In my constant and daily attempt not to have to boot into Windoze to perform the tasks I need to complete I found myself having to update (remake) my portfolio for an application today. I made the application itself in lovely old LaTeX which gives me such a buzz to use, the more I use it, the more I love it – it actually makes me want to apply for things. The portfolio is not, however suited to LaTeX, being mostly images with small captions positioned at the bottom of the page with lots of white space in between. It seemed perverse to use LaTeX for such a non-typesetting, text impoverished layout and so I turned to synaptic and downloaded Scribus.
Something that made me nervous was some posts here, suggesting that it wasn’t really up to scratch. I don’t know if I was attempting something very easy in terms of layout or not but I think I put it through its paces and it came out extremely well, doing everything I needed, like defining margins, shrinking images to proportional sizes, defining styles to use throughout and shuffling pages around. I also found it intuitive to use and the few things I needed to look up were a few clicks away through the excellent Scribus wiki.
One more reason not to have to restart in Windoze (select from grub, put kettle on, make tea, drink tea, wait for services to finish loading so you can actually do anything…)