Re: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:27 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:

> About six months ago I took a look at Scribus.
> I needed to make a simple mockup of a page design for
> a book: fairly standard DTP work.
> I couldn't do it, because of things such as lack of
> snap, a box model I couldn't fathom, and ugly fonts,
> though the last isn't Scribus's fault.
> Sorry to be negative, but speaking from experience,
> it's not yet at the level of Aldus Pagemaker in the
> Windows 3.1 days.

No, although I think it has antialiasing these days.

Neither Linux nor Gnome have font management worth a
damn... gfontview is the best font viewer, but it is
unmantained now I think, and there is nothing like
Suitcase on the Mac in the 1980s.  Yes, 80s.

I've wanted to do something in this area for several years,
but I really don't have the right sort of time to devote to it.
We did get some fonts donated, and Jim & Keith's work on
fontconfig was a good step forward.

Quark Passport is probably the right level to aim at.

Then there's printer support, colour management, workflow
management (e.g. keep track of 821 journal articles and
what state they are in, when I need to bug the authors or the
proofreaders, whether files have been checked, etc etc),
prepress checking ("preflight"), e.g. are all necessary fonts
included in this PDF, and if not, do I have rights to include
them?, we're probably about 20 years behind.

Having said that, the right approach is not just to follow,
but to innovate in a different direction.  E.g. can
passeportouot (1) be given a name more than 6 people can
remember, and (2) be made not to crash very often (maybe
that has already been done?), and (3) accept AbiWord and
OpenOffice's OpenDocument files by default and do something
plausible with them?  Or does xmlroff need some love?

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org