The Adobe tools are very expensive for hobbyist publishers and in some cases overkill. Luckily there are several free open source tools out there that can be used by the hobbyist to publish their materials. Among them are Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus.
Learning them can be pretty daunting but fortunately a beginner's guide for Scribus, a desktop publisher has been released that you can purchase. In addition to covering Scribus, it has teaches how to integrate programs like Inkscape and Gimp into producing your document.
I use these for most of my work nowadays, for maps, documents, etc. They're great, free, and surprisingly easy to use once you get in there and start playing around. Inkscape is especially good, very versatile.
ReplyDeleteI've used Scribus, but it runs pretty poorly and is not designed for great workflow. While i got round these issues I had to give it up because my business partner found it impossible to work with. Hopefully it will improve with time.
ReplyDeleteHey, I work at Adobe.
ReplyDeleteWhat, in the lot of the Creative Suite or there 'bouts, would make your particular brand of work better?
As an avid gamer looking to start up a Traveller sandbox of late, I've been playing with a lot of Flex programming and have some tools to help move the game along. But your work sounds more along the lines of content creation.