Open Source – good – but is it accessible?
Talking with my friend Jenny. She tells me she has been searching for an Open Source Desk Top Publishing system
Although Jen would deny it she is pretty good on computers – in fact she is very good. And after reading the reviews and shopping around she selects Scribus. I have never heard of it myself but it certainly looks promising.
Then she goes of Sourceforge and gets this text.
“Scribus/Aqua is a port of Scribus to a native Aqua build using Qt Free for Mac OSX.
This binary is the official release of Scribus 1.3.3.10 for OSX. It needs Ghostscript 8.54 or later.
This package and the libraries are PPC only. They are not Universal and will use Rosetta on Intel based Macs, which might affect performance. Minimum OSX version is 10.3.9.
The binary is downloadable from Sourceforge This binary includes all needed libraries except Ghostscript. To install, follow these directions:
* Download and unpack Ghostscript. Move the framework to /Library/Frameworks.
* Download and unpack ScribusAqua-1.3.3.10. Move Scribus.app to some convenient folder, eg. /Applications.
* Double-click on the Scribus application. If everything goes well, the splash screen should appear.
* On first start Scribus will scan all available fonts on your system. That may take upto one hour. Be patient, it is only needed on the first run.
* If you get the errormessage “Ghostscript was not found on your system”, you need to specify the path to the ghostscript executable manually in Scribus-> Preferences-> External Tools.
One of our dear users has provided a ReadMe which lists some of the current pitfalls with Scribus on Macintosh.
You should join #scribus on irc.freenode.net for hints and help.”
Jen cannot understand this. She calls it “technical wanking”. Why can’t open source developers describe their development in ways people can understand. As Jen says “how dare you say this is open to the world. It is not open”
End of rant from outraged of Pontypridd.
