+
+
+ > Is this Adobe InDesign? What is it doing that the free software
+ > alternatives can not offer?
+
+We run a journalist education. One of the very few non university
+ones that is ok:d by Svenska journalistförbundet, and that gives the
+pupils the right of membership there, once they are done. (Important
+if you want to get a job.)
+
+InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
+magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
+market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
+world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
+to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
+are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
+edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
+there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
+
+We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to the
+radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
+Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
+Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more openminded. We have
+tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
+program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
+studio. Its way to complex and the gui is to scattered when you only
+want to cut, make passovers, add extra channels and normalize. Thoose
+things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
+have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
+fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
+one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequentlly
+because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
+sound file.
+
+So, I am not sure we will succed in replacing even Audition, but we
+will try. Problem is the students have certain expectations when they
+start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to look
+and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many programs
+out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised as
+Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what program
+they learn, because once they start working they still have to learn
+the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn the
+editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
+