ScribusInteroperability

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This page is outdated. It is kept for historical reasons, e.g. to document specific decisions in Inkscape development.


This will serve as a page to discuss Inkscape's interoperability with the SCRIBUS Desktop Publishing App.

Meeting 02

Update 01:09:2004

A second meet is planned for 19 Sept 2004 0800 UTC, pending acceptance by Inkscape devels. Scribus Team has been mailed already.

Preliminary Topics List

  • SVG import/exports.. Where are we.. what's broken, what's works
  • Further cooperation.. I suggested we could help first with beginning lcms support in Inkscape, its easier.. and it will get my butt in gear to finish the openicc paper
  • Give inkscape folks some clues for what we are working on for 1.3+
  • Can we work on a complementary set of keyboard shortcuts? Inkscape has loads and they work well
  • Now 1.2 is done, a good lookover by the Inkscape UI folks at Scribus wrt to Usability. This is the perfect time to do this type of study.
  • Scope out perhaps some help with them for EPS import/export. Maybe they could pinch Franz's EPS/PS import code and write it as an external module for inkscape.
    • As aside note, I'll encourage Suse to add Inkscape as part of their 9.2 distro
--Mrdocs



Meeting 01

Updates 04:30:2004

  • A number of import bug fixes have been made to Scribus SVG import. Bulia's text features have drastically improved text import. More work is planned before 1.2 is released. New SVG rendering code has dramatically sped up import and display of SVG objects.
  • Things that would help:
    • Somewhere some notes on the differences between "Plain SVG" and Inkscape native formats.
    • We have added Inkscape links to the home page of www.scribus.net and added news items for each Inkscape release, as well as annoucements to the mailing list.
    • Scribus needs more sophisticated gradient handling. It is on the roadmap. This would be the last major shape or object barrier.
    • We cannot forget color sets. Scribus now has four included.


Initial Meeting Plan

Bryce from Inkscape and I, MRDOCS, worked out some preliminary stuff on the initial meeting to happen on IRC, server irc.freenode.net.

We'll do it on #scribus-dev. Inkscape members can be invited from #scribus

Best times considering where Inkscape developers live are: US/Eastern Sat 1-2 am EST; US/Pacific Fri 10-11 pm PST; Central Europe Sat 7-8 am CET; Australia/Melbourne Sat 5-6 pm AEST.

We decided Sat Feb 28 06:00:00 UTC 2004. (Try date --date='2004-02-28 06:00:00 +0000' to convert to your timezone.)

Let's have a definite start and finish time. Uncovered subjects can be done at a later date. 1 hr MAX!


Preliminary Topic List

1. SVG Text - What sort of issues need to be resolved in order for SVG Text import between Inkscape and Scribus to work better? What steps could be taken to get us moving in that direction?

2. Shared Color Names and Sets - Is it feasible to have a set of common default color names or color sets, that could be standardized between Scribus and Inkscape? What things could be done to help achieve this?

3. Color Management - Might be premature...but not forgotten.

4. METADATA Support - Inkscape plans to start tagging clipart with XMP (XML/RDF format) info (Author, title, license, etc.) What could we do to ensure METADATA compatibility between Inkscape and Scribus? Could we push our work on XMP into a library that SCRIBUS (and other apps really) could use?

5. Improved Postscript Support - Inkscape's printing support is not as good as users would like. Does Scribus have PS expertise we could tap for questions/advice, or code that we could use in Inkscape?

Since testing Inkscape's first release I have come to appreciate their progress and the way they have managed their whole project. It's a textbook example of OSS. I am very confident collaboration will yield good things for the future. --MRDOCS


Who's Who:

Scribus

fschmid

Franz Schmid - Started coding Scribus in 2001. Commercial Manager in Germany. Primary coder handles all the cvs commits. (Note to Inkscape..Scribus CVS is not public and anoncvs is rsync'd to the Salford site.)

nodoid

Paul F. Johnson - Joined Scribus around 0.8 release. IT manager and lecturer for School of Music - U. Salford UK. Works on code optimization, profiling, code review, patch reviews and code docs. scribus.net is hosted there by his Uni.

MrB

Craig Bradney - Joined Scribus during 1.1 releases. Setup Bug Tracker, IRC channel, handles most of the mailing list/IRC questions, works with Franz on bug triaging and bug fixing. Setting up IT company in Luxembourg. Australian national. Constant presence on IRC :) Helps mrdocs with Scribus website.

Mrdocs

Peter Linnell - Started testing Scribus early on 0.3.7. Professional DTP/IT consultant. Tests Scribus in clients pre-press/service bureau. Wrote most all of the English docs and web content. Works with MrB on bug testing and handles rpm builds. Bugs Inkscape team on Jabber ;)

subik

Petr Vanek - Newest member of Scribus team. Written some useful plug-ins including a plug-in howto, works on adding more functions to the python scripter. Does Czech translation of Scribus and has written some English and Czech docs.

