Evolution of a 100% Free Software-Based Publisher 210
NewsForge (also owned by VA) has a quick and interesting look at the evolution of a 100% free software-based Italian publisher. From the article: "Today, Sovilla acknowledges that choosing a 100% free software workflow complicated his working life. He also notes, however, that a great part of his troubles came from an early start, at a time when programs such as Scribus weren't mature enough yet. Today, he says, the situation has improved considerably, and publishers who are willing to experiment with an alternative software platform can, and should, try it without fear."
Re:There is such a thing as pragmatism... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:There is such a thing as pragmatism... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml [blackfiveservices.co.uk]
Re:GIMP! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GIMP! (Score:4, Informative)
The RIPs (Raster Image Processors) that produce, proofs, film, or plates expect (in many instances require) images to be in the CMYK colorspace (four 8-bit channels). So, lack of robust CMYK support makes the GIMP largely useless in a print production environment.
Re:Scribus & Other Open-Source Software (Score:3, Informative)
Some questions:
Did you use the latest version ?
Define "immature" ?
What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?
I will just point some relevant links:
The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios [scribus.net]. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.
Capabilities: Scribus Specs [scribus.net]
(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories [scribus.net]
Made with Scribus [scribus.net]
Press Reviews [scribus.net]
Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org [libregraphicsmeeting.org] and the open sourcing of Xara [xaraxtreme.org] are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.
Re:GIMP! (Score:4, Informative)
Bottom line is: RGB is additive, ie you start with black and add light to get the mix you want. Paper is reflective and so you start with white sunlight and subtract colours to get the mix you want. Thus cyan absorbs Red, magenta absorbs Green and yellow absorbs Blue - the opposite of RGB. Theoretically you could get black by mixing CMY but in reality making the primary colours accurate enough to do that is impossible and black is added to the system to make things easier.
This all means that there are colours you can see on an RGB monitor which are impossible to show with CMYK (not difficult - impossible) and vice-versa. CMYK is not the ultimate either, due to the same imperfections of the primary colours that make black impossible, and something like 60% of Pantone colours can not be shown using CMYK.
So, converting from RGB to CMYK can be tricky and causes some surprises to the unwary when they get a colour proof back and discover that their nice shade of deep green has come out bluish. Since printing is mostly in CMYK, this means that you need some form of colour management system to warn you if your colours are going "out of gamut" and to automatically adjust others to look right on paper.
TWW
Re:GIMP! (Score:1, Informative)
Incidentally, there's already a gimp plugin to do the cmyk separation, but since all it does is generate layers in those four planes, people discount it as useless, which without the pantone color system, it pretty much is.
But hey, I think the patents are only about $100 or so per-user to license.
Re:It would have been nice (Score:4, Informative)
By way of comparison, I have before me a copy of sed & awk (Dougherty & Robbins, O'Reilly Press, 2nd ed., 1997). It tells me that "Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output."
And that was NINE YEARS ago (though the first edition was in 1990, and I'm guessing it was typeset similarly). If nine years' progress in publishing with free software consists of replacing that stack (and its beautiful output) with OOo, something is very wrong.
Publishers Using Tech (Score:5, Informative)
I know that Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have used LaTeX for every one of their books. They have some home-grown macros to make compiling and checking the example code automatic. This just cannot be done with Word or FrameMaker and is critical for eliminating copy errors.
For papers or books where the content is quite complex
Re:It would have been nice (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nonluoghi.net/Bicicrazia/bici.pdf [nonluoghi.net]
It seems to've been done in OpenOffice.
That said, it's unfortunate that Scribus hasn't followed InDesign and made use of TeX's H&J algorithm.
For those who're curious, I've a similar
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogr
Serif used to be done in TeX and _The Free Software Magazine_ is, as is of course TUGboat.
William
Re:GIMP! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually RGB is a wider gamma than CMYK, any CMYK color can be accurately represented in RGB but not vice-versa.
In the old days, image editing/retouching for print often involved performing operations on specific channels to achieve specific effects (ie adjusting the levels of the magenta channel to remove a color cast in the shadow tones or whatever).
Also, in the old days, your source digital image came from a drum scanner which generally produced a CMYK image.
With increasing acceptance of CCD flat-bed scanners and even digital photography, high end print production is gradually moving to a RGB workflow, at least for image editing/retouching.
Still, every time an image is proofed or printed, it needs to be converted to CMYK. Depending on the environment, this can done by applying a "profile" in Photoshop or many RIPs now support "color management" which is sort of broad term which aims to convert images to the appropriate color space on the fly using device profiles.
As other posters have noted, lack of CMYK support, while a glaring problem, is really just the tip of the iceberg when considering the GIMP for professional use.
Calling this guy a 'Publisher' is stretching it (Score:5, Informative)
There are other publishers using OSS exclusively that deserve the term. For instance T3N [yeebase.com], a regular german magazin on Typo3 [typo3.org] uses the CMS Typo3 as publishing tool. They generate the digital prints by Typo3 driven PDF generation. And the bi-monthly 80 Page magazin - available at every larger Newspaper dealer - , albeight having a slightly 'technical' 2-column layout, is a full-blown professional publication, and not just some fanzine. That's what I call OSS driven publishing.
Oh, and, btw, if your wondering why in heavens name someone would have the wacky idea to publish a magazin on Typo3 like others publish magazines on, let's say, PHP or Java, you might be interested to hear that T3N is just in it's 3rd issue and is growing *fast* and steep in print run volume. That is because in Germany _*EVERYBODY*_ uses Typo3. Everybody. Which is unfortunate for me because I'm trying to make a living in Germany doing web developement and don't like T3 that much.
Re:Publishers Using Tech (Score:3, Informative)
It is also very easy to separate LaTeX documents into chunks which can be written/editted and version controled separatly. When combined into the master document, it is simple to update your TOC, LOF, index, etc. For a multi-author project with occasional outline changes, this is a big thing.
Re:Live, Cinelerra, MainActor (Score:3, Informative)
An alternative to consider would be Blender to 2.42 when it comes out. With the addition of ffmpeg for greater input and output flexibility, and its improved memory handling for video it is now a fairly capable video editor (see documentation on the sequencer).
LetterRip
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Informative)
Many of them even provide their own style packages (noticed that all Springer's books look alike?); see http://www.tug.org/interest.html#publishers [tug.org].
Re:GIMP! (Score:2, Informative)
Anyhow the reason CMYK is important is to correct the individual channel's rather than "tweak and praying" with RGB and hoping it comes out right. Now ideally a colour-profile would correct everything, but often, especially with illustrations it is important that you don't have just a little of one colour coming through. For example a newspaper has the colour dots offset slightly and it's better to have an illustration a slightly different colour, than have little speckles visible because it's not quite the yellow that the printer uses. For photos it is not quite so important, and for web design it is entirely irrelevant.
And that example from User Friendly is stupid since UF is an online cartoon and doesn't need colour correction.