gimp for publishing (was Re: [texhax] A.Mani :Re: texhax Digest, Vol 2004, Issue 41, Message No.1, 3)

William F. Adams wadams at atlis.com
Tue Feb 10 17:32:27 CET 2004


On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 05:33  PM, A.Mani wrote:

> I do not think it would be that difficult. Because the number of 
> 'difficult' programs to be written can be expected to be quite small 
> and these can always be reused...it is certainly worth the trouble. 
> Another option would be use both tex and GIMP for the purpose.


?!?

Is the GIMP no longer ``merely'' a bitmap editor? Does it now handle 
vector graphics as vectors and text as type exporting as a 
resolution-independent .eps or .pdf?

The dearth of decent tools for such has kept my NeXT Cube on my desk 
and a Windows laptop in my kit bag for the past decade (and don't tell 
me that Skencil nee Sketch, Impress, Sodipodi &c. are suitable). I need 
things w/ the capabilities of Altsys Virtuoso / Macromedia FreeHand, 
Adobe Illustrator, FutureWave's SmartSketch, and Fractal Design 
(Creaturehouse) Expression. Really a shame that GYVE didn't get 
finished and that Canon didn't follow through on their offer to donate 
a drawing program to GNUstep....

One other tool which hasn't been mentioned yet AFAICT is Scribus (which 
does seem like quite a good beginning).

Since it uses XML for its file format, one could in theory set up some 
sort of database publishing system which would run out XML versions of 
a document, then do the typesetting from within Scribus, visually 
tweaking at need.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com



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