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