You wrote on Die, 23 Mai 2000:
> my magazine project is a one-off thing, as it gets published once per
> year, so I don't mind a bit of extra effort.
>
> plus, I'd rather do it in Gimp, if it can be done, so that I learn one
> or two things in the process.
You can learn a lot in this process -- first of all, that gimp is not the
tool you really want to use for anything like typesetting. Think about
your final magazine going to print: each page has to be made in the final
resolution! A simple grayscale A4 page (210x297 mm^2) is 33,2 MByte and in
RGB 99.6 MB ...
And not to say: dynamic text is not able to use different fonts at once.
Gimp is very good for the illustration, making and working with scanned and
photographed pictures.
So you really _want_ to choose another program for layouting!!!
There are some alternatives (for linux):
o (La)TeX as already suggested. But this is only cappable of making text
in one direction -- no (easy) turning of paragraphs. But if you want
some booklike layout it is very good at producing high quality output.
Things that are "brandnew" for Indesign are there in TeX for millions of
years ;-)
o there is a modern alternative to LaTeX: ConTeXt
http://www.pragma-ade.nl/
look at the examples and the up-to-date!
It has a lot of features in the core that are available as extra modules
in LaTeX and it has tremendous pdf capabilities.
o there is a very good frontend for LaTeX: LyX (and KLyX for KDE) that is
very good if you don't want to turn every knob yourself ;-)
o from all what I have seen, the new KWord (from the beta KDE 1.1.90) is
very promising -- though it is very near to word ...
http://www.kde.org
o Adobe has made a version of framemaker for Linux that is available as
beta that expires at the end of this year.
http://www.adobe.com (and http://freshmeat.net)
o Deneba also has made a beta version of their Canvas 7 available for
linux. For me it is to slow (Winchip 200) but maybe your system runs
faster ...
http://www.deneba.com (and http://freshmeat.net)
o there are a great number of utilities to create high quality output in a
number of formats:
- lout
- htmldoc
- docbook is an sgml class for writing (hand)books
look at http://freshmeat.net for the exact location
for all this layout programs you can use to make very good pictures (maybe
for vector illustrations you may use xfig, sketch or killustrator.
Hope this will help you
Uwe
--
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http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~koloska/
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