Fourteen people made it to the March meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the first Monday of the month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute's Library, Room 146, from 7 to 9 PM. Ed Lawson made a great presentation on Scribus the Open Source desktop publishing package for Linux, OS X and Windows.
I started the meeting at 7 PM with the usual announcements about where to find out more about the group, upcoming and related events. Ben Scott was heckled as he offered copies of Fedora 8 DVD and LiveCD. Bruce Dawson brought along an OLPC that was passed around and admired by many. A call for topics was put out: anyone with ideas for a topic they'd like to see should contact me. Mark made a suggestion that he'd like to have some discussion on an Exchange replacement - not one with all the bells and whistles (shared calendars and folders, etc.), but just a mail server and several folks had opinions about that. I'd like to know if we have an "expert" in sound willing to give a presentation and sort out the OSS, ALSA, esd, PulseAudio, I-don't-know-what acronyms that makes setting up simple (or not so simple) sound -- and keeping the sound working! -- such a frustrating experience. If others have ideas for presentations, don't hesitate to speak up! Ed presented a fine tour of Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/), starting with a new install and configuring it for American ("imperial") measurements rather than European/global ("metric") settings. He created a blank document and showed how to use the story editor to add text and create and apply styles to the document. We talked about styles local to the document, kept in templates, and stored in stylesheets. We talked about some of the common issues with creating a layout, and looked through the included help file/ manual and the online wiki (http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Main_Page -- MediaWiki, btw) for some information on linking textboxes together for automated flow, and found there was an icon on the toolbar, of two textboxes with an arrow between them -- who would have guessed? Ed showed off a newspaper template for the Southern Maine Sea Kayaking Network, replacing an earlier attempt by another member to create a consistently-styled document in Word. He talked about the ability to generate PDFs, and specifically online PDF forms: forms that can be filled out on a web server to submit the data to the server, while maintaining the appearance of a PDF. He emphasized the Scribus was intended for publishing not only with local laser printers, but producing the high-end files that could be sent out to industrial printers, with all the features of CMYK separations and other features the high-end (4000 dpi+) printers could support. He cautioned that fonts that might look good on a 100dpi LCD display could turn out to be unsatisfactory for high-end printing, and that you'd want to do some research and preparation to ensure you were producing a high-resolution document (another example was that photos are much better in TIFF than a lossy format like JPG). Several people had questions or comments or observations (import from OpenOffice.org documents seems supported; there's a close relationship between OO.o, Inkscape and Scribus that make them a good toolset, questions on Postscript, "can you do this?" questions) that made this the most well-attended and interesting presentation so far this year. Thanks to Ed for his well-prepared presentation and for providing the projector, and thanks to the New Hampshire Technical Institute for providing the facilities. Next month, we hope to be able to twist someone's arm to present InkScape; stay tuned. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
