Anyone able to recommend a good/free open source alternative to Adobe's InDesign?

[jenjen@mastodon.art]

Anyone able to recommend a good/free open source alternative to Adobe's InDesign? It doesn't need all the functionalities. It just needs to be able to prep books for print properly.

[aaribaud@mastodon.art]

@JenJen

Just in case: @davidrevoy, any direct or indirect experience with this?

[davidrevoy@framapiaf.org]

@aaribaud @JenJen Scribus is what I use for my books. The desktop publishing part is OK, the export for print part is full of bug and traps depending the PDF specification and color space ICC of the printer. In short, under certain printer setup, it can be heaven, and on other, it can be hell. I met both cases.
I have a 'print' tag on my blog with logging my, issue, and sharing my workaround about it.

[eishiya@mastodon.art]

@JenJen If you're putting together bigger books, watch out for Scribus's memory handling. If a book has too many large images, Scribus can run out of memory and freeze/crash. It seems to keep uncompressed image data in memory even when the pages are off-screen.
I had to split my 276-page (B&W!) book into numerous separate files to avoid this issue.

@davidrevoy I'm curious if you ran into this issue as well; I don't remember seeing mention of it in the posts about the similarly thick P&C books.

[davidrevoy@framapiaf.org]

@eishiya Yes, I ran into this 'too big' PDF exported issue( a bug reported AFAIK) , and it was critical on my side because my printer had a custom form on their webpage, and the upload had a limit for the filesize... I found a way to post process it with ghostscript. It's somewhere on this blog post ( edit: part of the "test 1, big book 1" chapter, a 2,4GB PDF and 800MB upload limit 🫠)
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article757/the-english-book-printed-project-production-report-3 .

@JenJen