Word Processing vs DTP

This text isn't finished: Hopefully a lot of people will add there own thougts to it. Or perhaps just correct my terrible english ... ;-)

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Many people are using office-suites like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. But at some point, they are not longer satisfied with the capabilities of their prefered word-processor. Often it is a lack of finetuning a layout, or some ideas of the author are just not feasible. Or the magazine from the kiosk just looks - more professional.

So, people are starting to look around for other applications. And they find - more or less - professional Desktop Publishing-applications like QuarkXPress, Indesign or Scribus. Specially the last one has a big advantage: It is OpenSource, so why don't given it a try?

After downloading, installing and starting the application the word-processor-used author sits in front of his screen like a rabbit in front of a snake - he don't know what to do. Everything looks so strange, and why can't I type text into my document?

The result: After some frustrating time, the author deinstalls Scribus and goes back to his well-known word-processor, accepting it's disadvantages.

To avoid some more disappointments, this text will describe the principal differences between a frame-based DTP-application and a word-processor.

Principal differences

• A DTP application is not intented for creating text. For this purpose, it's better to use a word-processor or a simple text editor (with or without markup). After the text is finished it could be loaded into the DTP application. From this point, just minor changes on the text are done in the DTP application — Don't try to create long texts in a DTP application. The idea behind this separation is the orginal workflow in professional publishing: one person does the text content, and another person does the layout.
• Most of the modern DTP applications are frame-based. This means that every content on a page is placed into frames. Text, images, drawings and everything else an author would like to see on its pages. These frames are freely moveable and can be placed everywhere on the page. Text can flow from one frame to another.
• In DTP applications, the color palette contains more or less just a few dozens of different colors. Every other color which you need has to be defined by your own.additional That's because in a professional offset-printing workflow additional colors are often be seen as Spot Colors and heavily undesired.
• You can define so called master pages. If a normal page uses a master page as basis, all elements of the master-page will appear on the normal page. Within a document, you can define more than one master-pages.

What a DTP-application can't do for you

1. A DTP-application is for layouting a text: It's purpose is not to structure a text. It may not build summaries or table of contents for you, there is no possibility to add/manage footnotes to your text. Scribus 1.3.x can build Tables of Contents for you.
2. Generally, it will be defficult to connect a DTP-app with extenal data-souces like databases. Scribus allows you to do this with its Scripter python plugin

Advantages of DTP-applications

1. Absolute control of your layout. DTP-apps are working to the third number after teh comma correct.
2. Text-flow around irregular shapes.
3. Guidelines, margins and rulers are very useful for an exact placement of frames.
4. Professional output. PDF, PostScript or one of these realy big offset-machines: With a DTP-application, you can satisfy them all.