Monthly newspaper publishing

[mderen]

Hello.
I currently am using Serif PagePlus 5 to develop a new monthly newspaper in tabloid size. Some questions:
1. Will Scribus be a better software to use for generating the publication?
2. The publication will vary from 32 to 48 pages monthly, color and black and white pictures with articles and columns, including display, as well as classified, advertising. Will Scribus handle these easily?
3. Will Scribus put out the necessary fonts, etc for the commercial printer?

Thanks

[Nermander]

I can't answer question one, but I start with number 3:

Scribus can create a PDF with fonts embedded, subset or created to outlines so that the printer will not need to get the fonts separately. So if the printer can handle PDF everything should be ok.

As for question 2 you can have a look at Scribus success stories in the wiki: http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Template:TOC_Success_stories


Edit: Removed left over quote.

[leaf]

1. Will Scribus be a better software to use for generating the publication?

I don't think so. But it depends.

2. The publication will vary from 32 to 48 pages monthly, color and black and white pictures with articles and columns, including display, as well as classified, advertising. Will Scribus handle these easily?

Scribus can works with pages, cmyk, grayscale photo, columns, text styles. Is better in this matter (national hyphenation, short words, and can place ready pdf, eps advertising without interpretation as linked file, can works with overprint vector objects)
PP has more advanced text options - import character styles, import doc and docx files, regular expression, mail merge, tables etc. Scribus does not support drop shadows.
In big documents Scribus works slow, but Scribus users sometimes works with documents where are even about 400 pages.

3. Will Scribus put out the necessary fonts, etc for the commercial printer?

Scribus can embed fonts in pdf.

My vote: PP 65% - Scribus 35% but sometimes Scribus will be better.