On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Charles Goodwin wrote:
The ideas for how Inkscape might possible 'integrate' with GO are just that... ideas. There is no desire, I'm sure, for Inkscape to be forced into using GO or AbiWord or Gnumeric libs just for the sake of it. Any ideas were only suggested with the best of intentions, as something that could potentially help the Inkscape project. There was certainly never an intended compulsory nature to any such thoughts. (Perhaps it was me being a bit gung-ho and dreamy about GO in the future that made you think it was so.)
Ah, that could be that it's just miscommunication, but I did definitely get this sense from a few sources. For example, Jody's recent comment about judging worth based on "use of GNOME Office technologies" seems to imply this as a requirement.
On multiple occasions I've heard the idea of an 'Art Suite' posed. The idea generally identifies Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, and perhaps one or two other tools such as Blender or Dia. The rationale for making them into a suite revolves around improving interoperability including cut and paste, common file formats, etc. Note though that several of these apps are not GNOME apps (Scribus is Qt, for example). Also, we haven't really talked about this much with the other apps. But this is an idea we've heard much about.
Inkscape could be in multiple 'suites'. Why not be in GO and a separate Art Suite? It's just extra marketing for Inkscape. Everybody wins. ;)
Actually, I have some doubts about the marketing value of suites, but who knows. ;-)
To me and others I've chatted with about it, the primary benefit to an Art Suite would be that it would serve as a vehicle to coordinate interoperability between the participating applications, and as a way to explore sharing of widgets and file format code. Of course, such sharing can occur regardless of whether the apps are in a suite - that's just plan open source good sense. :-)
At one point someone identified Inkscape as a possible presentation component for GNOME Office. It is certainly true that people have used Inkscape's 'Inkview' component for doing presentations - I myself used it for my OLS presentation. But I don't think there's any desire to turn Inkscape into PowerPoint! ;-)
I think the idea was to use Inkscape as a basis, not for Inkscape to be the actual presentation application. Like Inkview except taken a bit further, an adaption of Inkscape. The people, that I'm aware of, who are pursuing a presentation application are more oriented around adapting AbiWord somehow or starting afresh. There is a codebase (a module in Gnumeric CVS, I think) that uses (the soon to be) libgoffice.
I've also spoken with Keith Packard and Carl Worth about an SVG presentation tool that they used at OLS, that iirc is part of xsvg. The cool thing about it is that it supported a stylesheet approach that made editing the presentation in a text editor very easy. The downside was that it requires a lot more coding before it could be generally useful.
Thanks, Bryce