SoC2007 application

About Your Organization

Describe your organization.

Scribus brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOSX, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

The immense complexity of Desktop Publishing is exemplified by the current state of the commercial market where the vast majority of installations are dominated by only two programs that while having enormous developmental resources behind them still seem unable to address a number of things correctly. Due to the complexity of the DTP workflow, the development of Scribus requires primary allocation of our developmental efforts in the areas with the highest return for our users. This creates unfortunate conditions where some useful smaller projects are placed farther down the roadmap. Participating in the GSoC 2007 will allow us to address these shortcomings while allowing participating students to gain valuable experience designing and coding the solutions that will have immediate practical applications for DTP professionals and amateurs alike. Our hope is that the incentive that GSoC provides for students may motivate some of them to become involved in Scribus development and that they will carry on this activity after the completion of GSoC 2007 thus expanding our team and making the only open source DTP program even better.

Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects.

Not in 2005. In 2006, Riku Leino participated in the Finnish GSoC.

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

n/a

Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

Oleksandr Moskalenko <moskalenko@gmail.com>

What license does your project use?

GPL

What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/SoC2007_ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#scribus on Freenode

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

• Name / University / current enrollment information.
• Biographical sketch.
• Did you ever code in C, C++ or Python? Please provide examples of code.
• Do you use Scribus? Please provide examples if you do.
• Do you make other use of Scribus than for laying out articles? please describe and show examples.
• Were you involved in Scribus development in the past? What were your contributions?
• Were you involved in other OpenSource development projects in the past? If yes, please tell us project, when and in what role were you involved?
• Why have you chosen your development idea and what do you expect from your implementation?

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@gmail.com>

About Your Mentors

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information.

Andreas Vox <Andreas.Vox@googlemail.com>

Craig Bradney <cbradney@gmail.com>

Peter Linnell <mrdocs@gmail.com>

Riku Leino <tsoots@gmail.com>

Petr Vaněk <nekrokodyl@gmail.com>

Oleksandr Moskalenko <moskalenko@gmail.com>

Backup

Jean Ghali <darth.scribius@gmail.com>

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

• familiarity and experience with the prepress technologies
• knowledge of the existing open source technologies applied to desktop publishing
• experience in mentoring junior coders, possibly from an academic environment
• in depth knowledge of user requirements