Over a year ago we intended to move TUX production from Quark (which we use for the actual layout) to Scribus. Scribus has capabilities well beyond what would normally be needed to produce TUX for print. If you are reading TUX, you know that we have covered Scribus.

The problem we have is with producing the best PDF for an electronic magazine. Currently, Scribus produces a file that places each individual text character in the file rather than complete strings or lines of text. The reason for this is that it offers the most flexiblilty. You could, for example, output a line of text with each character in a different color, slightly different size, kerned differently or moved above or below the baseline.

We have talked with the Scribus folks about this and we agree it was the right short-term decision. For a print publication it makes little difference as the PDF file is read once to produce the plates for the printing press. Unfortunately, for TUX, it means that each subscriber will receive a much larger file. In our PDFs, most characters only take up one byte of space. In a Scribus-produced PDF it could be from 10 to 100 characters.

The Scribus team intends to add this additional output mode in a future release. We are watching carefully and when Scribus has this capability we intend to move our production and delivery systems entirely to Linux.

Phil Hughes