-mrdocs

Inkscape

Anyone else going to attend the meeting? This is off the top of my head...johan, kees

bryce

Bryce Harrington - One of the project founders. Focuses on organizational stuff to try to keep the project chugging along well. Coded the original extension system. Works on getting the marker code hooked up, and helps with bug fixing and code cleanup. Considering writing a lib for better numeric localization 'ftos'.

njh

I joined mental and bryce in the initial planning and setup stages of the inkscape project. As I'm currently trying to finish off my PhD I've only really had time for behind the scenes works, such as rebuilding the mathematics (NR::Point, Matrix etc). My PhD research is on page layout algorithms, which I intend to add to inkscape once I've finished writing up.

bbyak

IANAP (I Am Not A Programmer), I am a usability freak :) All kinds of interface rearrangements and polish, shortcuts and mouse behaviors, documentation, lots of bug reporting and bugfixing. Some new functionality, too; I especially grok the text tool (added kerning and letterspacing) and the node editor.

JonCruz

Jon A. Cruz - Joined right after the initial announcement (Had just had a 'refocusing experience' and was getting going with Sodipodi usage and looking for Open Source projects to join when the notice came out). Has multimedia as well as multiple platform background. Dabbler in Unicode, I18n, UI, Color/Palettes/Patterns/etc., XML, metadata/RDF/XMP, DOM, Animation, Language bindings, Win32 tricks, OS X Usage...

TedGould

Official title should probably be "Jabber chat room heckler" but I also do some development on the side. I initially helped with splitting off the project and I am usually the guy who builds the releases (but really I'm the guy who fixes 'make distcheck' :). I took Bryce's scripting idea and expanded it some and I'm still working on cleaning it up. Everyone agrees that extensions are where Inkscape needs to be going in the future, and that is a target of our next release.

mental

Co-founded the project with bryce, njh, and Ted. Graphic designer by training, but highly proficient in programming and software design. Does a little bit of everything -- if you need to know something about Inkscape's architecture, he's probably the person to ask. He also (tries) to go to bed not too long after midnight, so 1am meetings (in his timezone, EST) are out of the question. Not that he isn't often up that late anyway. :P

rejon (Jon Phillips)

Joined the project right after the initial announcement. His main interest is in promoting Inkscape and linking the project with larger goals through the cleaning up usability, bugs and the implementation of new ideas (mainly the extension system). He is taking a lead on the new clipart project with Ted, Bryce and some sodipodi developers. Tasks: planner, writer, administrative, website, help/tutorials, code cleanup, tester, some work on the codebase.

pjrm

Programmer for constraints-related research; shares office with njh. Mainly cleanup & bug fix work on inkscape so far.

ishmal

sk1p

mrdocs

Meeting Notes

1. SVG Text - What sort of issues need to be resolved in order for SVG Text import between Inkscape and Scribus to work better? What steps could be taken to get us moving in that direction?

Decided to setup SvgTestCases. This is where Scribus and Inkscape developers can look test and compare SVG files. This will mainly be used to coordinate efforts between scribus and Inkscape developers to have consistent display of SVG content. We need to setup an SVG Test Cases CVS Modules

2. Shared Color Names and Sets - Is it feasible to have a set of common default color names or color sets, that could be standardized between Scribus and Inkscape? What things could be done to help achieve this?

Look into this further, but LittleCMS implementation will help smooth between teams.
svg dataTypeColor
colorKeywords
w3 sRGB research

3. Color Management - Might be premature...but not forgotten.

Color Management - LittleCMS


4. METADATA Support - Inkscape plans to start tagging clipart with XMP (XML/RDF format) info (Author, title, license, etc.) What could we do to ensure METADATA compatibility between Inkscape and Scribus? Could we push our work on XMP into a library that SCRIBUS (and other apps really) could use?

XMP and Scribus will follow our lead. JonCruz will look into after implementing basic support and then possibly push work into a library. Decided that how people use their files and rights management is up to the user and not our projects.
adobe xmp info

5. Improved Postscript Support - Inkscape's printing support is not as good as users would like. Does Scribus have PS expertise we could tap for questions/advice, or code that we could use in Inkscape?

Could someone else add notes to PS support. We decided that Inkscape drastically needs import/export of EPS and PDF.
IMHO we could prepare Scribus PDF/PS libraries for Inkscape export (just after quick examination of the code) [subik]

EXTRAS:

scripting - hopefully we can share the same languages, some keywords, etc, swig - any experiences with sip?

Log IRC Log 28022004

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