A 'wine' adventure

[Josef Lowder]

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On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:13:36 -0500 (CDT), Jeremy C. Reed wrote
> Sorry to side-step your real topic ...
> 
> But what features or interface usage do Pagemaker and Paint Shop Pro 
> provide you that you need?
> 
> I have used a Pagemaker and Paint Shop Pro a little several years 
> ago, and I have lots of experience with desktop publishing and 
> graphics software in general. For my needs, open source software has 
> been adequate and depending on the use, very good.
> 
> I am just curious ... maybe your needs can be solved with out wine ...


Thanks for your response Jeremy. 

You are not side-stepping my topic at all. 

If there were any way to accomplish what I need and bypass M$ entirely, I
would definitely be 100% in favor of that. 

PSP: Certainly many have suggested that there is nothing that can be done with
Paint Shop Pro that cannot be done equally as well or better with Gimp.  That
would be just fine with me, but in my first attempts to use Gimp, it just
seemed more difficult to use than PSP and I was not able to find clear,
concise, step-by-step instructions to do the things that I already know how to
do with PSP. 

Pagemaker: I have tried Scribus and Open Office Writer and those are both very
good programs that I am sure would be very satisfactory for many "desktop
publishing" needs.  However, I was not able to figure out how to use either of
them to do the kinds of things that I need to do and can do with Pagemaker. 
For example, both horizontal and vertical line compression, kerning, tracking,
micro-point leading, importing fairly complex RTF files, making font style,
size, and color changes within lines of text, integrating graphic elements,
lines, and borders within existing streams of text, automatic re-pagination of
columnized text with global font size changes, and a host of other tasks.  The
ease of doing many of these things with Pagemaker makes it seem terribly
cumbersome to try to do those same or similar things with either of the other
two packages I mentioned. Perhaps there are more options that I am not aware of. 

No doubt some of my perspectives on this this are just because of what I am
most familiar with using.  I certainly am open to consider other options. 

Here's a link to some examples of one of our Pagemaker layouts: 
http://AV7.org/pdfs/keys.pdf