On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 13:06, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Yeah, possibly, although I haven't really gotten a big impression about the marketing approach. Also, we seem to be getting word out about Inkscape at about the "right" pace - not too much, but enough to keep interest and new developers up.
Yes. You're doing all the right things are many people are very impressed.
The notion of being part of Gnome Office was just because there was no 'Creative Suite'. Really it makes most sense to have Inkscape and the Gimp work well together.
*Nod* Yeah, you're right, interoperability is important with other applications, and we especially want to be able to communicate well with the other graphics apps. We've been moving in that direction with things like file formats and investigating SVG incompatibilities, so hopefully this'll get a lot of improvements.
The whole idea of a Creative Suite is so much about branding and packaging that it is almost meaningless in a linux distribution. If you are selling your software packing all together and offering a bulk discount to keep users on your less popurlar products by leveraging the better ones makes sense. If you have gone to the trouble of integrating things it makes sense to use that to help market your product, but of course when you are not heavily marketing your product it is moot.
Yeah I think you have a good point - suites make sense from a marketing perspective when you're selling the software, but in our situation most of the apps are included with the linux distro anyway. I'm really more concerned about being excluded just because a given user thinks, "Oh, I'm going to use OpenOffice so I'll unload all these GnomeOffice apps."
MS Word and Open Office both have integrated drawing capabilities for their documents.
I have ideas on how inkscape and librsvg could be used to achieve even more powerful capabilities. (I'm not talking about forking or even putting in much in the way of feature requests except as outlined below. Just using it as you guys improve it.)
SVG lies right in the middle of our post GNOME-Office 1.2 roadmap.
gnome-print already provides an SVG backend that will distributed as part of the GNOME 2.8 release. So every app that uses gnome-print can produce SVG post GNOME-2.8
You should expect a flood of requests to import the SVG it produces :-)
I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite.
Yeah of course, I guess I've made to much of a minor issue.
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either).
Yeah you're right, we do need to put attention to that. I'd actually like to see if there's a lower level set of standards to connect to... It'd be great if we could do these things in a way that's not Gnome specific but that would work equally well in KDE or generic X environments.
I suggest you look at drag'n drop and copy & paste if you haven't already. GNOME and KDE have agreed on the former and the X11 mechanism is well documented. AbiWord will happily import any SVG you put on the clipboard now (albeit by converting it to a png) but in Abi 2.4 we plan to keep it as SVG and to make lots of SVG available for pasting.
Cheers
Martin