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My personal roadmap for Scribus 1.6

By a.l.e on 2012-08-06 14:00
[Scribus]

Recently, I've been asked several times, what the plans are for the release of Scribus 1.6. While I'm not aware of a detailed roadmap, I feel that there is a tacit consensus on two goals:

• start the stabilization phase around the beginnings of automn 2012 and release Scribus 1.6 at some time in spring 2013.
• get some more usability and productivity improvements into Scribus 1.6

This been said, here is a features list that I -- from a UI and productivity point of view -- wish, that could make it into Scribus 1.5svn before it gets into the stabilization phase:

• one single status bar (I'm working on it)
• split of the Properties palette in Content and Frame palette (Jean is working on it)
• get the Content and Frame palette to be context sensitive (Jean is working on it)
• work on the UI/UX aspects of the new palettes (can partially be done during the stabilization phase)
• create guides based on the selected element (a script?)
• make the search dialog non modal
• replacing text in the whole document (Cezary is working on it)
• footnotes (Cezary has almost finished the work)
• style based table of contents (Cezary is working on it)
• complete the undo (Pierrick has been working hard on it)
• complete the new Scripter (Jain is working on it)
• variable text markers (date, document title, ...; Cezary is working on it)
• keyboard shortcuts for styles (Cezary is working on it)
• a smart hyphen at the beginning of the word should avoid its hyphenation (Cezary is working on it)
• support character styles when importing text
• keep basic formatting (italics, subscripts and superscript...) for text imorted from .odt and .html files
• recognize italic and bold as such
• export to epub (I'm working on it)
• a better handling of click through the layers (I'm working on it)
• partially clean up the toolbars (Claudia is working on a proposal)
• a more consistent (and pleasant?) icons set (Vladimir is working on it)
• import PDFs into the current file and avoid opening them as a file
• protect the guides from the master page from being edited on the page
• right clicking on the overflow box should show a context menu
• option to "remove the overflowing text"
• (items below added, or promoted from 1.8, on September 26)
• a solution for simple imposition (Jos is working on it)
• support for indic languages (Anil is working on it)
• bullet lists (Cezary is working on it)
• shortcuts for styles (Cezary has made a patch)

Lot of thinkgs to be done in the next two months! But most of the features described above are already quite advanced, so I still hope that my dreams come true!

While compiling the list above I had lot of ideas floating in my head, and -- for sure -- not all could fit in. So here some ideas about I would like to see in Scribus 1.8, if they don't magically make it into 1.6:

• clean up the toolbars
• unified ressource manager (styles, colors, fonts ...)
• unified transform tool (size, rotation ...)
• unified content loader (Pierrick is working on it)
• new UI and interaction for editing the shape
• improvements to the Preflight verifier
• a more logical palette of colors (choosing among RGB and CMYK as a default for the document)
• more work on the concept of master pages
• frame styles and other types of styles
• better support for the typographic grid (allow the descender to extend outside of the frame; calculation based on the margins and the baseline grid)
• finish the work on the new text layout (ScribusOIF branch...)
• an interface for managing the typographic color
• create an info panel
• allow layers to be local to a (master) page
• links as text and frame properties
• apply formatting on several selected items
• adding a path for fonts in the preferences should load the fonts without needing a scribus restart
• attach font directories to documents (optionally relative paths)
• allow relative paths for external ressources (images, fonts; probably with a contraint that they must be in or under the directory containing the .sla)
• check if the (improved) fancy gimp input/slider box can and/or should be ported to scribus
• headless scribus
• more granular display refreshing and multithreading
• better, on canvas, editing of path's nodes
• align and distribute for nodes

After having compiled this list, I've also been asked what bothers me most when working with Scribus and I would see being fixed in 1.6. Here is my personal "egoistic" list:

• guides on master pages should not be editable on the page
• a style palette with non modal "editors" (but i'm not sure we should do it for 1.6)
• finishing the pdf import
• getting the experimental tag away from the PDF embedding
• complete the new scripter
• and fixing the importing of italics, sup and sub.

