Free Desktop Graphic Suite

Common interface for graphic programs on the free desktop.

Many artists use several applications in their workflow. This includes using one program for photo editing, one for illustration and one for page layout. To ease the user experience for someone using these apps, consistency in wording, looks and similar working tools needs to be adressed.

The three programs that will be adressed are:

• GNU Image Manipulator Program aka GIMP (bitmap image editing)
• Inkscape (scalable graphics illustration)
• Scribus (page layout)

Common dialogs

Tool consistency

Resources that can be shared:

• Patterns (PNGs)
• Gradients (SVGs)
• Palettes (We need a standard here.) (suggestion: .xml format, based on .ai format (each text line with each colour name and its rgb, cmyk or whatever))
• Clipart (SVG/PNG)
• Icons
• Cursors
• Color Management
• Fonts
• Symbols
• Filters

To help manage these resources it would probably be wise to try and incorporate some kind of Thumbnail Browser into any such suite. Unfortunately there is no obvious choice of cross platform and open source Thumbnail browser.

Feature Requests

There are many features in the GIMP that Inkscape will want to copy such as the Dock Widgets for managing Palettes.

There are also some enhancements to the GIMP like this request for a standard toolbar that would be helpful for Inkscape users.

Links

• Open Source Desktop Forum - a large forum hosted by Nabble on big open source desktop projects such as Gnome, Xfce, Rox, Etoile.

• Article on free graphics software integration

• Achieving higher consistency between OSS graphics applications - Bryce Harringtons article on the issue

• Gnome Human Interface Guidelines

• KDE Usability project

• http://www.openusability.org/

• http://www.freedesktop.org/

• http://developer.gimp.org/standards.html

• Unified icon spec on freedesktop.org

• http://openclipart.org/