OpenPublishingToolsOrganization
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The Open Publishing Tools Organization (OPTO)
This idea comes out of a discussion online with MRDOCS, about the need for Open Publishing Tools to unite and develop some sort of presence so that printers understand that there are other tools that are being used, other than QUARK, PHOTOSHOP, ILLUSTRATOR, and INDESIGN. There are other issues too that need to be dealt with, such as PANTONE's monopoly over the color industry. A project idea that OPTO could commission is/are open swatchbooks, which could be sold for the price of printing them (standard color formulas for printers) and could be downloaded as PDF files as well.
Initial Applications that would fall under OPTO:
- Scribus
- Ghostscript
- Inkscape
- CUPS
- The_Gimp
- GIMP-Print
Open Swatches
pastels, grays, coated, uncoated, Web, sheetfed, Web Offset, metallics
Font Management Software (like suitcase or atm)
It should be relatively easy to slap together a GTK+ frontend for fontconfig that will allow the management of fonts, loading of new permanent and temporary fonts for a system, and then run 'fc-cache' to update a desktop to the new fonts installed. This is very necessary for designers whom work with MANY fonts and need to be able to load new ones without restarting their system. Commandline is not the most user-friendly for this type of task.
Scribus, has a capability to package up all the images and layout files into a separate directory, which can then be tarred. Would be nice if the fonts could be managed in a compatible fashion. Already, packaging fonts is in the Scribus tracker as a request.
For everyday installing, this is not needed with KDE, as of 3.2 it has KIOslave for fonts: fonts:// linked to ~/.fonts and a previewer for individual font faces. It works really well. Gnome has fontilus, but I have less experience with it.
Perhaps focus should be on packaging with files (The_Gimp and other image files, Inkscape files and Scribus layouts) and making it easy to restore, files and fonts on other machines..
Scribus has added preliminary support for The_Gimp integration in 29022004 1.2cvs. This allows a user to launch The_Gimp to edit an image from within Scribus and edit the file with return to Scribus after saving changes. Would be a nice option for Inkscape.
--mrdocs
Rendering Engine Consortium
- Mozilla
- Cairo
- Inkscape
Specifically, discussion of these topics is coming out of an IRC chat with the developers of Mozilla SVG, Cairo graphics, and our people.
As ISHMAL puts it:
(00:09:47) ishmal: moz does need a x-platform renderer (substite OS X/Win32/Linux/etc for x) (00:10:03) ishmal: cairo does need users (00:10:20) ishmal: we (eventually) will use cairo
I think we need to look at our project as a triumvirate between Mozilla, Cairo, and Inkscape, or Viewer, Engine, and Editor. Once SVG is rendered out-of-the-box in browsers, that will drive the use of Inkscape. --rejon
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