> On the newspaper, take your cues from those already available and > improve upon those things you think could be better.
I'm responsable for a paper that runs on MacOS 9 boxes with QuarkXPress 4, and I can tell you for sure that that's definitely not problem free. Nothing is in IT, especially it seems in prepress/print. Scribus + Linux will no doubt be a similar situation (OK, infinitely less crap OS, and Scribus is much less "mature" but in many ways nicer than Quark, but it'll still break in real world use because everything does.) My attitude is: Be prepared for problems, leave plenty of time for testing, and you should be alright. Hell, /expect/ problems. Never do something first time for production use, because if you do it probably won't work (just one of those things). We've currently got Quark crashing whenever we try to print documents with placed PDFs - it suddenly started happening on all 6 workstations, with most PDFs. *sigh*. Quark support says "we don't know, and why are you using that old version <hint hint> anyway". The moral of the story: commercial doesn't always better support, since they may have their own priorities. Oh, and make sure you have good quality fonts. There's nothing more infuriating to debug than problems caused by dodgy fonts (OK, maybe subtle network issues, but it's a close call). WRT to Scribus - I presume you've used it for a while personally and made sure it does what you need, is stable in your environment, etc? If so, then cool - have fun :-) I'm tracking Scribus development, and would love to try it out on an ad workstation some time. We've got a significant LTSP deployment, and being able to use Scribus on those boxes would rock. I don't know if you folk have thought about this issue, but the combination of Scribus, a seriously grunty server (like our dual xeon 2.4 with 2 gigs of ram) and LTSP clients has a lot of potential for things like ad workstations at newspapers. /Especially/ with the ability to import OO.o documents with intact formatting (at least text formatting like bold etc, if not tables and such). Even without that, though, it's a pretty earth-shaking idea for someone in a (small-ish) paper. Need a new workstation? 5 minutes later, the new LTSP box is up and running. With 10/100 e/net it'd be easily responsive enough, I use the GIMP over remote X on a netbooted P133 regularly. One of the things I'm focusing on is testing Scribus over remote X11, and that's the main reason. I'd like to be able to contribute more in terms of testing, docs, etc but so far am running in to time issues. Craig Ringer
