[Techtalk] PrintShop-like programs for Linux?

[Akkana]

Andrea Landaker writes:
> I was wondering if anyone knew of any PrintShop-like programs for Linux -- you 
> know, the kind where you make your own greeting cards, posters, banners, etc. 
> with cool word art and graphic effects and things.  Any programs I can find 
> to reduce the frequency of my Windows-rebooting are great.  :-)

I love projects like that, but for most of it I just use gimp.
It's great for taking pictures and adding various text and graphic
effects (for text I like the gimp-freetype plugin best, since it does
a better job than the standard text tool at handling lots of different
truetype fonts).

For labels, I use gLabels: http://snaught.com/glabels/
which is probably the most windows-like of the linux printing programs.
It does a nice job on simple stuff like address labels, or for
printing a sheet of "Powered by Linux" penguin stickers to stick
on machines in place of that nasty sticker they come with.
They recently came out with a new release, which sounds like
it has lots of cool new stuff, but I'm not sure whether the new
features are in the gtk2 version (which is hard to build, requires
extremely current gnome2 everything) or in the gtk1 version (which
should build virtually anywhere if you have libgnomeprint).

For cards, I just print directly from the gimp, drag and resize the
image so that it occupies the lower half of a US-Letter sheet, and
print onto some sort of nice heavy photo quality paper.  I made
lots of silly holiday cards this year.

If I want a bunch of little images (e.g. printing many small tattoos
onto inkjet tattoo paper) I just make a big gimp image with a white
or transparent background, then paste my images all over it and
print the single large image as a sheet.

For CD labels, I wanted better resolution -- gLabels doesn't print at
photo quality, or at least I haven't figured out to make it do that --
and I ended up writing a couple of gimp plugins for designing CDs,
and a patch to gimp-print which lets it read a label template file
and position and scale the image correctly for your Avery 5931 labels
or whatever.  Details here: http://shallowsky.com/software/cdplugins/

With all this stuff, I usually save as .xcf (gimp's native format)
with lots of different layers (e.g. on the tattoo sheet each tattoo
is a different layer), so I can edit it at some future time and easily
make changes.  My favorite gimp tutorial is the book at gimp-savvy.com
(I was clueless about using layers prior to reading that book, but
it turned me into a gimp addict).

I actually find all of these easier to use than PrintShop -- I bought
PrintShop in a weak moment back when I was still doing my printing from
Windows, and found it tiresome to fight with all its cutesy templates
to make it do what I wanted rather than what it wanted.  I'm much
happier under linux where I have full control.  But that's me. :-)

	...Akkana