Passepartout-dev wrote:
Collaboration with Inkscape has been suggested before and it certainly makes a lot of sense, though I don't think merging the programs is a good idea.
Would you like to share your reasons why not?
We(a bunch of inkscape devels) think that by building multiple frontends on the inkscape code base for different application types we can make a more unified application set, and that it can be done with less programmer-hours. Having a look through the passepartout source, I think you would benefit greatly from our expertise with several things - much better canvas system, a powerful document tree handling system, superior maths core, better h-n-j and of course support for import and export of vector graphics.
On the cons side, we don't handle any dtp type file formats yet, don't support multiple pages, have poor support for linking to multiple documents (no interface in particular), terrible printing support (being addressed) and clearly no direct interface for working with dtp documents.
I think your team could easily provide that expertise for inkscape - we have talked about doing it ourselves, but you have obviously battled and overcome several difficult problems in your work. A possible route would be to start sharing the common subsystems, and leaving the two applications separate. Another idea would be to start adding passepartout's tools to inkscape and merging the code base.
I think the latter is probably more efficient, and would be a significantly innovative step in the world of DTP and illustration.
Inkscape seems to have a very nice version of the gnome canvas, more capable than the vanilla version, which I'm not even sure has a maintainer.
We do, and we've been slowly working on building a separatly buildable library for use by other projects such as passepartout.
I don't know if Pango has much to do with the font support in Inkscape. Inkscape can convert fonts to Beziér curves. I don't think it could do that without reading the font files. We'd like to know how it manages to find out what font files correspond to which fonts in X.
A few of our developers have been working on using pango and found it is not entirely suitable for drawing programs (and for similar reasons, DTP programs).
We haven't been in touch with any of the Inkscape devs though.
Hop onto the jabber channel and have a chat! We love to chat!
njh