Hello
I am a teacher in a county in Denmark where we are starting to use Open Source. We now OpenOffice and Scribus - Scribus but is too difficult for children in primary school. Are there other DTP products in OOo environment?
Best regards
allanramsby [at] hotmail [dot] com">Allan Ramsby - allanramsby [at] hotmail [dot] com
Bookmark/Search this post with:
For simple page layouts try Inkscape. Although it is more aimed at graphic design, for producing flyers, posters and things that are not very text intensive it is excellent and easy to use. In primary I would also use it to teach mathematical concepts in shape, space, symmetry and scale. It is also a good counter to the bad practice I have seen a lot at primary level where bitmap editors are used when a vector tool would be much more appropriate. Of course you could use OOo Draw, I personally prefer Inkscape. There is also OOo4kids that might be worth a look.
Not OOo but http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/ might be worth a look
Hi - I suggest you to use Tuxpaint wich has some DTP features wich can be used progresively according the student's age.
Checking the ubuntu repositoy I have just found Xara Xtreme - try it!!
IMHO, for DTP you really need something than introduces the concept of text and graphic objects and how they can be laid out , scaled etc. The problem I have with painting programs is that they are not really the right tool for DTP. They are really for producing icons, editing photographs and manipulating bit map images. While it might be considered for KS1 and below for some general fun, mouse control etc, For children over 7, an easy to use vector program is more likely to get them off to a better start in learning about matching tools to needs.
Thank you for the many replies but really there is not much DTP in some of them. What I miss is a real alternative to Microsoft Publisher. Do you have a good suggestion?
Allan Denmark
Hello Allan,
The site below offers some good alternatives usually.
Regards
www.osalt.com
Account Manager
Telephone: 0
Personally I use Open Office Draw for DTP tasks and I find it has done everything I ask of it. That it is called "Draw" to me is a misnomer, as there are far better drawing programs out there.
Perhaps it will be easier if you define the key features you are looking for in a DTP program? For me, the key features are:
Open Office Draw does all of the above for me.
Sometimes it is best to use more than one specialist program to achieve a results rather than relying on one jack of all trades program that does nothing well. "Use the best tools for the job". Complex artwork (and pretty textual graphics) I do in proper graphics editing programs and import as appropriate. Word art (for example) should have been taken out and shot years ago.
Provided I get the page format sorted first, collating the documents as booklets, leaflets, cards, badges and so forth I leave to the printer and print drivers.
Occassinally when I want exceptional control over the formatting and output of a document do I turn to Scribus.
I think the problem is that some of us think that using MS Publisher wizards to produce DTP is educationally bad practice. (Ok, you don't have to use Wizards but the majority of practice I have seen is dominated by this with MSP) The short asnwer is that there is no MS Publisher equivalent in open source and probably never will be because there is no need. Professional DTP houses would not touch publisher and most small business users, like ourselves who are IT literate have plenty of design tools and would not want to have our companies characterised by a "Wizard" or have work tied up in a proprietary file format that has just about zero interoperability with anything else. For children learning to produce paper published leaflets, posters and even say a school newspaper what matters is learning how to design things to communicate to an audience and understanding transferrable skills and knowledge like use of positioning and alignment tools, measurment, precision and symmetry. No doubt there is some benefit in choosing a template or Wizard but as in the OFSTED report "The Importance of ICT" (2009), this severly limits learning for a majority of children who are capable of a lot more. If all you want is ease of output, use a photocopier :-)
If Scribus or OO Draw does not meet your need.
We also install PagePlusSE for students and staff to try and encourage them not to use Publisher! PlagePlusSe is free but not OSS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PagePlus
Why discourage use of Publisher if it is the tool that does the job? That sounds more of anti-Microsoft than freedom of choice.
I discourage the use of publisher for how it talks to printers. i.e associating the document with a specfic printer.
Publisher is installed and available to all staff and students, so there is no anti anything. Not sure why you imply there is? I would discourage the use of software that costs money where equivalent or better functionality is available in an opensource or free software tool. I would hope that all public sectors organistations would take this approach!
PagePlus "does the job" a lot better, and has been shown to get pupils higher grades over work produced in Publisher.
Nothing to do with Microsoft. The question is what job is it doing? Children are in schools to be educated not simply to produce output. What is desirable in learning? Publisher encourages mindlesseness and that is born out by just about every observation I have made in classrooms and mindless operation is not good education. To me the over-riding issue should be about learning to learn and understand and ICT can be much more than just a presentation tool in that process. The cost, the undesirability of non-interoperable file formats, printer document association, issues of equality and inclusion etc. are important but secondary considerations to promoting effective learning.
The mindlessness can be stopped if guidance is given from the teacher as to what outcome is expected. Publisher can save is a variety of different formats if I am not mistaken?
Yes, in a variety of formats - just none that are used by the printing industry....
If we are teaching DTP then surely we should be looking at the standards, conventions and formats used by that industry. Publisher supports none of these, as far as I am concerned...
The reason most people tell me they need Publisher rather than say Scribus or OOo Writer, or one of the other publishing methods is Wizards. Yes, a teacher could provide appropriate guidance, but in my experience most of the ones using Publisher are unlikely to. If the main reason for choosing Publisher is for its Wizards, it is not a very good reason educationally. Publisher can, for example, save as HTML and I have seen a number of people then using that for making web sites - Hmmm, it sort of works but.... The main issue is that once saved as a Publisher document it is almost impossible to do anything with that file unless you buy software. So sending a .pub attachment of having .pub files to download is effectively saying buy MS Publisher or you can't access this information. Simply accepting this is to me educationally undesirable. We should be educating children to understand the wider implications of choosing particular applications, issues of lock-in and why it is anti-social to expect other people to buy software just to be able to access information. Bu then I am an advocate of open systems so you might not agree.
I agree with Simon King.
I use OOo Draw for all my DTP type of work (from professional brochures for my organisation to my own wedding invitations).
OOo Draw is mis-named. It is more of a DTP application than a drawing application. And it's much better at layout than Writer. Trying to do DTP with Writer I find I get into the same kinds of messes as I used to when I used to use MS Word.
For drawing I use InkScape for vector based graphics and the Gimp for raster images.
I last tried Scribus about a year ago and found it limited and buggy. It may have improved though.
That's interesting because having used both Draw and Inkscape, I prefer Inkscape. It really has some powerful text features like being able to set up newspaper type columns and flow text between them and around arbitrary shapes.
There is PubOOO which is a converter for Publisher files to OOo format but I have never used it so I don't know how well it works.
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pubooo
Ian,
You've inspired me to experiment more with Inkscape! I hadn't thought about using it in that way. It is a great application. Its "trace bitmap" function is fantastic for converting from bitmaps to vectors.
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Text-Flow.html
The link above takes you to the explanation of flowing text between shapes. A shape can be just a rectangle so then linked rectangles become newspaper columns and the alignment tools make it very quick and easy to design say a template for a newsletter. Box for a photograph, columns for text. You can easliy produce text flows around irregular shaped objects, object transparencies etc. I did try to upload an eg but the site doesn't allow .svg attachmets which I think we should change because it is the W3C stanard for vector graphics!