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 http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/1.3.x_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.

No.

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

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

Peter Linnell has been a US based IT business and pre-press consultant since 1999. From 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, and handles much of the external relations with other teams and groups.

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 emphasys 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. His porting work also lead him to develop 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. Future plans include color management abstraction, improvement to Scribus graphics capabilities and XPS export.

Craig Bradney studied Computer Science in Sydney Australia, where he was born. After completing his studies he often programmed for fun, but worked in commercial IT environments such as support, development and technical management.When Craig moved to Linux permanently quite a few years ago, he needed a publishing solution and soon came across Scribus and quickly began to get into OSS coding with the Scribus team. Craig has brought many of the public facing tools to the project, such as hosting the bug tracker, wikis, and now all websites. Craig has been editor for the Renault Car Club of Australia for 11 years and for the past 3 he has used Scribus for its bi-monthly magazine. Craig does a variety of coding across the codebase, bug tracking, code cleaning and standardising, as well as management at some levels. Craig now lives in Luxembourg and works as deskside support and a data centre technician.

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 maintainance of Scribus package in Debian, which eventually led to his becoming a Debian Developer and later a member of Scribus development team. Alex has been contributing bug reports, interface translation, and some development infrastructure improvements such as writing scripts for producing Scribus interface translation statistics, administration of an IRC bot for #scribus and related channels, performing user support, and maintaining an upstream repository for a number of scribus and related Debian and Ubuntu packages. Currently, Alex is moving from mainly python/shell to more C++/Qt4 programming to become more involved in Scribus development.

About The Program

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Scribus team has an up-to-date RoadMap of Scribus development. We will work the possible GSoC 2007 projects into our development plan, so if an unfortunate case of student disappearance happens we would be able to reassign our resources to complete the proposed project.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Scribus Development Team has proven to function in a very cooperative and supportive environment. If the involvement of a member or some members of the GSoC 2007 mentoring team will temporarily decline due to unforseen circumstances we have sufficient overlap in skills and willingness for mutual support that would allow us to reallocate mentoring resources without causing interruptions in the GSoC 2007 mentoring process. We also have a backup mentor Jean Ghali who is ready to take over mentoring of a student in case some other member of mentoring group is unable to perform their duties.