Joining GNOME Office

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

Inkscape developers!

I'm in the process of developing the new GNOME Office portal.

There's has been talk of GNOME Office applications requiring a quality
SVG canvas.  Your roadmap suggests that, at some point, you intend to
separate out an SVG canvas from the Inkscape codebase.

I also notice your plans for a clip art extension.  This would also be
an excellent tool for other GNOME Office applications.

GO already contains arguably the best available spreadsheet application
in Gnumeric, one of the leading word processors in AbiWord, and an
excellent data(base)-agnostic backend in the Gnome-DB project that is a
unique facet to GO.  We are looking to include Conglomerate (advanced
XML editor), Mergeant (database management), and Planner (project
management) as well as Inkscape.  The increased collaboration and code
re-use could produce an office suite to be reckoned with.

Inkscape is becoming the leading SVG editor.  I am in a position of
ignorance (not a coder or a projcet lead) but I firmly believe there is
a desire from the GO team to include Inkscape among GO or, at the very
least, make use of some of the excellent functionality provided by
Inkscape.

Perhaps Inkscape could make use of the advanced editing capabilities of
Conglomerate or other facets of GO?  There is libgsf, libgda, libgnomedb
and the planned libgoffice (emerging from Gnumeric).

I know not the details nor how any of this would be accomplished and
indeed parts of it is mere speculation by myself.  I can only humbly
invite some (or all!) of you to join the GO mailing list in order to
begin discussions with the more technical members of GO with regards to
what GO and Inkscape can do for each other:

http://lists.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-office-list

In the potential GO application list, we have a distinct selection of
potentially (if not arguably) best-of-breed applications.  If they were
to collaborate then who knows what exciting prospects the future might
hold!  But first the respective project leads must be prepared to look
months or even years ahead in terms of planning and setting goals.

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon!
-- 
- Charles

Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
Online @ http://www.charlietech.com