Beside DTP, or something to do the DTP job, a production cycle like GNUzilla's needs tools for graphic editing. Bitmap graphics are generally an easy job for GIMP, but at the time when GNUzilla was started, Inkscape was not good as it is today, and Xara Xtreme was not free. The first vector steps in GNUzilla magazine were made with Sodipodi, a program that the Inkscape crew forked. Sodipodi was useful, but full vector graphic power usable for GNUzilla came with the rapid development of Inkscape, which we use today. Basic examples of the use of vector graphics include GNUzilla's logo. As Inkscape started to be a more and more advanced tool, GNUzilla's visual identity matured, thanks to the talented people inside the project. GNUzilla also received a donation from one of the readers in the form of a mascot, a friendly smiling GNU/dragon, unofficially called "Milica". Milica was vectorized totally by Inkscape.

GNUzilla uses Inkscape for vector graphics, including Milica the dragon mascot.

The initial way of producing PDF file was used for many issues, before OpenOffice.org Writer got an adjustable PDF export environment that started to make reasonably good result. After the issue got prepared in Writer, we printed to file as PostScript, then converted to PDF by using the ps2pdf console tool to convert PostScript to PDF using Ghostscript. This way PDF's had an optimal relation between size and quality. After OOo improved its PDF exporter, we abandoned this process, and now make PDF's are directly from Writer.

Workflow

Being a community project, GNUzilla's main goal considering workflow is to save the contributors' time as much as possible. Templates are available to authors who want to prepare article directly in OpenOffice. Otherwise, authors send articles to editors in plain text or other document formats with proper formatting. In other words, authors are free to make the article however it works for them. The OOo template is preferred, but it's not an requirement. Editors do any needed technical editing if necessary, and then send the articles to proofreading. This way, proofreaders get the final version in the sense of technical content. After the articles arrive back from the proofreaders, they go to prepress, and after the PDFs get done, editors take a final look before making it GNUzilla available for download.

Their majesty, stats!

GNUzilla has existed for almost three years, and it is being read in all countries where the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian languages are understandable. Most authors are from Serbia, but almost all countries in the region have had representatives among GNUzilla authors.

Until now there was not any professional statistic analysis that might give accurate information about the number of readers. According to log analysis on the servers, GNUzilla magazine was downloaded 6,000 times per issue in average, which means 174,000 total downloaded PDF's. This information includes only the official download server and mirrors, with no stats from several sites that host GNUzilla PDF's too. It is very hard to make an approximation about number of readers, since GNUzilla can be legally shared. On the other side, readers might have reasons to download one PDF several times, so, as it is mentioned, this issue still requires professional statistic analysis.