From time to time I receive emails asking me when will OpenOffice.org have a desktop publishing (DTP) program. My reply is always the same: “Have you tried Writer”? Although we position Writer as a word processing package, in the hands of an expert user it can do so much more, well into the realms of what I would consider DTP. No doubt if we were selling OpenOffice.org, we’d split Writer into two products: Writer for word processing, and Publisher for DTP – but as OpenOffice.org is licensed as free software, we really don’t have a motive for doing that

However, I can’t really claim to be an expert in this area, and I make no claim whatsoever to having skills in graphics, layout, etc. That’s why I was pleased to read an article in Linuxworld from the folks behind GNUzilla magazine, who do know what they are talking about. As enthusiasts for free software, they have tried a number of different packages to produce their magazine, but have not found anything to tempt them away from Writer:

During the first year of GNUzilla’s existence, several
observations were made in sense of using some more professional tools like Scribus, or maybe Tex/LateX, but Writer followed the requirements very well. In the past three years OpenOffice.org became faster, Writer started to produce more and more optimized PDF’s, and remained everything GNUzilla needs right now.

Judge for yourself – have a look at their magazine (in Serbian), and think what OpenOffice.org Writer could do for you!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 4:16 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.