[Scribus] Scribus GTK

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 13:56 +0100, brutus wrote:

> I searched through the FAQ and googeld for a while, but can't find
> anything. Is there a GTK version of Scribus? or are some people already
> working on one?

No, and No, respectively. It'd be a huge job - even the internal data
structures are mostly Qt specific (same as many Gtk apps use Glib
extensively). Not only that, but I don't think it'd really gain anything
- In gtk some things are nicer, in Qt others.

> Scribus looks Really promising and while OpenOffice is great, Scribus
> seems to fit some of my needs much better. I was so glad that since
> Gnome toaster is out I finally have no need for the Qt library anymore
> (used it for k3b). It would be annoying to have to deal with it again.

Personally, I'm currently using a GNOME desktop (lower pain-level than
KDE recently, and I haven't got around to installing XFCE4 yet) and
don't find any issues with Scribus being Qt based. It needs hefty de-
uglification treatment because of the default Qt theme when KDE isn't
installed, but after that it's quite fine indeed. 

As for the need for the Qt libs, I can't say I even notice. I'd be
curious to know what issues Qt is giving you.

> Furthermore, I'm often forced to use Windows. Since there's no free Qt
> engine for windows (afaik),

Well, Qt4 will be dual-licenced for Windows, with the GPL being one of
the two options (Cheers, TrollTech!). However, Scribus needs a lot of
porting before it'll be Qt4 compatible. After that, there's a _separate_
porting effort to Windows to consider, involving integration with the
Windows font system, printing system, and no doubt many other areas.
It's a big job... and I imagine the devs would welcome volunteers
(especially if they're willing and able to help with Qt4 compatibility
work).

> It seems I'm out of luck finding a win32 port.

Yup (though IIRC there _was_ some work with Cygwin. I don't know what
the status of that is.) Even the MacOS/X port requires an X server for
1.2.x . Fingers crossed that 1.3 won't, though the gdk-pixbuf stuff
might make that hard.

> it's a pity, lot's of other great open source apps (like gnome,
> inkscape...) that are running on GTK are already ported on win.

I'd say the chances of an eventual Windows port are pretty good,
especially if folks jump in and help. On the other hand, I'd be totally
astonished if somebody ever actually ported Scribus to use GTK (and more
than a little confused about why).

-- 
Craig Ringer