Re: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

[The recipient is not subscribe to the list, you should probably CC him.
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On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, Maxwell Bowerman wrote:

> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:40:04 +1100
> From: Maxwell Bowerman <Maxwell Bowerman auroraenergy com au>
> To: "'usability gnome org'" <usability gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP
>
> 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 ...

<snip>

> With regard to DTP,

[Acronym: DTP, DeskTop Publishing]

> it would be great to see a GTK or Mono application in the future.

Funny you should mention it, I was just trying to compile Passepartout
http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout/
If you are a developer I am sure they would love more help.

> Through we now have Scribus under QT, there is still a notable lack of
> applications in this area.

It would be a lot of work to develop and maintain any fully featured
Desktop Publishing software.  I'm impressed how Scribus has been sucessful
in generating interest and getting people to help out.

I do not always use only Gnome applications and Scribus seems to be a
really great application.  I look forward to a time when Gnome
applications and KDE applications can look properly integrated on each
other.  If you look at Microsoft Windows there are applications written
with many different toolkits and they manage to achieve an adequate level
of consistency (mostly).

> 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.

The developers of the GNU Image Manipulation Program do not consider it a
GNOME application.  Best that I not comment on it and you discuss it
directly with their developers.

> Finally, has thought been given to supplying perhaps a selection of clipart
> as part of the GNOME desktop, as s imple value-adding feature.

I have contributed some artwork to OpenClipart.org and the project is
growing, almsot too fast for the developers and site managers to keep
up with. (Hopefully they will have a new release soon.)

Gnome might benefit from some kind of a "clipart chooser" dialog and
do some nice integration but it is really up to distributions
to include OpenClipart.org so please do file a request with your preferred
distribution.

> 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.

I'd be surprised if future versions of Kubuntu didn't include Scribus, I
guess all you can do is ask more distributions to include it.

> There is an option to download but this can be impractical/impossible
> for those without high speed network connections.

One alternative is to buy magazines with the software on cover disks
(which is how I got my first copy of Red Hat).
If there is a Linux User Group (LUG) in your area perhaps someone else
with broadband internet access might even be kind enough to burn a
CD for you (which is how I got a copy of Ximian Gnome).

> This attitude also limits the extent of GNOME applications available.  In
> particular, Blue Fish HTML editor and SodiPodi vector graphics application

Inkscape is quite popular and is being included by more and more
distributions.  [Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, it took the
Sodipodi codebase in a different direction.]

> 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?

In the past Gnome has not overtly lobbied for distributions to include
specific software, in fact many (most?) distributions replace the default
Gnome Web Browser Epiphany with Mozilla Firefox.
However if an application is actively maintained and integrated part of
Gnome it is less likely that a distribution would bother replacing it with
an alternative or leave it out.

> I love GNOME and have just started to play with 2.14 last
> night and I am learning things about it all the time.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/