GsoC 2010 Scribus Team Application

Questions:

1. Organization Name: (required)
2. Description: (required)
3. Home page: (required)
4. Main Organization License: (required)
5. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating? (required)
6. Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. (required)

If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. (required). Add a Comment (optional):

If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (required)

What is the URL for your ideas page? (required)

What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2010. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. (required)

What is the main IRC channel for your organization? (required)

Add a Comment (optional):

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2010 site. (required)

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible: (required)

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? (required)

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? (required)

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? (required)

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? (required)

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team? : (required)

Add a Comment (optional):

Backup Admin (Link ID):

Answers:

1. The Scribus Team
2. The Scribus Team includes the core development group and an ever larger circle of code, translation, testing, and user support contributors located on every continent who cooperate to develop Scribus – Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2, and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Scribus provides professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, color separations, ICC color management, versatile PDF creation and pre-flight verification, and a python scripting engine. In the Linux/UNIX and OS/2 worlds, Scribus is the only professional-grade Open Source Desktop Publishing Software, and on Win32 and Mac OS X, Scribus is used by an ever increasing number of professional, as well as demanding amateur users.
3. http://www.scribus.net
4. GPLv2 or later
5. Desktop Publishing is a very complex process that requires a well-working workflow with its pinnacle being the layout software. This complexity is reflected in the commercial market dominated by two software companies with no interest in platforms other than Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X that are often not responsive to customer input. Without Scribus there would be no Open Source desktop layout on alternative platforms, and the ability of people in the developing world and users of Free Software to produce professional level documents would not exist. Scribus grew out of its humble beginnings as an application for making restaurant menus into an impressive piece of software that rivals products with huge budgets and large vendors behind them. However, because of the high complexity of DTP workflows and the capacity limitations of the development team, the development of Scribus is targeted to the areas with the highest return for our users, whose input is invaluable. Unfortunately, this means that smaller projects end up with lower priority on the roadmap (http://bugs.scribus.net/roadmap_page.php). GSoC is our best opportunity to attract developmental resources to address these useful smaller projects, while allowing participating students to gain valuable experience of designing and coding solutions that will have a practical use for thousands of DTP professionals and amateurs empowering people all around the globe as our growing list of user success stories shows (http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories). The dynamic of Scribus development is such that there is a constant feedback loop between many of our users, including professional ones, and the development team. This means that GSoC student participants will get support and advice from top-notch DTP and pre-press professionals, as well as our entire core team, not just their assigned mentors. Moreover, participating in GSoC 2010 program would give us an exposure to a large field of potential contributors who would have an incentive to get over the entry barrier to Scribus development to complete their GSoC project and hopefully become interested in being a part of our team as two previous GSoC participants have already done.
6. We participated in GSoC 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Our GSoC 2007 participants added math formula editing support via LaTeX frames – and a basic imposition (booklet printing) plugin. Both projects were completed successfully. GSoC 2008 brought in a new generation python scripter, a universal vector import UniConverter filter and GraphicsMagick integration plugin, and a well-polished picture browser to Scribus. GSoC 2009

What we perceive as the major success of our GSoC 2007 participation is that Hermann Kraus not only successfully completed his project, but continued to contribute to our project and eventually went on to join the core Scribus development team. He is currently actively working on generalizing and extending the support for other markup languages (like graphs, musical notation etc.) in Scribus. After completing GsoC 2008 he has been working on the UniConvertor and GraphicsMagick integration. Henning Schröder, who also participated in GSoC 2008, is now a part of our core team. He continues to improve the next generation of the scripting engine to be included in the next major release of Scribus.

A hugely positive outcome of the GSoC 2007 was that we went through the learning curve without major problems while learning a lot about selecting students, managing mentor-student communications and expectations, and finding problems before they turn into major obstacles. This allowed us to streamline the GSoC 2008 selection and mentoring processes and achieve a 100% success rate in our second year.

Our main challenges were all related to the communication difficulties between students and mentors and student personality issues. In one case in 2007, development time was lost due to a student's withdrawal when confronted with coding problems. This may have largely been due to the student's personality, but our mentors and administrators should have identified the problem in less than the two weeks it took to straighten out the issue. In 2008, a couple of the students had problems connecting with their mentors on IRC due to the time differences and network access difficulties, but they were able to switch to email and to use it in a productive manner in conjunction with subversion branches. Fortunately, we had a supporting infrastructure that helped continue the flow of code and reviews. With the experience gained from our first two years of GSoC, the team collectively is enthusiastic and feels confident about our success in 2009, provided we qualify once more.