From ICommons wiki

Within the NGO-in-a-Box Open Publishing edition, Desktop Publishing will focus on tutorials and software bundled together to allow organizations to prepare material for both print and web-based publication. Simple tutorials should be included with the software, and software should be aimed at both high-end and low-end computer systems and people with some knowledge of using word processing tools. Tools should cover a range of uses, such as AbiWord for simple processing, as well as more complicated tools like Scribus or OpenOffice.

(Note: tools make sense w.r.t. what you are going to use them for: this page should include also real-world examples and tutorials, for instance 'How do I make a logo?', 'How do I make a banner?'...)

[edit] Design and layout

Scribus

Description: Probably the best known open source Desktop Publishing program.

Comments: I use it and enjoy it very much. It's available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, so it'll be easy for our users. The worst thing about it is it's lack of documentation. I know of a long French tutorial, but nothing in English.

Technical Level: There can be a substantial learning curve, especially for people who have no experience in desktop publishing.

Site: http://www.scribus.net/

Plaftorms: all platforms

Resources:

• Screenshots
• Documentation:
  • Get Started With Scribus
• http://wiki.scribus.net

[edit] Scientific and technical publishing

TeX

Description: A technical but effective language for all things publishable.

Comments: Some say TeX is essential for high quality publishing, especially when it comes to technical documents with equations, graphs, and so on. The biggest problem so far is that all TeX downloads seem to be gigantic (400+ mb), making it impossible to fit a lot of other content on one CD.

Technical Level: Difficult, but in a rewarding way.

Site: There are numerous resources. See below for some.

Plaftorms: all platforms

Resources:

• http://www.miktex.org/ - MiKTeX
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#External_links - Wikipedia's External Links page has numerous resources.
• http://www.fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp/kakuto/win32-ptex/web2c75-e.html - W32TeX seems to be the smallest distribution.

Lyx

Description: Lyx is a graphical user interface for LaTEX

Comments: Lyx allows to edit and compile LaTEX documents in a more user-friendly way

Technical Level: middle

Plaftorms: all platforms

Site: http://www.lyx.org

TexShop

Description: another graphical editor for LaTEX on Mac OS X

Comments:

Technical Level: very easy to use

Plaftorms: Mac OS X

Site: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html

[edit] Printing tools

pdftk

Description: Let's you join, split, encrypt, and apply other basic modifications to PDFs.

Comments: A good tool for people who don't have access to Adobe Acrobat or other advanced PDF tools. When combined with export functions in software like OpenOffice, it can be really powerful.

Technical Level: The biggest downside is that it is a command-line program, so it may be difficult for some people to use it. The documentation included with the software is pretty dense and difficult to read.

Plaftorms: all platforms

Site: http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

psutils

Description: command line tools to create books

Comments: book printing from PostScript documents

Technical Level: middle

Plaftorms: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows with cygwin

Site: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ajcd/psutils/index.html

Resources:

• http://www.pjls16812.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/psbook/index.html