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Desktop Publishing: Scribus (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, ...)
What can Scribus or any DTP system can do that LaTeX/TeX can't? I haven't heard of DTP, QuarkXPress in 20 years. I'm surprised they're still relevant today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund? Our culture loves…
> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right? What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is…
If anything per-customer support costs go way up in a SaaS situation because of the (mostly artifical) introduction of having to run the software on your own servers.
There needs to be some sane solution in between Sketch and Photoshop/Illustrator. The former is a little too simple, the later becoming byzantine and crazy expensive.
One of several reasons I left my first job out of college is that the boss made me remove the ability to cancel a subscription from our web application. I thought it was pure jackassery to make people call and then try to wheel and deal to keep them on, but it did make a surprisingly real difference to the bottom line. No doubt something similar is at play with Adobe. Personally, I'm not sure I'd be opposed to a law…
As a consumer, I loathe any company that makes it difficult to cancel.
As the owner of a business management platform, we've found that more than half of our cancellations are due to lack of knowledge.
The product is fairly complex and has hundreds (possibly 1,000) settings that cover just about any customization a business in our niche could want. People don't want to learn or read documentation, so we offer one on one video calls with our team to support configuration.
The cancellations come when they forget about the (free) one on one time and get frustrated with all the configuration.
The way we handle cancellations is to follow the "don't be a dick" policy. When a customer requests cancellation (a single email to their acct manager) we remind them about all the resources they still have available and offer to chat with them to see if there's a workable solution for them. If we don't hear back within 1 day, we process the cancellation and refund.
Flash forward to ~9 months later and I try and cancel the plan on chat again. The agent says I'm on a yearly plan and would be penalized for cancelling. I insist I'm not, and ask him to check the previous chat log. He says there is no previous chat log, just a summary left by the previous support person that says I agreed to it.
I start disputing this, and then the support agent literally starts copying and pasting quotes from the previous chat I had, despite insisting such a log didn't exist. I call him out, tell him to refer to the part in the log where I verified I asked if I could cancel at any time. Agent went quite for a few minutes and then promptly agreed to terminate my monthly payments with no penalty.
I was flabbergasted. How toxic must Adobe's corporate culture be to foster this kind of pressure on sales people?
Can't you just... call your bank and tell them to reject any payment requests from Adobe? It puzzles me to see so many people in that thread saying they've been charged for months and can't stop it... if that happens to you, your problem might be something else...
I'm a custom software developer, mostly e-commerce, and over the years I have been asked numerous times to implement similar schemes. The most popular is a recurring payments, such as for health supplements, that you cannot cancel on the web site. Not a broken system, but just no way to do it. You have to contact them via email. And many of them have a unspoken policy of not cancelling on the 1st, or maybe even the 2…
The fraud chargeback code is supposed to be reserved for transactions where the card holder did not participate and are used for training a variety of systems. Everything from product like FICO Falcon that is used by card issuers to detect fraudulent transactions to databases that are used to detect compromised systems. Adding a lot of bad data decreases the performance of these systems and makes it easier for fraudster to operate.
Correctly disputing the transaction will get the same result and also makes it easier for supervising banks to identify the problem and either get the merchant to resolve the issue or take the merchant down. When they are incorrectly coded as fraud the supervising bank will often go after the merchant to tighten their fraud systems rather than addressing their behavior (bad business practices).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Adobe CC products don't run on Linux? Think before commenting!
You don't need Adobe Cc on Linux if you're going with one of the alternatives. And both Gimp and Inkscape are Linux applications, GIMP is even part of the GNU suite!
What? Even if you wanted to, you can't use Adobe CC on Linux. Doesn't run. So these aren't alternatives, they are your only options. It's not that "Linux gets no love", it's that Linux simply doesn't apply in this case, because nobody who's currently using Adobe CC is on Linux.
It gets even worse if you need to do subscriptions for your team. The management console is an utter joke. Adobe owns some of the killer apps of the creative industry but there are alternatives: Photo editing (Photoshop): - Windows: Gimp, Xara Photo, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo. Paint.net - macOS: Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Gimp Vector editing for digital (Adobe had Fireworks but abandoned it, Illustrator is rather…
Desktop Publishing: Scribus (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, ...)
However, Scribus comes nowhere close to InDesign. Here are several basic things I require from a page-layout application if it's going to be any kind of competitor to InDesign:
1. Work in picas and ems, not inches. (Inches are fine for specifying page sizes, but beyond that, picas are the standard in typography.)
2. Be able to zoom arbitrarily. Scribus doesn't seem to support zoom levels more than 400%, so I can't work with even medium-sized text at all accurately.
3. Be able to easily set kerning and tracking on arbitrary text. The Scribus manual caims this is possible, but mucking around with the latest dev version (1.5.3), I couldn't figure out how to do it. (I did really well at totally fucking up my layout just by scrolling, through. Scribus is a bit too response in some ways.)
4. Be able to use OpenType features. Apparently Scribus 1.5.4 will include some of that. But to a typographer in this century, OpenType is essential, not optional.
Apologies to the Scribus developers, but being told that it's a capable publishing app is a bit like a C programmer being told that BASIC should be just fine for them -- hey, they're both programming languages, right?
And yes, I've attempted to use TeX (and LaTeX, and ConTeXT, and XeLaTeX, and...) to do high-quality typographical work. It's possible, but the amount of effort to undo Knuth's poor aesthetic choices (not to mention interface with archaic architecture) is significant, and frankly, not worth my time.
Grumpy typographer is grumpy.
It gets even worse if you need to do subscriptions for your team. The management console is an utter joke. Adobe owns some of the killer apps of the creative industry but there are alternatives: Photo editing (Photoshop): - Windows: Gimp, Xara Photo, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo. Paint.net - macOS: Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Gimp Vector editing for digital (Adobe had Fireworks but abandoned it, Illustrator is rather…
Indeed. Quit Adobe like a drug and never looked back. I am fortunate enough to have a personal license of CS6 Master Collection but rarely use it. The people that are really stuck are graphic (non app/web) designers because InDesign is the standard and there are no viable replacement...yet. Adobe and Autodesk are both examples of "too big to fail" and it is only a matter of time before some company(ies) come along an…
But folks have been saying that for years and also pointing to the open-source alternatives as done here and it has just gotten worse with CC.
For individual people, that have to retrain and use things as they wish, open source stuff works. If I proposed that sort of move at my company, I would get laughed out of the room. It's too entrenched as an "industry standard", even though every user I comes across curses various products at least a few times a day. As a desktop/application support person, I have to spend an inordinate amount of time daily helping figure people (on $3-5k workstations that can handle advanced 3D modeling) what new thing f'd up. CC being installed alongside our previous CS6 license has made this worse.
I don't think any investor would risk the money it would take to take on Photoshop/Illustrator replacements and whatever would be created would not only need to allow users to work flawlessly with those file formats but meet the baseline of tools, UI, and stability (though the latter might not be as hard). I'm not well-versed in all the possibilities out there but, like Autodesk, I think this is an extremely difficult monopoly to break.