Re: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Liam R E Quin wrote:

> Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 01:19:47 -0500
> From: Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>
> To: Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>
> Cc: Maxwell Bowerman <Maxwell Bowerman auroraenergy com au>,
>      "'usability gnome org'" <usability gnome org>,
>      Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP
>
> 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.

> Quark Passport is probably the right level to aim at.

I know what Quark Xpress is (or was, In Design seems to have largely
supplanted it) but I didn't know what exactly Quark Passport was.

Here is a short description:
"QuarkXPress Passport software is a complete, fully functioning version of
QuarkXPress that includes additional features for multi-language
publishing."
http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/passport.html

Passepartout seems to be the work of two developers who wanted desktop
publishing for a magazine they were putting together but are no longer
working on so development is very slow now.  Finding a small niche might
be a better bet than more ambitious targets, ideally polishing and
stabalising what is already there and getting out some kind of a 1.0
release.  I'd say that goes for most projects.

> 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,

Make that seven! ;)

'Passe par tout' French for pass through all, and the name of Phileas
Foggs manservant in Around the World in Eighty Days.  It doesn't exactly
shout out that it is intended for Desktop publishing but most project
names don't imply their purpose.  Thankfully the website makes that
abundantly clear.

There are plenty of projects with worse names, at least it isn't offensive
and they don't slap their project branding all over the place making it
harder to remove.  (Incidentally if there is anything in the style guide
which recommends against including PROGRAM NAME in all over the place
I'd love to know.)

I think it would be a good idea if more programs could abstract out their
name a little bit, they might actually need it later, it just seems like
best practice.  Look at projects like Firefox (formerly Phoenix amongst
other things) and Ekiga (formerly Gnome Meeting which was a fairly good
name), two of which both ended up changing their own names.

> and (2) be made not to crash very often (maybe that has already been
> done?), and

Given help that should be possible.  In theory at least fixing what is
already there should be easier than adding whole new functionality and is
a task which lends itself to being broken up into much smaller pieces.
Perhaps we could offer passepartout a place in Gnome bugzilla?

> (3) accept AbiWord and OpenOffice's OpenDocument files by default and do
> something plausible with them?  Or does xmlroff need some love?

I'd be surprised if either the Abiword or OpenDocument formats were well
suited to the kind of precise frames based layout one would expect from
desktop publishing software but support for those formats would be great
(not that I'm volunteering to implement it).

Now if I could just get Passepartout to compile...

-- 
Alan