Any Good Layout Software Out There

[Awakening]

As a board game designer I need to be able to make well designed manuals. Are there any good open source layout softwares out there that I can use on my Pandora?

 

[CasperN]

http://www.scribus.net/ is a powerful program, don't know if someone is going to port it, or if its done. But its open source. Think you will like it.

 

[dflemstr]

If you're serious about creating professional-looking documents and correct type-setting, printability and so on is important to you, then you should use TeX, more specifically LaTeX, and even more specifically LyX.

These are tools that are used for making books, research papers and articles, and other material where you need to publish content of extremely high-quality. TeX is a typesetting system, LaTeX is built with TeX and adds document-writing features to TeX, and LyX is a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) text editing program, where you yourself just enter text and say "this is the title", "this is descriptive text", "this is a maths formula" and LyX automatically makes it looks nice for you.

Some examples of LyX-produced documents (just found by random Googles):

• Pandora PXML specification, by me
• Exploring Lift aka The Lift Book aka The Definitive Guide to Lift, by Derek Chen-Becker, Tyler Weir and Marius Danciu
• An Example LYX Document by Warren Toomey

 

[bzar]

If you're serious about creating professional-looking documents and correct type-setting, printability and so on is important to you, then you should use TeX, more specifically LaTeX, and even more specifically LyX.

+1, these are the tools to use. I'm using LaTeX to write my master's thesis (which I should actually be writing even now).

 

[Awakening]

I was looking for a desktop publishing software, I had forgotten that's what they are called.

http://www.scribus.net/ is a powerful program, don't know if someone is going to port it, or if its done. But its open source. Think you will like it.

Thanks! That one looks great, gonna download it and try it out on my PC. Would be nice if it was ported to Pandora

 

[vputz]

++ to Scribus. LaTeX and friends are dynamite for writing documents (I use LyX when I can to help deal with LaTeX, but do all my articles and presentations with LyX/LaTeX), but they aren't what you want to use for pretty graphic layout. When I have to do posters for conferences, it's Scribus all the way (with LaTeX for equations), and I'd imagine if I was doing a game manual, you'd want Scribus. You CAN do anything with LaTeX, but it's generally not worth it for graphics-heavy things like nice manuals.

It can be a bit opaque, but there are some great tutorials out there.

 

[marshal]

++ to Scribus. LaTeX and friends are dynamite for writing documents (I use LyX when I can to help deal with LaTeX, but do all my articles and presentations with LyX/LaTeX), but they aren't what you want to use for pretty graphic layout. When I have to do posters for conferences, it's Scribus all the way (with LaTeX for equations), and I'd imagine if I was doing a game manual, you'd want Scribus. You CAN do anything with LaTeX, but it's generally not worth it for graphics-heavy things like nice manuals.

It can be a bit opaque, but there are some great tutorials out there.

+1

If you need to diverge a lot from the basic layout and want something graphic-heavy latex might be a bit hard to use. I use Lyx quite lot and it's really nice but I usually just use the default template with a few modification. Same for presentation I use one of the template that comes with Beamer.
I think you'll need to understand latex code and take a good look at the documentation if you want to do a lot of customization.

I've never used Scribus but I have head it's a good piece of software.

 

[Awakening]

I have added both Scribus and Inkscape to the port request page on the wiki. Together with GIMP they should make a nice package. I wonder how well they will preform on the Pandora considering the screen size and hardware. Will be playing around with Scribus and perhaps the other two this week.