GSoC 2009 Scrapbook

Craig Bradney
Craig Bradney, a.k.a. MrB, has been a developer of Scribus since before 1.1. He has a background in computer science, and commercially in ERP development, programming and IT management. He currently works in desktop and datacenter support in Europe. He supports the Scribus servers, manages the majority of the websites, helps manage the project and codes whenever possible.

Jean Ghali
Jean Ghali studied image processing after two years learning mathematics and physics. He started coding in various languages such as Visual Basic, Java and C++ with an emphasis on color management. Now he is employed by a printing and publishing company as a pre-press engineer. While performing a technology survey, he discovered Scribus. He performed a port of Scribus to Windows, and his porting work also led him to develop the Scribus printing system on Windows. Since his work on the Windows port, Jean Ghali has mostly been involved in improving Scribus color management and SVG import capabilities. His working plans include color management abstraction, improvements to Scribus graphics capabilities, as well as PDF and XPS export.

Andreas Vox
Andreas Vox has a background in mathematics, object oriented programming and software architecture. While preferring Java, he's now primarily programming Scribus in C++. He has ported Scribus to OS X Aqua (PPC) and has been providing binary snapshots of Scribus/Aqua for anyone wanting to try out Scribus on OS X. Currently, he is bringing Scribus's text system to the state of the art. Future plans include major improvements to the text layout system, a new LaTeX mode, better tables, better XML integration and more code refactoring.

Peter Linnell
Peter Linnell has been a US-based, IT business, and pre-press consultant since 1998. From the early days of Scribus development, Peter has been testing Scribus in real world pre-press environments and helping to guide design and features for Scribus. With the formation of the team, he acts as the release manager, helps manage the infrastructure, tests output quality, writes core documentation, and handles much of the external relations with other teams and groups.

Oleksandr Moskalenko
Oleksandr (Alex) Moskalenko encountered Scribus when he was looking for Linux software to produce a poster for a scientific conference. Realizing that the Scribus package in Debian was very buggy and its maintainer inactive, Alex took over the maintenance of the Scribus package in Debian, which eventually led to his becoming a Debian developer and later a member of the Scribus development team. Alex has been contributing bug reports, interface translations, and some development infrastructure improvements such as writing scripts for producing Scribus interface translation statistics, providing a support IRC bot for #scribus and related channels, performing user support, maintaining an upstream repository for a number of Scribus and related Debian and Ubuntu packages, and making minor commits to the Scribus code base.

Backup Mentors

Riku Leino
Riku Leino started his involvement with Scribus development with version 1.1.5. He wrote the Document Template plug-in and the new OO/HTML/ importers for 1.2.2. He works in IT support.

Petr Vaněk
Petr Vaněk started with Scribus 1.1.4. He is a plug-in specialist, having written several Scribus plug-ins and the HowTo for Scribus plug-in writing. Currently he's mostly working on some of Scribus's internal modules and the Qt4 port. He is maintaining discussion forums at the new Czech Scribus portal.

He is an IT consultant and database developer for a telco/finance IS.

Petr is working on other OSS projects as well – mainly used for DB development or administration, like TOra, Oraschemadoc, and Sqliteman.

13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
All of our mentors are members of the Scribus core development team. Beside their familiarity with the Scribus code they possess other qualities that are useful for successful development of this type of software:


 * Familiarity and experience with pre-press technologies
 * Knowledge of the existing Open Source technologies that are applicable to desktop publishing
 * Experience in mentoring junior coders, possibly from an academic environment
 * In-depth knowledge of user requirements

We made sure that only those members of our development team who would be able to dedicate sufficient time and efforts to mentoring of GSoC students and had excellent communication abilities were selected for the mentoring team.