Chapter 6: Publishing with Fedora and RHEL

Overview

In This Chapter

• Using OpenOffice.org

• Using commercial word processors

• Creating documents with Groff and LaTeX

• Creating DocBook documents

• Printing documents with Linux

• Displaying documents with ghostscript and Acrobat

• Working with graphics

• Using scanners driven by SANE

To survive as a desktop system, an operating system must be able to perform at least one task well: produce documents. It's no accident that, after Windows, Microsoft Word (often bundled into Microsoft Office) is the foundation of Microsoft's success on the desktop. Fedora and RHEL include tools for producing documents, manipulating images, scanning, and printing. Almost everything you would expect a publishing system to do, you can do with Fedora and RHEL.

OpenOffice.org is a powerful open -source office suite available as part of the Fedora and RHEL distributions. Based on the Sun Microsystems StarOffice productivity suite, OpenOffice.org includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and other personal productivity tools. In many cases, OpenOffice.org can act as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office, in both its features and its ability to support files in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft formats.

The first document and graphics tools for Linux were mostly built on older, text-based tools. Recently, more sophisticated tools for writing, formatting pages, and integrating graphics have been added. Despite their age, many of the older publishing tools (such as Groff and LaTeX) are still used by people in the technical community.

In this chapter, I describe both text-based and GUI-based document preparation software for Fedora and RHEL. I also describe tools for printing and displaying documents, as well as software for working with images.