CUPS § Document Index § Javascript and PDF in Scribus


A little wine with Scribus

Overview

One of the facts of life in the desktop publishing world, is the occassional need for working in a cross platform environment. Fortunately, for Linux users in particular, the Wine Project and Codeweavers have made much progress in being able to sucessfully run many Windows applications on top of Linux.

My main interest and focus for these notes is being able to run the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader and the full version of Acrobat, in order to test Scribus created PDF files, as well as occasionally running the odd Windows or DOS based utility.

Since migrating my own personal workstation to Linux as my default enviroment, I have dabbled with installing various Windows apps and kept a eye on this project for several reasons: 1) Until the recent enhancements to Gnucash, I needed a Windows accounting application to run the books for my own company. 2) Professionally, I have to test and build training materials for a number of Windows applications, thus I try to avoid have to reboot into Windows. 4) I have run VMware in the past and it is superb, but is too resource intensive at times. 3) Sadly, many kinds of multi-media on the net needs a Windows based media application.

Hints and experiences:

The alternative - buying Crossover Office

I would not discourage anyone from buying Crossover Office. The newest version 2.0.1 runs a number of applications quite well, including Photoshop 5,6,7, as well as in my tests, Illustrator 10 and Indesign 2.0.2. The last two can be taxing even on real Windows at times. I found the demo to have a very polished and easy to use installer, which makes configuration a snap. Codeweavers has contributed a great deal to the success of the Wine project thus far and have been good citizens in the open source community. You can also get Crossover Office with some versions of the Suse and Xandros distributions.

Success:

Acrobat Reader 5.1 on Linux with Wine


PDF/X-3 Inspektor from callas.de

Although Acrobat 5.0.5 is not offically supported by Codeweavers, it installs and runs very well. Until the day when Linux/Unix has the same parity in commerical application support, Wine is a good transition strategy. Hopefully, you will find these notes useful in supporting your use of Scribus.

Updated 11:07:2003

CUPS § Document Index § Javascript and PDF in Scribus