Hi Inkscape developers,
I teach computer science in France (in this school: http://www.polytech.upmc.fr/version-english.html ) and my fourth-year students are required to work on a project for a few months (2-3 months), for about 2 days a week. Instead of asking them to do "random" projects, I would like them to (try to) contribute to open source projects.
In particular, I would love that they contribute to Inkscape.
We have three main constraints in the choice of the project: - be do-able by 2 students in a few months; - be a challenge interesting enough to provide work to 2 students for a few months; - include a design phase (understanding the topic, asking questions, designing a planning, find algorithms, etc.) and a coding phase (this excludes code cleaning, documentation, bug-fixes, etc.).
Ideally, I would like the students to be mentored by an Inkscape developer who could answer their questions and give some directions; I'd like a least to be sure that the project is interesting for inkscape developers. You can think about this like something similar to the Google Summer of Code. The main difference is that we don't really select candidates so the students may not be very good and the project can obviously fail; but sometimes they can also be very efficient and motivated!
I've checked the google summer of code page (http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Google_Summer_Of_Code). The import/export code might be interesting to try with them. The font designing idea and the ICC support migh also be cool. Are these proposition still up-to-date? I'm of course open to other ideas.
Something I was thinking about: I often use Inkscape to design posters and I'd really like to have an option to use the Knuth-Plass algorithm and hyphenation (at least in English). I know that they're not in the SVG specifications but this could be only for pdf exports. Another feature which would be useful is to be able to link text blocks (as do Indesign and Xpress) [again, this is not in the svg specs]. This would make an interesting challenge for our students.
What do you think? Would some of you be interested in helping us? What task would you suggest? At any rate I need your help to calibrate a task (or several tasks) so it's not too hard but challenging enough.
Thank you and merry Christmas.
Best regards,