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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Uwe Thiem on Thursday 13/Mar/2008, @11:52
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First of all, the brochure is *much* better than no brochure. It doesn't suck at all - and thanks for creating it! It does have some rough edges, though.
Before I became a software developer and network administrator, I was a professional printer. Went through an apprenticeship and worked many years printing stuff. So here I wade in - hopefully with criticism a little bit more constructive. ;-)
The front page doesn't suck but it definitely is unbalanced. The blue area carrying almost nothing is far too big. The building in the picture is draen perspectively (right word in English?) but "Sponsorship Brochure" is not. So it sticks out like a sore thumb. Someone suggested to put it under the picture. This would probably help and reduce the "vast emptiness of the blue are.
If you go to File -> Properties -> Fonts in okular you will notice, the fonts actually are embedded in the file. (You can also learn from this dialog that the document was created using scribus.) On pages 3 - 5, the font seems odd. (It has been a long time since I worked as a printer. New fonts have popped up right and left. Most are crap. ;-) The old, classical fonts like Times New Roman, Universal and such are still *much* better than most of these new fonts.) I cannot identify the font used on these pages. Some gothic one. Either scribus's PDG engine or okular's (and probably kpdf's) rendering engine mess it up. Spacing is wrong. It also seems to be rendered with anti-aliasing, although I disabled AA for smaller fonts on my systems. What can I say? The creators of this document were at the mercy of the tools they used. One thing is for sure: They should have realised that the font they used was sub-optimal. Use a common one that is known to be rendered correctly by most rendering engines. You will notice, though, that the font used on pages 6 and 7 looks much better.
There are other problems that let the heart of a printer skip a beat. ;-) The creators of the document chose to use line spacing between paragraphs. *Sigh* According to the rules of typesetting, paragraphs are separated by indentation. Yes, line spacing has crept in since typewriters became more common. It's wrong. Simply wrong from my point of view.
Anyway, they chose line spacing. So be it! Look at page 5. The last paragraph in column 1 ended exactly at the end of the column. The program (scribus) should be smart enough to know that it had to skip line spacing at the top of column 2. It was not. So, again, the creators were at the mercy of their tool. Honestly, it looks *very* wrong.
Go to the end of page 5. The two columns don't match. They must. It's a rule of typesetting written in stone. As it is, it looks quite ugly. But again, the tool did it, not the creators.They could have inserted additional blank lines. Yes. But that is not their task. The tool (scribus) should do it. I am not bashing scribus. Over time, it will probably get there.
Let's look at the table on page 6. It isn't all that bad. one question occurs to me: All columns but the first one are centred horizontally. The first one is aligned to the left. Why? Looks weird.
My conclusion: They creators of the document did well enough. Problem was, they knew very little about the rules of typesetting and layouts. They chose a tool like scribus that knows some of the rules but leaves most things to the human.
My advice for the next brochure is to use something that knows all the rules. Something like LaTeX. Sure, you promotion guys don't want to learn LaTeX. Honestly, neither do I. ;-) So use something like LyX, a frontend to LaTeX.
End of rant.
Uwe |
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Alex on Thursday 13/Mar/2008, @13:03
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I seriously think you should get in contact with the Scribus developers and discuss the issues you brought up. They are very nice guys :-)
Alex
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Uwe Thiem on Saturday 15/Mar/2008, @13:04
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I am pretty sure they know much more about the remaining deficiencies of scribus than I do since I do use scribus. For everything other than plain text and spreadsheets, I use LyX. The results look like done by a professional typesetter.
Scribus is a nice application for flyers and small brochures. As long as the user knows something about typesetting and layouts.
No, the scribus developers don't need yet another person to tell them what desktop publishing is about. They know it. They just have to get their app there which will take time.
Uwe
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Chani on Thursday 13/Mar/2008, @19:03
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now *that* is constructive criticism. :)
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Uwe Thiem on Friday 14/Mar/2008, @02:57
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Jeez. So many typos in my posting above. I am embarrassed. But then, I was slightly drunk when I wrote it. ;-)
Uwe
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Riddle on Friday 14/Mar/2008, @07:18
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That is constructive criticism. It carefully outlines the problems with the document (which are mostly problems with scribus) and gives a solution (use Lex or LaTex). Much better than the "It Sucks" comments that started all of this.
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Re: akademy2008 logo sucks.
by Aaron Seigo on Friday 14/Mar/2008, @08:23
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nice summary, Uwe... i might just have to tap you in the future to look over documents we do =)
and yes, it would be great if the scribus team were made aware of some of these issues if they aren't already.
cheers...
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