[Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP

[Maxwell Bowerman <Maxwell Bowerman auroraenergy com au>]

Guys,

I have a few ideas for GNOME that I would like to share with you,
particularly in regard to the area of DTP that is an emerging area for our
desktop.

Firstly though, a negative.  I wish to lobby strongly against the Windows
XP-style start menu proposed by Novell:

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=13589&comment_id=93581

This appears to be a definite step backwards for us.  The current system is
much better.  Do other people share this sentiment?

With regard to DTP, it would be great to see a GTK or Mono application in
the future.  Through we now have Scribus under QT, there is still a notable
lack of applications in this area.  The fact that Scribus is not bundled on
the install disks of many distros (though it is not downloadable from some
repositories) shows that this area is still nowhere near being taken
seriously enough, at least by those compiling distros.

As GNOME is reminiscent of MacOS in many ways, particularly with regard to
look and feel, would it not make sense to carve a niche in this area.  MacOS
has always been the premier platform for this area due to its usability, so
surely GNOME could extend this?

An actual app for DTP is only one aspect though.  GNOME would need a colour
management system such as ICM or ICC and easy calibration.  

I understand that GIMP's lack of CMYK support is a widely known issue that
has been on the agenda for rectificaiton for some time.

A colour picker is also an essential applet, such as the KDE tool mentioned
here:

http://dot.kde.org/999851854/999881767/

Finally, has thought been given to supplying perhaps a selection of clipart
as part of the GNOME desktop, as s imple value-adding feature.  Perhaps even
a separate disk ISO could be supplied for download, containing a mixture of
high quliaty generic images and fonts.  (I imagine that this would depend on
how broadly you define the extend of your "Desktop" project to include such
things.)

In essence, though these are major things to add, they would certainly
improve GNOME's usability as a viable alternative DTP system.

One thing I touched on above was the fact that the QT-based Scribus is
rarely supplied by default with many home user distros, such as Fedora,
Linspire and Ubuntu.  There is an option to download but this can be
impractical/impossible for those without high speed network connections.
This attitude also limits the extent of GNOME applications available.  In
particular, Blue Fish HTML editor and SodiPodi vector graphics application
are also not included on installation disks, menaing that two GNOME
applications with potentially large markets are overlooked by many "newbie"
users.  I would argue that HTML editors and vector graphics applications are
too important to be marginalised like this; they may be niche applications
but they could harldy be said to have small niches.  Could the GNOME
community lobby the distribution compilers to include these on the install
disks/ISOs that are sent out?

Thanks for your time reading this.  I look forward to your responses.  No
flames, please!  I love GNOME and have just started to play with 2.14 last
night and I am learning things about it all the time.