On Monday 15 June 2009 05:33:47 pm Maur??cio wrote: > I'm curious about Scribus and would like > to ask you: what is the difference of what > I can acchieve with Scribus and what I can > acchieve with TeX, Latex, ConTeXt etc.? > > Thanks, > Maur?cio
I use both. Scribus has distinct advantages and some disadvantages. I use Scribus for book cover creation. I even wrote an e-book on the subject (see below.) For covers Scribus provides layers, transparencies, custom shapes, precise placement of guides, visual placement of graphics objects etc. similar to Gimp. But it operates in CMYK color model and is much easier to use IMO. Text is text and not bitmaps of text. Graphics etc. can be visually placed but precise tweaking of numeric placement values is also available. Exact placement of graphics is much more tedious in TeX. Scribus output formats include PDF 1.5 and PDF X/3. The PDF output range of both TeX and Gimp are more limited. The downside is that the facilities for footnotes, running heads, table of contents, indexing etc. are more primitive or missing altogether. Scribus does not generate pages on the fly, although you can flow text from page to page. For long documents it operates very slowly and generates huge output files. So I do not recommend Scribus for long text heavy documents, although it certainly can be done. Some users have reported file sizes in the 32 mb range. The printed Scribus Manual was created in Scribus and is 439 pages long. But I would have chosen TeX for that job had I been doing it. Because of the very large size of Scribus generated pdfs I was forced to write the e-book referenced below in pdftex to keep the output under 2 mb even though it is graphics heavy and could have been more easily created in Scribus. There are horses for courses. I use pdftex, Scribus, and now and then Gimp for some fancy text tricks, dissolving one image into another via blends etc. I do urge you to jump into the Scribus pool and splash around for a while. There are some excellent free howtos and even ogg vorbis video presentations on the use of Scribus. -- John Culleton Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95 http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html
