A Look At Xournal
Denis Auroux's very popular and respected desktop publishing software has been for some time now available on the Open Source platform. In fact, he claims that Xournal is much more usable as a free program than competing programs like Adobe Acrobat or Open Office. He also claims that Xournal has better features and versatility than other similar products. Some of his key selling points include a powerful tile engine, a WYSIWYG editor, multiple templates support and a powerful package manager. Most people who have used the program have found that the biggest weakness of Xournal lies in the simple fact that it is not yet ready for mass production.
The tile engine of Xournal that Auroux mentions in his review seems to have an issue with the glyph management. This can be easily corrected however by installing the PyGtk2 widget from the distribution. This little gem will allow you to create beautiful looking menus using your own widgets. The PyGtk widget that is required by Xournal will make things easier for you if you are like somebody who wants to create beautiful looking menus for your Xournal application like something along the lines of something from Microsoft Word.
The other thing that I liked about this point is that the author says that Xournal has had extensive testing and that the final release is bug free. With that said, it does seem like the software has seen quite a few updates over the last few months. I have also noticed that one time when I tried to launch the program, it took a few more minutes than normal and it seemed to freeze up several times. By the way, it took me almost eleven months ago to try and get this program running on my laptop!
