ideas for improvement

[a.l.e]

p.s.: it seems that here is a good place for discussing ideas for improvement :-)

[Robby Barnes]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum but have been using and appreciating Scribus for about a year.

I have several ideas for improvements in v. 2.6 when it is finished, but have not been able to figure out where to bring them up. I am not a programmer, but have a lot of experience in communication and in using DTP and graphics software. I think it would be very helpful to have an initiative dedicated to improving documentation and communication between people (programmers and users alike) interested in improving Scribus. Maybe such a thing exists already in English? I am not in favor of creating yet one more forum or wiki, but cannot think of the best solution. Thoughts?

[a.l.e]

hi robby,

welcome in the scribus community.

in my eyes, the most urgent need for scribus is to find out how to get more programming power!

this could happen by defining projects that can be implemented independently from the work done by the team. or by getting companies that use scribus to work together and get programmers to produce and contribute the scribus code they need.

we have currently two running projects that are going in the direction of getting more code produced for scribus:

- the indigoDock project for creating a "working" mockup for the properties palette (https://github.com/nitramr/indigoDock)
- a collaboration with HOST in Oman aiming at improving the support for arabic (and generally non latin scripts).

personally, i'm also collecting drafts for projects descriptions that i hope to be able to integrate in a web platform at the beginning of the next year:

https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-project

since you talk about wikis, scribus has an official wiki and a bug tracker, but both are probably in a state that does not make them a good platform for working on ideas.

generally speaking, the communication in the scribus world is not that bad (of course it could be improved!): the bottleneck seems to be in the ability to transform the ideas into working code.


anyway, here are two ideas for you:

i think that right now, the place where you could most help is by creating content for of a "asknot"  platform:
the current html is here: https://github.com/scribusproject/asknot
and it should work in a way like http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/
kunda (who will fore sure be reading these lines) can give you more details...



another project where we can need help is the new monthly newsletter:

http://impagina.org/newsletter
https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-newsletter/issues

we could need people looking for contributions or writing contributions for it!


those were my thoughts for this morning :-)

have a nice day
a.l.e

[Robby Barnes]

Hi a.l.e and all,

Thanks a.l.e for your description of Scribus needs and suggestions for getting involved.

Like everyone, my time is limited; but I will look into both working on an AskNot platform and contributing to the newsletter.

For the former, I know a bunch of HTML and CSS and am handy with WordPress, but have never done anything with GitHub. If there is some sort of graphical way to build the AskNot I could probably work on it, but if it's all code, I probably would do better working on something else.

I will follow up within the next month as time allows...

All my best,
Robby