John Beardmore wrote: > While Scribus has shortcomings, the community seems to be actively > overcoming these, and even 1.3.3.x seem to be less buggy and crash prone > than Pagemaker and InDesign. > > I don't know about that ... I've found InDesign CS 3 is pretty solid for general tasks. QuarkXPress 7, on the other hand, is on par with or only slightly better than Scribus in stability and about AU$1500 ( or a factor of 1:? ) more expensive. (Quark rip people in Australia off particularly terribly; their prices here are half again to twice the US price even once exchange rates are factored in, and if you buy direct from the US they won't do *any* support etc).
Additionally, version 7.3 still has bugs that make it impossible to print on some Mac systems without users manually hacking PPD files or printing through a non-Apple CUPS server. It also *loves* to corrupt the Mac OS X font cache when it crashes (even when the machine running Quark has nothing but Adobe OTF Collection fonts), and not infrequently generates bad PostScript that leaves printers with genuine Adobe PS 3 RIPs needing a manual job cancel. Oh, and it relatively frequently (usually a job or two a week) generates incorrect PostScript and PDF output that doesn't match what's on screen. Yay. At least with Scribus, I can get in and fix issues myself if I really feel the need. Sure, it's time consuming, difficult, and frustrating, but I can do it if I really have to. With Quark, I just have to go beg on the forums and (sometimes) see their responses demonstrate a total lack of understanding of things like, say, how Mac OS X (CUPS) printing is designed to work. Given the nature of some of the Quark bugs that just *won't* *go* *away* the notion of something I can fix myself becomes more appealing all the time. There are still too many feature and performance limitations for it to be a real option in my work, but I'm keeping my eye on the possibility for the future. By the way, do any of the Mac OS X folks here know of a way to get Mac OS X to cope with a shared CUPS raw queue? Mac OS X seems to choke on such queues if the user tries to select them, reporting a series of errors about missing PPD files. It seems to be a limitation of the Mac printing APIs layered over CUPS, as the Mac's CUPS server its self is perfectly happy with raw queues (though it provides no way to create them without using the web UI). I'm puzzled that apps like Quark and InDesign, which generate their own PostScript anyway and handle the printer's PPD themselves, can't be used with a CUPS raw queue under Mac OS X. -- Craig Ringer
