Desktop Publishing

[A. Jorge Garcia]

My wife is quitting her job and going whole hog into Personal Histories. For this I have to retool her home office to publish these personal histories from soup to nuts.

Rather than investing in more bloated M$ apps, I was going to get her to use KNOPPIX!

So, my question is, does KNOPPIX have everything we need, or most of what we need, the rest we could download onto a knx-hdinstalled PC?

For example, I know that The Gimp is like Adobe PhotoShop and is already included in the KNOPPIX CD. What about stuff like Adobe Pagemaker or Quark Express or Adobe Acrobat?

Anyone out there familiar with the publishing industry, I'd REALLY appreciate your input as I'll be the tech advisor on this venture.

She will do all the business end of lining-up and interviewing clients (10 hours or so on mp3 player/recorder) and writing. I will do all the transcribing, desktop publishing, scanning of pictures and layout. We have to get to the point where each book is ready for a bindery.

BTW, if anyone can suggest a good bindery, I'd REALLY appreciate that too!

TIA,

[rickenbacherus]

This might be of some help.
http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/

[MattT]

The latest OpenOffice 1.1Beta has some nice new fetures that will help with publishing. For example PDF exporting. Here is from their page:

"Import/export formats such as PDF, Macromedia Flash, DocBook, several PDA Office file formats, flat XML and XHTML"

If you do a hd-install I would definitely check it out.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK it looks like what we need is Desktop Publishing and Typesetting software.

As for Typesetting, I see that KNOPPIX has LyX and teTeX on the CD. I thought that LyX and KLyX work with LaTeX, but LaTeX is not on the CD (neither is KLyX, BTW).

I'm wondering if anyone out there has had any experience using LyX with teTeX and what success you have had (with and without KNOPPIX)?

TIA,

[eadz]

While there are powerful software such as LaTex for publishing, I would reccomend using openoffice to start with. For starters, If you decide to go back to windows, OO is there.

I'm not sure what _sort_ of publishing your wife is planning on doing, but I would reccomend writing in OO, i.e. get it to the final copy. Then once all the text is there, you could format it in LyX or similar. Although I think OO is pretty powerful under the hood.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Thanx for your input! You've just confirmed my thinking on this. Believe it or not, that's exactly what I just told her.

Getting her to switch from M$ WINDOZE OFFICE to KNOPPIX OO is hard enough, making her switch to TeX straight away - forget about it! Anyway, she's going to handle the OO and I'll handle the LyX.

Regards,

[besonen]

http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/

[Rono64]

Hello to all, I am a former Mac Addict (I used to love Macs) then along came OS X... an ok OS, but frankly the learning curve taught me UNIX, which in turn led me to LINUX, well the rest is history, I made it my mission to replace everything I do on a mac in linux. I work for a publishing comapny and I am almost fully switched over, for a while I used mandrake on a PPC, but it is buggy on a mac, so I loaded Knoppix onto an old (really old) i686 and boom everything I need.
Here is a list of what is needed.
Photoshop = The Gimp/Kooka
Illustrator = Sketch/Karbon14/Scribus
Indesign/Quark= Scribus

And that's it... Scribus lets me create a PDF which I can send off to the printers and it's ready to go.

My biggest complaints, fonts, but I need to learn how to add fonts, I have about 3000 mac postscript and truetype fonts, I am sure there is a way to do it, I just need to learn. Also Barcode creation, there are several options, again I need to learn the installs etc. So if you really want to do it... linux more than measures up.
now if Knoppix ever ported to a PPC, I could use all these old Macs I have.

[aay]

And that's it... Scribus lets me create a PDF which I can send off to the printers and it's ready to go.

Open Office also lets you print to PDF. The new beta version even makes this a bit easier and for the first time includes this function in the windows version as well.

My biggest complaints, fonts, but I need to learn how to add fonts, I have about 3000 mac postscript and truetype fonts, I am sure there is a way to do it, I just need to learn.

To install fonts just open the KDE control center, go to System, and locate the Font Installer. It's pretty easy from there. You can also simply create a .fonts directory in your home directory and place your fonts in there. The will then be available to the local user.

Also Barcode creation, there are several options, again I need to learn the installs etc.

Kbarcode looks like a really nice app for this. There is no debian version (yet) but I imagine it won't take too long for someone to make one.

]So if you really want to do it... linux more than measures up. now if Knoppix ever ported to a PPC, I could use all these old Macs I have.

There is a debian ppc version. If thats a bit over the top then you can look at Yellow Dog Linux which is designed soley to run on macs.

[Rono64]

Thank's for the font info, I thought I was doing something wrong.

Turns out I have 2 kinds of CD's in my archive those that a GNU/Linux build can read and those it can't. Both kinds were made on a Mac but some I think on an older Mac Os just don't read, so when my new burner arrives I will re-master all the "crappy" ones and let's hope.

I have tried Yellow Dog, and I prefer Mandrake for the PPC ( Knoppix would be best). As for Debian, well when I am braver.