Finally, since I've started compiling this list, slightly more than a month ago, several things have improved in Scribus and not all of my requests still match the reality... But this will be discussed in future articles!

Grafiklabor am 5. August 2012 > Grillieren im Garten

By a.l.e on 2012-07-26 10:30
[Grafiklabor]

Wenn das Wetter stimmt: Dieses Mal wird's wirklich einen Outdoor-Labor sein!

Wir treffen uns

am Sonntag 5. August
ab 14 Uhr
bei Ale im Garten
an der Spatenstrasse 23
in Zürich

und grillieren zusammen.

• Freiwillige Anmeldung auf Doodle
• Anfahrt
  • Velo: Klar, kein Problem!
  • ÖV: Zum Bahnhof Oerlikon mit dem Zug, Bus 61/62 Richtung Schwammendingerplatz bis Friedackerstrasse (oder mit den Trams 10 oder 14 bis Salersteig)
  • Meistens hat's viele freie Parkplätze vor der Türe
• Mitbringen: Etwas zum Essen und/oder zum Teilen (bei Gelegenheit in den Notes auf Doodle angeben, damit am Ende nicht alle das Gleiche teilen möchten...)
• Ein paar Dinge zum Besprechen: Wie sollen wir mit dem Grafiklabor im Herbst weitermachen?
  • Einerseits: Möchte jemand ein Thema im Grafiklabor präsentieren?
  • Anderseits: Mir ist aufgefallen, dass im (sehr)Grossraum Zürich fast mehr Entwickler wie Benutzer wohnen:
  • Sollen wir Workshops organisieren, die direkt die Entwickler ansprechen?
  • Welche Themen würden euch interessieren? (Programmierung? Grafik? Projektmanagement? ... ?)

Ich wünsche euch noch ein paar heisse Tage!

a.l.e

P.S.: Falls es regnet, hat es genug Platz in unserer Stube.

Fighting the Scribus' blurred border

By a.l.e on 2012-07-19 15:00
[Scribus]

One of the big small whishes that have been expressed for Scribus at the last LGM has been to fix that blurred gray border around the unselected frames that have not border set.

During the "coding" workshop at the RMLL Cédric and Guillaume tried to set that line to a 1px. Always. But they didn't manage to find the place where that line is defined.

With a bit more time at hand, I've also tried with Guillaume to find it. And I was ready to write this blog report to tell you how much better we failed this time.

We went a step further, we found that the "unselected" lines are defined in PageItemTextFrame::DrawObjDecoration and the selected ones in CanvasMode::drawSelection(). We could change their color and thickness, but could not really fix the blurring.

And then I started to write this blog post, prepared some small frames for a screenshot and what did I discover? If I move the frame with the arrow keys there is no blurring!

Now: this is a path worth to be followed!

Grafiklabor am 8. Juli 2012 > SVG Fonts

By a.l.e on 2012-07-05 22:25
[Grafiklabor]

Ein zweites Mitbringsel aus dem diesjährigen Libre Graphics Meeting: In Wien hat Claudia den "Colorfont" Workshop von Ana und Ricardo besucht. Sie wird uns beibringen, wie wir auch farbige Schriftarten gestalten können.

Wir treffen uns

am Sonntag 8. Juli
ab 14 Uhr
im Dock18 (Rote Fabrik)

und erforschen die Welt der bunten Schriften.

P.S.: Falls die Sonne scheint, wird es ein Outdoor-Labor sein!

Grafiklabor am 10. Juni 2012 > Gimp

By a.l.e on 2012-06-07 21:11
[Grafiklabor]

Das Libre Graphics Meeting ist vorbei – vier Zürcher waren in Wien dabei! und eine bereut es immer noch, dass sie nicht mitgefahren ist... – und ich habe wieder ein bisschen mehr Zeit für das lokale Engagement.

