[geeks] Desktop Publishing a la Pagemaker

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, James Sharp wrote:

> Any recommendations on some Unix based desktop publishing software sort of
> like Adobe Pagemaker?  I'm going to be needing to make some sales slicks
> for different products (lots of pictures & graphics & suitspeak).  Will
> TeX/LaTeX handle this easily...and not that I'm against learning them, are
> there any good front ends for them?

If you're planning a typical flashy flyer with lots of non-rectangular
text boxes, overlaying images, and rotated text, TeX will handle this
quite well; LaTeX will not.  However, plain TeX is not nearly as easy to
learn/use as LaTeX, IMHO.

The difference is that LaTeX was designed to let you concentrate on
content, and give LaTeX almost total control over the minutae of layout.
That is to say, LaTeX is a document-description language, not a
page-description language.

TeX is a low-level, down-and-dirty typesetting language.  There is no page
that you cannot represent in plain TeX with a combination of TeX's
text-placement and drawing commands.

To my knowledge, there is no easy front-end for plain TeX.  LyX is an easy
(but crappy) frontend to something not entirely unlike LaTeX.  Unless you
really want to get your hands dirty, you want FrameMaker (which is still
the only Unix content-producing product Adobe still makes, AFAIK)

Framemaker really is overkill[1], but it'll do the job.  Chances are that
you really want a Macintosh with Pagemaker or Quark.  You can always
experiment with some of the free office suites, but I don't know how
mature they are.  OpenOffice might do what you want.  KOffice looked
promising the last time I checked, but I haven't been able to play with
it, on account of having not ported KDE 3.x to IRIX yet.

Mmmm.. I think I know what would do the job well: A PM G4, and this:
  http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2037801774

But, back to your original question, I don't think there is much in the
way of Unix software that is both user-friendly enough and mature enough
to do the job in a way that you'll really appreciate, without sending $$$$
to Adobe.

--Jonathan
[1] And you will be reminded of that fact upon pricing it.