> So far, the only conclusion I've reached about Karbon is
> that it badly needs a UI redesign to compact the
> mass of options docked at the right, and some additional
> tooltips here and there.  I need to do some cross-
> evaluation of saved files with other programs, but I suspect
> it's capable of supporting the simple shapes, 
> gradients, and non-flowed text needed for basic vector
> work.  In fact, if it uses the same rendering engine 
> as everything else, it may be the safest choice for
> modifying Trinity assets.

I believe the user interface is shared among all koffice apps. I think karbon and chalk (nee krita) share some interface components too. I doubt we can remedy the interface issues any time soon, so we would focus on documentation, tool tips, etc.

> I've never actually read the SVG spec, but the file format
> is XML (which I am fairly familiar with), so
> yes, I can probably figure out what options there are and
> whether or not we support them.  Might be
> a little while before I have the time, though.

As karbon, and koffice in general, was long ago neglected and shoved aside, we do the best we can with what we inherited. As long as we remember our project goal of maintaining koffice as a light-weight office suite, I think we can tweak karbon.

> Hmm.  There are two aspects to that:  what parts
> of the standard does the embedded viewer
> support, and what parts of the standard do the most common
> editors mangle?  (Fortunately, in
> the case of two of those editors, I already know the quirks,
> so I just have to examine the GIMP
> and Karbon.)

Great. You're already way ahead of me. :-)

> Writing is not a problem, although you may want to go back
> over whatever I produce and
> dumb it down a little--I'm prone to long sentences and
> rampaging m-dashes, so while what
> I produce is grammatically correct, it may be difficult to
> follow for people whose first
> language isn't English.

Editing and proofreading would happen naturally when the text is transformed to docbook, which is needed to create the help handbook. I'm pretty good at "dumbing down" technical information --- been doing that for many years. :-) Just write whatever you want. We'll handle the editing and refining later.

I'll learn much about karbon by helping with editing and docbook transformation because I'll actually have to test what we write. :-)

Thank you for helping. If we get something crafted for R14 then great, but let's not let the R14.0.0 release dictate this particular project. We can always push a new karbon handbook in R14.1.0 or R14.2.0.

Darrell