On Tue, 2012-02-28 at 21:43 +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:

With Scribus you get an nice GUI, with ConTeXt you get every thing else that really matters for a typesetting job.

Regards, Khaled

Hey Khaled. That is kind of a given, but thanks anyways. -- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com

Am 2012-02-28 um 21:20 schrieb Jaroslav Hajtmar:

Hello, I work quite often with Scribus (but I am not expert). I use it mainly to leaflets, posters (great tools for posters for me) and other similar things that contain a lot of graphics, overlays, etc. I can imagine writing a small magazine with lots of images, etc. For extensive work (thesis and large documents with a large majority of the text) in the Scribus current version can not imagine it. Those who can not nothing in TeX or ConTeXt Scribus is an interesting option. It's clickable tool that allows to one who does not understand typography and not feeling for it do make a nice shit. Typography expert can produce very nice documents. Or also, someone who has a great feel for typography. Scribus is developing quite quickly and quite well with developers trying to improve it. For some time it will definitely be a tool that can tread on the heels of InDesign

But it still lacks a lot of essential features for professional work (at least in my area), e.g. usable master pages and nondestructional import of vector graphics (esp. PDF), CMYK and spot colors. Correct me if it gained these lastly - I know they're working on it, but the development speed is much much slower than ConTeXt’s. Maybe it’s more stable and reliable therefore... Scribus has at least one feature that sets it ahead of InDesign (besides being Open Source): render frames (similar functionality as ConTeX’s filter module - replace foreign sourcecode by its result). Greetlings, Hraban

On Tue, 2012-02-28 at 21:20 +0100, Jaroslav Hajtmar wrote:

Hello, I work quite often with Scribus (but I am not expert). I use it mainly to leaflets, posters (great tools for posters for me) and other similar things that contain a lot of graphics, overlays, etc. I can imagine writing a small magazine with lots of images, etc. For extensive work (thesis and large documents with a large majority of the text) in the Scribus current version can not imagine it. Those who can not nothing in TeX or ConTeXt Scribus is an interesting option. It's clickable tool that allows to one who does not understand typography and not feeling for it do make a nice shit. Typography expert can produce very nice documents. Or also, someone who has a great feel for typography. Scribus is developing quite quickly and quite well with developers trying to improve it. For some time it will definitely be a tool that can tread on the heels of InDesign

Jaroslav Hajtmar

Thanks Jaroslav. That was comprehensive. -- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com

William Adams writes:

With a graphical tool, one is limited to the automation which the developers are willing to build into the tool and sentenced to handling manually _everything_ else, _every_ time that there's a change, e.g., if you have a keyword block on your opening article pages aligned against the outside gutter and the layout program can't place it automatically and contextually, then _every_ time the article changes from opening to a left to a right or vice-versa one has to make that change manually. [...]

This is the best comparison I've seen in ages. Thanks for this. It was a delight to read. -- Marco

2012/2/29 William Adams :

I wrote up a longer comparison once upon a time --- Scribus isn't that much different from InDesign and Quark, so the criticism holds:

wikify please! Best Martin

On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 20:40 +0100, Marco Pessotto wrote:

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and_other_typesetti...

(But it's not linked from anywhere)

Thanks Marco. -- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com

On Feb 29, 2012, at 2:30 PM, Martin Schröder wrote:

wikify please!

Thanks! I'm flattered everyone enjoyed it. To properly frame the context of the original post it was written back in 2006: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/msg/36401bceced0ee9a?dmode=sour... when I was using Quark 6 and InDesign CS. Worth going back and reading the original just to see David Kastrup's post which engendered it. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Am 29. Februar 2012 21:10 schrieb Kip Warner :

One other thing too that I don't know if anyone has ever raised anywhere is that other typesetting applications that store their project files in some kind of proprietary or binary format will probably not be very diff friendly. A big advantage to anything TeXish is that it makes collaboration on a large document much easier because it can be typeset using plaintext documents.

At least InDesign's and Scribus' files have a XML representation and would be diffable/versionable in that format. InDesign's XML format is widely used e.g. in editorial systems; you can also save just snippets (layout parts). I'd like to add that the mentioned GUI programs all are scriptable - Scribus in Python (AFAIK), InDesign in JavaScript or AppleScript; don't know about the current state of XPress, in old versions on the Mac it supported Frontier, then AppleScript. I've some experience in remote controlling ID by Python appscript (i.e. sending AppleScript events from Python); it works, but is not very reliable, mostly due to missing/wrong documentation on Adobe's side and quirks of AppleScript. Scripting TeX is much easier; I still seldom use Lua, but write ConTeXt sources from Python scripts. Greetlings, Hraban

On Feb 29, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

I'd like to add that the mentioned GUI programs all are scriptable - Scribus in Python (AFAIK), InDesign in JavaScript or AppleScript; don't know about the current state of XPress, in old versions on the Mac it supported Frontier, then AppleScript.

As I noted, the oars are customizable. Unfortunately, there aren't many hooks in InDesign (and none I'm aware of in Quark) to activate scripts automatically, so that a document will build itself --- one which is pretty cool is Dirk Becker's auto-indexing script which will run a script to format index entries (so as to make up for InDesign's inability to capture character styles in index entries). Even more egregious is that many features in Quark are specifically prohibited from being scripted (last I checked), requiring one to use interface events. Moreover, as was recently noted on the InDesign mailing list, long document support in InDesign is sorely lacking (the new span columns feature trumps keep specifications for minimum number lines in a paragraph for example, and it's all-too easy to have an index in a book be too large to be generated by InDesign in one pass, requiring one to do it in sections, then use a script or a specialty indexing program to merge the sub-indices. Lastly, AIUI InDesign's (and probably Quark's) licensing prohibits remote usage from a server unless one purchases the Server version. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

On Mar 1, 2012, at 11:15 AM, Martin Schröder wrote:

May I suggest you contact our sales agent: http://www.priint.net/en/ - if you truely want to do Database Publishing with InDesign. :-)

Naturally, the rules change if one is using InDesign CS Server --- we have a license and use it and some other proprietary plug-ins (the company bought XMPie) --- we truly do database publishing with InDesign (and other tools), but that's not something of interest to the typical user --- kind of like all those old discussions where people would state all of TeX's awkward aspects are addressed in 3B2. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 11:29 -0500, William Adams wrote:

With a graphical tool, one is limited to the automation which the developers are willing to build into the tool and sentenced to handling manually _everything_ else, _every_ time that there's a change, e.g., if you have a keyword block on your opening article pages aligned against the outside gutter and the layout program can't place it automatically and contextually, then _every_ time the article changes from opening to a left to a right or vice-versa one has to make that change manually.

I wrote up a longer comparison once upon a time --- Scribus isn't that much different from InDesign and Quark, so the criticism holds:

While I'm no TeX wizard, I prefer it because it allows one to off-load some of the tedium and repetitiveness to the computer, as opposed to repeatedly solving variations of the same problems by hand time after time after time.

So,

Superb coverage Will and I appreciate the philosophical approach. I think Hans et al should maybe consider adding your description to the wiki somewhere suitable. -- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:29:30 -0500 William Adams wrote:

So,

I can just picture Hans beating the drum and Taco wielding the whip! Alan