msevior@...79... wrote:
Very True. I get warm fuzzies when I look at the millions of direct download stats for AbiWord on sourceforge. Most of the direct downloads come from Windows users. But a large fraction of our developer strength is in Linux/GNOME. We have these sort of dependency arguments in AbiWord frequently too. But the bottom line is, with a good Windows installer (we use the NSIS installer ) it's not that hard to package up what you need for Windows. We also have the luxury of having a GTK-only build as well as a GNOME build which provides the full bloat^H^H^H^H^H power of the GNOME desktop to the user.
Our aim is to steal lots of that experience from you :)
I suspect that at some point you'll also have to address the question of whether you want inkscape to be gtk-only or have GNOME (and/or GNOME-Office) integration. (Or even KDE integration given the way things are going on the inter-op front.)
Already covered: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?InkscapeInvariants
"Gtk-based user interface following the standards set out in the GNOME HIG"
Hmm what about things like drag and drop from file-managers/ or WWW documents? Users would expect to be able to drag images from their file browser and drop them on their canvas. If we get the technology we're discussing below correct, users could drag arbitary document types onto inkscape which would convert them to SVG via GNOME_office apps and edit them in inkscape.
Maybe this could be all done via extensions.
Speaking of dreams... I saw on your roadmap importing of different doc types like ps and PDF. I'd love that. I wish I had more free cycles to help but AbiWord is a big enough project to always completely consume my devel time.
From the GNOME-Office perspective we're very interested in your ideas for a SVG rendering lib and ...
what's wrong with librsvg?
It doesn't do text. It doesn't print. We also want an SVG rendering backend for GNOME-print because want to make SVG representations of our documents (think print to ps or PDF) so they can be easily be embedded and combined other apps whether GNOME-office apps ie (AbiWord in Gnumeric or Gnumeric in AbiWord) or other apps like scribus, inkscape or on the WWW. Embedding via SVG representation is the easiest way to achieve XP integration. A lot of the technology in inkscape would be useful to our cause. Cairo is another possibility although it's not XP.
Cheers
Martin
njh