[Scribus] Re: Scribus and GIMP

[Ashley J Gittins]

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 07:16 pm, Robin Rowe wrote:
> > Gimp is one of the programs Scribus relies on (as theres
> > no PS etc on Linux). Gimp has the user basem and many of them need it to
> > move
> > into this domain.
>
> Franz Schmid didn't sound enthusiastic for GIMP for pre-press work in his
> interview in Linux Journal.

I am not sure how you drew that conclusion. He noted the lack of cmyk support, 
and critisized the "legal paralysis" wrt implementing it. The upshot was 
though that scribus could do the cmyk conversion so as far as scribus users 
are concerned the gimp is the perfect tool for editing their images.

> The issue he discussed was GIMP's lack of CMYK support, not its lack of CMS
> support.

All kinda related in colourspace terms, I guess. Good(tm) Colour Management 
Support (CMS) would include CMYK support, all part of the same game.

> I've used Scribus a little without encountering GIMP. Reading your
> parenthetical description above, it's not clear how Scribus utilizes GIMP.
> Can you be specific what form of integration exists? And, what does GIMP do
> better for Scribus that any other image editor, such the other two Franz
> listed in his LJ article?

I don't believe there is any integration as such. I think what Craig(?) might 
have been saying is that scribus _users_ rely on The Gimp for their image 
editing tasks, generally speaking. Then they link the resulting images into 
scribus. As for the other two editors mentioned, he gave some pretty big 
points as to why they are not as good - old, difficult to install, not 
supported, not opensource. On top of all that, there is a lot else that the 
gimp can do, it's just that it's colourspace support is.... wanting.

> Relative to the needs of Scribus users, what does CinePaint not do or need
> to do better?

I can only offer my own opinion here. The single, ultimate, nothing else in 
the world matters at all thing that cinepaint absolutely needs to do to make 
me happy is... unfork.

Cinepaint was an excellent project that took the gimp and gave it 16bit colour 
depth, and perhaps a few other things. It provided a tool for the vfx shops 
that wanted it, and enabled perhaps a few other areas to use the gimp on 
their deep files. However, now cinepaint is rotting. It's feature set has 
stagnated when compared to the Gimp, this in itself is not a bad thing, but 
it means you have a great image editor (the gimp) that lacks deep colour 
support, and you have an ancient shadow of what the gimp used to be, that 
does do deep colour. Neither situation is great. I have the feeling that 
there are problems with integrating the trees of gimp and cinepaint again, 
and that a new way of handling colour in the gimp is in the works, so in my 
view - cinepaint is and always was the temporary hack that would go away when 
the gimp got it right. Hopefully it does not take too much longer for that to 
happen, as the gimp now has a lot of features that would be fantastic to have 
in a film-ready image editor.

As for the people who work on cinepaint, I'd love to see them reach agreement 
with the gimp team on how to implement colour management in the upstream gimp 
tree, and work towards making the Gimp the final answer to gui image editing 
on linux.

All opinion of course, and subject to being thoroughly wrong on all 
accounts! :-)

-- 
Regards,
 Ashley J Gittins
 web:  http://www.purple.dropbear.id.au
 jabber: agittins at purple.dropbear.id.au