On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:42 AM, Donna Benjamin wrote:
I may have missed it... but is anyone here involved in this?
Advanced PDF export plugin for Inkscape http://www.indiegogo.com/Advanced-PDF-export-plugin-for-Inkscape
Just curious if this is coming from within the community, or anyone within the community knows about it - or it's a totally independent initiative?
The person who started the initiative contacted me last week re publishing news about it at inkscape.org, submitted a news item to LGW (currently not approved for reasons listed further) and wrote an announcement at inkscapeforum.com.
In a nutshell:
- cost of the project seems to be well underestimated (more on it below) - we know nothing about expertise of those two companies who agreed to do it for $800 - noone contacted the team to discuss the project - the person who runs the kickstarter has been pointedly ignoring the requests to contact the team
Personally, I'm not doing anything until I see some sort of respect for community. No, wait, I tell a lie. Actually, if it hits OMG!Ubuntu or whatever, I will have to publish official announcement that we have nothing to do with it, and this is a 3rd party effort we are not affiliated with in any way imaginable.
Now, about the cost. Back in 2008 when there was a slight chance to put some money into Inkscape development by Russian government I spoke to several developers in the team, and bulia estimated cost of this very project via Cairo as ca. 30K. That's at least half a year of work for one person and I dare say it's a very real estimation. Color management and color separation are hugely complicated things.
It is entirely possible to not do it via Cairo. For instance, Scribus has a custom 8K line large C++ library, so while they do use Cairo fro rendering things on dsplay, for PDF exporting they use that library. Using some custom solution is still few months of work, and the Cairo way is better in the long run, because we have more applications like GIMP that would benefit from it (v2.8 will be shipping with a Cairo based PDF exporter that only does RGB).
Overall, you need to have a very good understanding of prepress technologies to implement correct color separated output. In my absolutely not humble opinion anyone who claims to be able to do that for $800 either has no clue or is laughing at someone else's expense. And since the person who started the initiative does't even want to bother himself talking to actual Inkscape developers, personally, I see no reason to get involved.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org