Scribus Publishing Software

[denham]

I've encountered some problems with our workflow when publishing our images. Basically we render to .png w/ alpha-->Open in Photoshop, do touch up work, then save as a flatened png, & open in Autocad, where we add construction notes & leaders, w/ 4 elevations & a perspective.

 

Here is the problems though, before all these elevations were on a white background, now we are wanting to have a full page watermark in the background, so the individual renderings cannot be flattened or they will be a white box. Apparently you cannot have a transparent images in CAD, there is a transparency command, but the anti aliasing sucks, and it looks like crap.

 

I think using CAD in this manner is probably odd anyways. So I want to get some different software to make this publshing of sheets easier. I was thinking Indesign, but then I found this open source software called scribus (win, linux, mac)

Anyone used it before. It seems very powerful, does vector imaging, publish pdf, ICC profiles, works effieciently w/ very large files, etc.

 

What are some other peoples workflows for compiling multiple elevations & renderings to sheets, w/ construction quality notes & symbals?

 

http://www.scribus.net

[sterealkey]

I use Corel Draw to compile my final presentations.

 

It works quite effectively. It has some nice compression options e.g. for print, or for web (which makes them email friendly)

 

You can combine vector and raster images in the same document, handles pictures with no background quite well, I use tiff files. The power clipping function is very handy for pasting your images into custom shapes (like a frame with rounded corners.

 

It even supports importing of photoshop files, so when you import it maintains its layers.

 

And best of all is that its not an expensive package.

 

Here is an example of a presentation that I compiled using Corel Draw.