Linux for Designers

The Dev team released the 2nd RC of the desktop publishing software Scribus 1.3.5. All details about the changes over RC 1 can be found at the release post. Scribus now requires the QT 4.4.0 libraries or higher.
If you are using Ubuntu Linux you can easily install it by adding the additional sources lists.

Again a the Google Summer of Code is started. Here is an overview of interesting and accepted graphic applications, web development apps and multimedia tools:
* Aqsis Renderer http://wiki.aqsis.org/dev/soc_2009
* Audacity http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=GSoC_Ideas
* Blender http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2009/Ideas
* FFmpeg http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* GIMP http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode2009ideas
* Gnome Desktop http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
* Hugin/ Panotools http://wiki.panotools.org/SoC_2009_idea
* Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* OSM http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GSoC_Applications_2009
* Python http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009
* Scribus http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GSoC_2009_Ideas
* TYPO3 CMS http://typo3.org/development/gsoc2009/ideas/

Hopefully a lot of ideas become reality and all these projects will get a lot of new, strong, powerful developers!

Color profiles are usefull for prepress, image and video editing. Besides the package "icc-proflies" (contains ECI-RGB.V1.0.icc, ISOcoated.icc, ISOuncoated.icc, ISOuncoatedyellowish.icc, ISOwebcoated.icc, LStar-RGB.icc, PhotoGamutRGB_avg6c.icc, Fogra27L.icm, sRGB.icm) that ships with Ubuntu there are other free and professional color profile available:

Adobe
http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfiles_end-user.zip
http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfilesCS4Win_end-user.zip

ECI European Color Initiative
http://www.eci.org/doku.php?id=en:downloads

ICC profiles are a standard of color management. All of them are platform independent and can be used with Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape and F-Spot & Co. To make the profiles available system wide (including Windows applications running on Wine) copy the downloadad profiles to

~/.color/icc

Myself prefer the Euroscale V2 profile for print and the Adobe 1998 profile for image editing.

Reading through Planet Gnome i stumbled over a post of Andreas Nilsson (Random Pixels) who pointed to an interesting entry of the Scribus Wiki about using Spot Colour palettes (like HKS or Pantone). Of course this works with Gimp and Inskape too.
If you are looking for a conversion table about HKS, CMYK and RAL spot colors check out this PDF document and this webpage (HKS N,K,E,Z) or this (HKS/CMYK/ RGB) or this (Pantone/CMYK/RGB) too.

Ubuntu Berlin Graphics Workshop

UPDATE: Here is a PDF of my talk (in german).

The stable branch of Scribus is updated to 1.3.3.12.
This version shipped with:
* Several fixes and improvements to text frames and the Story Editor.
* Some additional scripts have been added to enhance functionality.
* More translation and documentation updates.
* Several fixes to protect against possible crashes.
* Improvements to the Scripter to enable more features.

In the evening of the 14th Juli i have a talk about open source graphic software and Ubuntu. The workshop is about web design, print, vector graphics, imageing & photos and 3D. It is organized by Ubuntu Berlin with support of the c-base. If you like we can meet us there!
Update: Here is the official appointment

Scribus is a fine open source application for print and dtp. I'm using 1.3.4 often but it has its bug and so i'm waiting for an update. I was a little bit confused about the newer 1.3.3.x releases because 1.3.4 sounds like a successor of 1.3.3. Now i found a little preview of Scribus 1.3.5 which will hopefully hit the streets soon.
If you using Ubuntu, you can get this SVN build easy:
Getting Scribus on Ubuntu/Kubuntu up and running

DTP on Linux = Scribus. The 1.3.3.10 version is a maintenance release of the stable brunch:

* Several fixes and improvements to text frames and the Story Editor.
* New Arabic Translation.
* More translation and documentation updates.
* Many improvements to PDF Forms exporting and non-Latin script handling in PDFs.
* Several fixes to protect against possible crashes.
* Improved Color Managed Display in some cases.
* Some fixes to the Scripting plugin.

Scribus works together with LProf for color prfiling and Fontmatrix for font management.
At the first look the GUI of all looks a little bit ugly because they all are QT-based application. If you like to have a native Ubuntu look of them try out my QT-Ubuntu theme.
Read my earlier post about a unique Ubuntu look with different toolkits.

DTP on Linux = Scribus. The 1.3.3.9 version of it is released . Mainly just bugfixes. The next real nice steps coming with the following 1.3.4.
I checked out the previous version which worked nice. But at the first look the GUI looks a little bit ugly (Scribus is based on QT) and so i created a Ubuntu color theme for it. To use it, copy it as root to "/etc/qt3/" or as normal user to "~/.qt3/". There is a "qt3-qtconfig" config tool too.