Hi Emanuele,
Since I don't know the Inkscape code very well at all, these are mostly grammatical comments. Hopefully they'll help a little though. I'm currently struggling to learn Esperanto (one of the simplest languages), so don't take my comments on your excellent English too harshly ;)
On Wednesday 08 Jun 2005 11:33, Emanuele Aina wrote:
This is the proposal: i'd be glad if anyone would proof-read it, just to check my english... :)
======================================================================== Emanuele Aina <emanuele.aina@...400...>
Inkscape: Break out the canvas to a widget
Create a GTK SVG canvas widget based off SPCanvas, to allow other projects to easily make use of an SVG canvas.
Currently the widget used in Inkscape to display the SVG document is very tied to the editor, and cannot be used indipendently by other
"is tightly bound to the editor" might be a little better. also, "independently"
applications.
The focus of this project is on the extrapolation of this canvas widget in a separate loadable library, eliminating the need of the entire
"to a seperate..." I would probably write "library module", just to emphasise that you're modularising code, which is always a good thing in its own right :)
Inkscape codebase to use it.
This will provide to the open source community a fully functional canvas widget with SVG semantics, making it easier to reuse and embed in external applications.
As Inkscape provide a simple SVG viewer, Inkview, the first target of the project will be to provide a widget for it. When this will be functional the widget is going to be also integrated in the main editor.
If you mention these as actual deliverables, it may make investors more willing to put money into it. So, something like "The project will provide, in two seperate stages: a) ... b) ...")
Right now I've set up a simple autotool'ed package to host the new library, but I'm going to start working seriously on this project at the beginning of July, because June is still exams period here.
My name is Emanuele Aina and I'm a student at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy. I've already worked on some open source projects, writing some years ago the run-parts applet for busybox (http://busybox.net), writing with the current Gedit mantainer an experimental system for the spell checking in GNOME (not yet released), and implementing a new generic syntax highlighting engine for GtkSourceView (temporarly hosted on the CVS of GtkSourceView on SourceForge, awaiting for a merge in the CVS HEAD).
I'm not sure if Google are aiming to attract *new* people to FLOSS development with this SoC thing. If you can find that out, it may help you to know whether it's a good idea to include that previous experience. But, of course, experience would hopefully always be considered a good thing.
Good luck!!