My Linux DTP Tool Box
This is wholly my own personal selection, based fairly narrowly on how capable I find these applications to work with Scribus for print. If you disagree, I most certainly will listen to a well reasoned argument. Be prepared though! Part of my day job is to evaluate similar commercial applications for clients. Some of these apps have been tested within the limitations of modern PC hardware. Example: Telling Xnview to create 10,000 thumbnails at once. So in alphabetical order:
- Acrobat Reader
- Other PDF Viewers
- Batik
- Gimp
- Ghostscript
- GSview
- Advanced Ghostscript & GSview
- Imagemagick
- Inkscape
- KSnapshot
- Tracing Tools
- WINE
- Xnview
- Lprof
- Krita
A note on PDF Viewers:
One of the challenges with PDF and EPS viewers on Linux, is that Scribus creates high end PS level 3, PDF 1.4 and PDF 1.6 in the future. Sometimes these features are beyond the capabilities of some open source viewers. Some of these features are necessary for reliable commercial printing and only supported in commercial pre-press or DTP tools. Four years of working with Scribus has led me to the strongly held conclusion that the following three viewers are the most reliable at displaying PS/EPS/PDF created by Scribus:
- Acrobat Reader 7.0.x for Linux - The best and sometimes the only choice for PDF viewing. Detailed notes and hints: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
- GSview 4.8+ - with the latest version of Ghostscript available. This combination is your best choice for viewing EPS files, PS files and most PDFs. In addition, GSview has many other very useful capabilities with add-ons like
pstoeditandepstool. For more detailed notes and hints: GSview. I consider it an essential tool for DTP on Linux. - Kpdf from KDE 3.5+ - This updated PDF viewer based on Xpdf has a new rendering engine and is capable of viewing PDF 1.5 files. There is a vast improvement from Kpdf 3.3 > Kpdf 3.4. This no knock on Gnome, just based on my experience with the latest from both DE's.
If any other PDF or EPS viewer you choose cannot display PDFs from Scribus, but they do view properly in Acrobat Reader 5+, file a bug with the upstream author. I cannot stress this enough. In virtually all cases I have tested, it is a limitation of the viewing application. Scribus PDFs are tested daily with specialist pre-press software to validate their adherence to the published PDF specifications.