On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Karl Anderson wrote:
> Anyone familiar with the state of layout/publishing apps for Linux?
> I'm looking for Pagemaker/Quark Xpress clones, or roughly similar,
> don't need the latest & greatest. A good word processor would
> probably do.
I don't think there is any oss/free software that is exactly like
Pagemaker/Quark (I believe there's a proprietary one out there at least for
Solaris), but I think that's because of the different development
environment free software/Unix has had compared with MacOS/Win -- instead of
word processing, its text editing; in the old days, digital typesetting (btw
Knuth's new _Digital Typography_ is great!) was done on Unix with
groff/troff etc before dtp killed it. It _is_ harder to make Win/Mac zine
layouts in this kind of environment, but then again you can do things that
Win/MacOS can't. I did a couple zines and chapbooks in TeX/LaTeX and was
very happy with the results -- the hardest part was figuring out how to use
pstools to print it as a booklet. Texinfo or SGML-Tools can also help, but
again it isn't layout so I guess this isn't answering your question -- and
as you mentioned LyX isn't for layout either but you can make some excellent
looking multiple-column newsletters etc. with it, and deal with EPS images
much better than you can with plain TeX.