Lassen wir uns also vom Geist vom LGM inspirieren: am Sonntag 10. Juni ab 14 Uhr widmen wir uns den Gimp!

• In Wien haben wir die Gimp-Entwickler die ganze Nacht im lokale Hackspace (http://metalab.at : allein die Reise wert!) eingesperrt und das Resultat war, die Veröffentlichung von Gimp 2.8 (stimmt nicht ganz, aber hört sich gut...) Wir schauen also, wie das Programm nun aussieht und was es jetzt neu kann!
• die Gimpers waren echt fleissig: Gimp 2.10 könnte ziemlich bald (in Freie Software Zeiten...) erscheinen. Schauen wir was die Pläne da sind! Und probieren wir aus, was es schon kann...
• Im Metalab, hatten wir eine grosse Überraschung: wir sind auf Amir gestossen, der Autor vom – bis vor kurzem unveröffentlichten – Gimp Plugin, dass mit Bilder und Bildbearbeitung Musik spielt! Wer möchte mitmusizieren?
• Joao hat mir ein Gesellschaftsspiel aus Brasilien mitgebracht: alles mit Gimp gezeichnet! Falls wir noch Zeit haben, packen wir es aus und probieren die Regeln – klar, auf Brasilianisch – zu verstehen!

Ich wünsche euch eine wunderschöne Woche und ihr seid alle am Sonntag im Dock 18 willkommen.

Warming up for GSOC 2012

By a.l.e on 2012-03-17 11:00
[Scribus]

Scribus has been accepted for the GSOC 2012 and several guys (girls where are you?) are popping up and ask about how to get confident with the Scribus code.

Here are some short facts to get you up and running.

First: get the Scribus code and compile it!

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Before doing this: you will have to make sure that:

you have a working and modern Linux.
you have to pull all the dependencies: if your on Debian you can run apt-get build-dep scribus, for other distributions you will have to read the Getting All the Things You Need chapter in the Scribus wiki.
you have a src/ and a bin/ directory in your home (which i will call "yourhome" in the rest of this article).

Some remarks:

For your contributions you can also use Windows, OS X, or almost any other operating system; but for your first steps the easiest thing is Linux; believe me.
The repositories on Sourceforge are not all up to date. For now you should use our SVN repository, but for the GSOC project itself you will be able to use what you prefer (git, hg, ...).

The second topic is: how to talk to "us"!
"We" are mostly in Europe and have a normal day job keeping us busy during day hours. Even if some of us keep an eye on the #scribus irc channel on Freenode for most of the CET day, the best time for a chat are CET evenings between 20:00 and 24:00.

If you have a proposal to submit or questions that didn't get answered in the irc channel, please register to the scribus-dev mailing list and post your question in there.
Third: How to get your feet wet.
On the one side you will probably be curious, to know what it's like to write code for Scribus and on the other side seeing how you program, will help us to choose among the GSOC candidates. We have a bug tracker where we have lot open issues (and even more closed ones!). Skim through them: you will get an idea of what are the hot topics.
If you feel overwhelmed -- and it's likely that you feel that way after having had a look at the bug tracker -- here is a list of issues you could try to solve:

Guides jumping around on mouse click (learning about the canvas)
Keep insertion mode after inserting glyph (a bit harder)
Some Edit Boxes trigger an action on every user keystroke (more Qt oriented)
Horizontal scroll sometimes not there for main window (more GUI oriented)

And once you have some code to show:

 

and upload the diff file to the bug tracker!
Finally: I wish you good luck with your application for GSOC 2012!
P.S.: Ff you get a segmentation fault when launching Scribus, please install qt-config and change the theme used for the Qt apps.
... and as a challenge to our GSOC candidates: you may want to look for the cause of it, fix it or get Scribus to notice that there is a problem and gracefully quit (not before having shown an alert indicating what the user should do)
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