Hi Roger and Randoph and others interested

First, Iam not trying to sell you Linux! It is just I used UNIX before
going over the Mac in publishing. So FYI.....

    http://www.linux.org  should provide more info and from here the Linux
Documentation Project is also worth checking. There are also various
different distros, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and so forth. Mandrake
is meant to be an easy introduction for home desktop use and Debian is
the most configureable and hence can be harder to use but good if you
are into playing with software.

As for Linux applications in publishing... what is really lacking is a
version of Photoshop which can produce half tones and print ready colour
seps. There is GIMP which is as powerful as Photoshop with a few added
extras and Blender, a 3D animation application, but both of these are
for web sites or film production. (All the computer work for Lord of the
Rings is done on Linux as is Dreamworks, BTW.) Framemaker from Adobe was
being ported to Linux but the project got dropped, so there really is
not a high end DTP application like Quark. If you know how to use
Photoshop then learning to use GIMP should not be that hard, but I do
warn you, it is a fairly high level graphics manipulation program. It
would be quite capable of producing covers in GIF or JPEG or ESP
formats. From this another program can be used to do the colour seps.
Also, easy to use web development appplications like Macromedia are
lacking although there is Homepage Builder from IBM. But this aside,
anything you can do with Macromedia you can do on Linux using various
webpage tools like Quanta, Netscape Composer or Mozilla (the open source
version of Netscape) or even handcoded using a text editor if you know
html and java. Also, there is a MS Windows thingy which lets you run
Windows apps on Linux but I know little about this.

But from what I am reading you are not really after or need high end
applications. (I assume you are not doing complex multi-column colour
magazine or newpaper layouts.) Linux can handle true type fonts so you
can use the fonts you already have with MS Windows in Linux. You
can also have a duel boot system with both Windows and Linux or even a
Mac version of Linux. Also, if all you are using is MS Word then there
is Open Office or Star Office from Sun Microsystems which is much like
MS Office. This can handle doc, rtf, html, xml and most other word
processing formats. It is quite capable of producing high quality
postscript output which can be converted to PDF if need be. It uses a
zipped version of XML in native Star Office format which can be unzipped
for XML without having to open the application (if you can use console
text based tools.) Open Office is the open source version of Star
Office. The only real differences are Star comes with more fonts and
user support whereas Open Office comes without any support in terms of
how to use it. (Star Office costs about $200 Aust.)

    Aside from this there is a professional quality typesetting program
called LaTex, but this can be difficult to learn. To get around having
to handcode typesetting markup using a text editor I use a graphical
frontend to LaTex called Lyx (http://www.lyx.org) which can be
downloaded in source code and compiled fairly easily. I do all my
original writing with a text editor of which Linux has a wide range of
powerful text editors and then I use Lyx or LaTex to typeset it. From
here I can convert it easily to postscript, PDF or HTML and I then I
edit the HTML code for CSS. (Also, using a text editor means I can do
all sorts of things on a console with the text using UNIX commands,
including spell checking, word counts, joining files together and so
forth. ASCII text has this habit of not becoming obsolete, also, I
notice, unlike some word processing and DTP formats.)

    Most print shops should be able to handle RFT, XML, postscript or PDF
on a MS DOS disk. Linux can handle MS DOS format floppies or zip disks
easily and these can be tranferred to MS Windows or Mac. A lot of
printshops now can print directly from a zip disk, so this may be worth
checking out more???? You need to spend some time researching your
needs, which ever way. Also, you can always email a file to the printshop.

Having said all this, you do have to spend some time learning Linux and
especially the UNIX parts, if you want to make use of these. It is a
multi-user multi-process industrial strength operating system unlike the
home version of MS Windows so it may appear a little strange at first.
But based on what I am currenlty using, Redhat 8.0 Personal Edition
(which cost me $40 Aust) this is changing very quickly. I do have some
issues which I do not like with this version but later versions should
improve on this. (Never buy a dot zero version... is perhaps good advice
for any software.) This version comes with Open Office but you cannot
install Netscape 7 on it or Acrobat reader unless you want to hack
config files which should be corrected with updates and which you could
do on previous versions of Redhat. (A stupid mistake connected with a
misguided idea of making Linux easier to use...) But there is  still
XPDF and Mozzilla plus a choice of web browsers so this is not really a
concern, for me. Sometime very soon Linux should be as easy to use as
Windows, and given that the latest version of Windows will make most
older hardware obsolete may be the only choice other then buying a new
whizz bang computer.

Linux can be a bit more difficult with some applications, especially
multimedia, video editing and sound because it does not have the easy to
use home type applications that MS Windows has but is quite capable of
producing professional high end results providing you have the hard ware
to match and the patience to learn. It is supported by IBM in anything
from supercomputers and mainframes to laptops and also Sun Microsystems,
which are two of the biggest.

    I  have not worked professionally in publishing for five years now, so
may be out of date, but do not get Quark Xpress for a Windows or Intel
based computer as the hardware cannot really handle it and it will send
you into to a nervous breakdown. Mac uses a RISC processor so is much
more capable of handling high end graphics applications like Quark and
give you all the advantages of using Quark. Also, when I used Quark last
I found I had to strip all the Word formatting off (save as text only in
Word) and re-format in Quark to get a consistent result.  (The reason I
have not used Windows much is because I first trained as a graphic
designer and photographer and worked in publishing for the past 20 odd
years on and off and am willing to do a PhD to get out of that industry!!!!)

Oh, and it did not matter about using Linux in terms of accents. At the
basic user interface level, Linux, Mac and MS Windows are much the same.
I just needed a foot in the door to get started so it most most useful
to me, anyway.

best wishes

Chris Jones.