On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Liam R E Quin wrote: > Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 01:19:47 -0500 > From: Liam R E Quin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Joachim Noreiko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: Maxwell Bowerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > "'[email protected]'" <[email protected]>, > Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [Usability] Thoughts on GNOME and DTP > > On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 09:27 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote: > > > About six months ago I took a look at Scribus. > > I needed to make a simple mockup of a page design for > > a book: fairly standard DTP work.
> Quark Passport is probably the right level to aim at. I know what Quark Xpress is (or was, In Design seems to have largely supplanted it) but I didn't know what exactly Quark Passport was. Here is a short description: "QuarkXPress Passport software is a complete, fully functioning version of QuarkXPress that includes additional features for multi-language publishing." http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/passport.html Passepartout seems to be the work of two developers who wanted desktop publishing for a magazine they were putting together but are no longer working on so development is very slow now. Finding a small niche might be a better bet than more ambitious targets, ideally polishing and stabalising what is already there and getting out some kind of a 1.0 release. I'd say that goes for most projects. > Having said that, the right approach is not just to follow, but to > innovate in a different direction. E.g. can passeportouot (1) be given > a name more than 6 people can remember, Make that seven! ;) 'Passe par tout' French for pass through all, and the name of Phileas Foggs manservant in Around the World in Eighty Days. It doesn't exactly shout out that it is intended for Desktop publishing but most project names don't imply their purpose. Thankfully the website makes that abundantly clear. There are plenty of projects with worse names, at least it isn't offensive and they don't slap their project branding all over the place making it harder to remove. (Incidentally if there is anything in the style guide which recommends against including PROGRAM NAME in all over the place I'd love to know.) I think it would be a good idea if more programs could abstract out their name a little bit, they might actually need it later, it just seems like best practice. Look at projects like Firefox (formerly Phoenix amongst other things) and Ekiga (formerly Gnome Meeting which was a fairly good name), two of which both ended up changing their own names. > and (2) be made not to crash very often (maybe that has already been > done?), and Given help that should be possible. In theory at least fixing what is already there should be easier than adding whole new functionality and is a task which lends itself to being broken up into much smaller pieces. Perhaps we could offer passepartout a place in Gnome bugzilla? > (3) accept AbiWord and OpenOffice's OpenDocument files by default and do > something plausible with them? Or does xmlroff need some love? I'd be surprised if either the Abiword or OpenDocument formats were well suited to the kind of precise frames based layout one would expect from desktop publishing software but support for those formats would be great (not that I'm volunteering to implement it). Now if I could just get Passepartout to compile... -- Alan _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
