page layout and other adobe "types" of programs
 

I don't do a whole lot of work with this type of stuff, so I am looking for some suggestions..

Last week I wrote out my first resume and now that I need to edit it..I see hours of layout going to waste. I realized that this task would have been much simpler in an app like pagemaker or something similar. I see no reason why I should use windows, much less pay for crappy software that isn't even worth stealing.

SO what do you guys have to suggest? Free and opensource alternatives..I need to do some page layout, conversion to and from pdf's..etc.

thanks!

To convert your stuff to .pdf, your best bet is OpenOffice. It is really a great piece of free software. Be very careful with two things:

1 - If you need 100% compatibility wiht MS Office, say, exporting your resumè as a .doc, OpenOffice can mess thing up and when somebody tries to open it with MS Office, everything will look like... well... you know, different :). In this case you will have to use MS Office either booting into Windows or trying to run under Wine or Crossover Office.

2 - Since you are using Gentoo, don't try to emerge Open Office. I did it and the time it took is not even worthy. Get the binaries ;)

There's nothing for Linux as Adobe Pagemaker yet. Adobe started a project for Linux called Framemaker, but is has been cancelled:

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/fmlinux.html

thanks for your reply. I use openoffice quite alot...at least as much as I need an office suite for. I am pretty gentoo fluent..so yes I stayed away from the source.

Unfortunately a pdf converter is sort of second on my list, though I apprectiate your point; I didn't know openoffice could convert pdfs.

Anyway..I can't believe there are no page layout apps - or something similar - for linux. I thought I'd ask here, I didn't know if I had missed some great app (it happens a lot..hehe)

Does anyone have some experience with this sort of thing? All I really want to do is being able to put text in specific boxes and laying out the overall look of the page. I would also like to then convert the result to pdfs.

Thanks~