Re: Desktop Publishing.

[Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au>]

>                Just need to know if anyone is doing DTP with Debian and
> what they recommend using.
>
> My wife has a home based business and I would like to create some
> flyers, tri-fold pamplets and such for here. So ideally it has to be
> easy for her to use, but if not I'll do all the work! 

Have you had any luck here?  I am interested in desktop publishing
applications too.

I have done some searching myself and here is what I have found so far:

xfig:
	This is a great package for vector graphics.  Its graphical user
interface is a little old fashioned, but it does the job and is a stable,
good quality package.  I have been using it for years for some things and
been quite satisfied.  However it is not a fully fledged desktop
publishing package like Adobe Pagemaker say.  It is slowly moving in that
direction however.  You can now incorporate bitmap files into a document.
And they now also have image librarys that you can use for loading common
images into your document without having to draw them yourself.  The main
negative in my view with xfig is that I don't think it deals with text all
that well.

tgif:
	Similar in some ways to xfig.  The interface doesn't seem quite so
nice.  I have only had a brief play with it so I don't know how powerful
it is.

sketch:
	Have a look at:
http://www.online.de/home/sketch
It looks fairly promising.  Though I haven't tried it myself.  The user
interface looks great and the potential power of the package looks
promising.

Axene Illustrator:
	This is a commercial desktop publishing package for (among others)
linux.  It looks quite good and only costs US$25 for a licence.  This
could be your best option?????

StarOffice:
	This is another comercial package (though free for non-comercial
use).  It is a suite of programs.  It seems fairly good and well
integrated.  This is sort of the "Windows suite of software when you're
not running windows".  One of the programs in the suite is StarDraw -- not
quite a complete desktop publishing program, but not too far off -- it
might be enough for what your wife wants.  This also could be your best
option????

Others:
	I did stumble on a few other (free) programs which looked like
they might have promise in the future, but were a long way from being
there.  Also, there was one other one I read something about recently, but
I've lost the reference to it.


Well, that's what I know about it.  I'd appreciate hearing about what
you've found so we can compare notes.

Cheers,

Mark.



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