On the desktop

Posted on 9 Feb 2007 at 11:28

Ian Wrigley and Simon Brock take a look at desktop open-source software aimed at publishing information in a variety of forms.

For a change this month, we've decided to move away from server software and instead put a few open-source desktop programs through their paces, more specifically programs aimed at people who have to publish information either in print or online. Open-source software doesn't only run on high-end Unix servers you know - it's just as at home on your desktop, be that Mac OS X or Windows XP. Although the screenshots this month have all been taken on a Mac - because that's what we use as our desktop platform of choice - all of the programs we're going to look at will workjust as well on Windows.

The first program we're going to take a look at is Scribus, which is a mammoth undertaking - it's an entire, fully featured open-source desktop publishing (DTP) program that's available for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. It started life in 2001 as a Linux program, and to some extent that still shows. The Mac build, for example, isn't based on the latest Linux version, although it works extremely well. Installation on the Mac is a matter of downloading four files that contain three sets of library framework and the application itself, uncompressing these (oddly, they're tarred, BZIP2'd and then tarred again) and copying the frameworks into the relevant directory. Windows installation is simpler still. One of the frameworks you download is GhostScript, an open-source version of PostScript that the program uses to handle things like rendering PDF files.

Although we're pretty used to being impressed by open-source projects, Scribus blew us away with its range of features. No, it isn't going to replace QuarkXPress or InDesign, but for many people - and certainly for those who just want to lay out a few pages for a newsletter or something similar - it's going to save an awful lot of money. When it first opens, Scribus asks you to either open an existing document or create a new one by specifying things like the page size (from an almost overwhelming multiplicity of choices), orientation, size of margins and so on. Choose a document size, click OK and you'll be presented with a screen that looks similar to what you'd expect in a page-layout program costing several hundred pounds. All the tools you'll need are there for drawing shapes, text frames, image frames and more.

We started by trying to duplicate a page layout Ian had created for a magazine in InDesign last year. Although the learning curve for any complex program like this is going to be fairly steep, within half an hour we had a pretty good approximation of the page, with few significant differences.

One issue we did encounter was that the developers of Scribus are typographical snobs who don't allow "false" bold and italics. This means that if you want a word to be in italics, you must have the italic version of that font installed, as the program won't fake italics for you by simply slanting the regular letter forms. Now Ian will happily admit to being a typographical snob too, but sometimes you really, really do want an approximation of italics in a font for which you either don't own the italic version or no italic version is available. We also found that some fonts we'd installed and which we firmly believed to include an italic version, didn't show that italic version in the font selection dialog box. The Scribus folks say their refusal to allow fake bold and italic is due to the problems it can cause when printing, and that's always a possibility, but it's still a major pain. All other programs allow you to select a word and hit some key combination to choose the bold (or italic) versions, but in Scribus you have to actually select the font version from a pop-up menu.