Why I love(d) Krita to be part of Calligra (was: Re: After 2.9.7)

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Sonntag, 30. August 2015, 20:36:06 schrieb Boudewijn Rempt:
> Long mail :-) Sven already said a lot of what I wanted to say. The thing
> is, with KOffice 2.0, we actually got further along the road to making
> fine-grained composite document possible. We got further than Apple,
> IBM or Microsoft with projects like Taligent, Opendocs or OLE. Sure, we
> made architectural mistakes, but to very large extent, the result works.

Which is what seems so great about Calligra for me :)

> With Calligra Gemini you can already combine hand-written annotations
> with your document, for instance.

Oh, not noticed that, how can one do that? I saw voice and pre-made stickers, 
but pen input based option is at least not visible to me in the UI, also not 
on a touch device. Which code to look out for?

Then, Calligra Gemini seems rather dead, no commit since it was imported :/
But I have hopes that I can sit together with leinir at Randa next week :) and 
revive this former beauty (rotten in master ATM) or at least see how to rescue 
the QtQuick bits for other usages.

> There are just two gotchas: the first is that for all of that, Krita's
> specific strengths aren't needed, but on the other hand, a lot of
> ballast. There are at least two image filter implementations in Calligra
> next to Krita's, and those are more suited for compound documents,
> for instance.

Not sure how things are ballast if they are done behind proper abstraction 
layers. What do you mean "filters" in "image filters"?

> The other is that the users aren't there. It was a grand vision, and
> one that's really attractive to software developers, but users care
> about one thing: getting the job done asap, so they can quit the word
> processor and go back to doing their real work. And they're right.

IMHO the users are not here, because most of Calligra's apps were never ready 
as editors, due to being crashy as hell, losing data and having incomplete 
features, especially compared to their usecase rivals.
The code was/is fine for loading and viewing documents. Both confirmed and 
reinforced by the commercial products made from Calligra code, as you said.
And that is also why I picked up the Okular plugins of Calligra, to make this 
viewer power available to more players.
But the code for document manipulation and storing seems to never have seen a 
similar care. Krita is the happy exception here.

The other problem is also that development of the core has stalled. Krita 
started to do workarounds to the existing core instead of seeing how to 
coevolve the core with the other apps, from what I saw. Surely also because of 
lack of interest of developers for other apps.

Then, my real work would rather be in the "word processor" or even something 
bigger. Because it's not just a few lines of text that I do. I am talking 
about rich content. That is why I am here in Calligra. See below.

So, I don't see at least this gotcha.

> That's another difference between Krita and office applications. Office
> applications, unless you happen to be a novelist, support doing work, are
> not tools to do the actual work. You use krita to produce the deliverable
> you send to a customer, you use Words to create the accompanying invoice.

Perhaps that's where you miss my needs :)
I am not interested in a software to just drop a few lines of text onto a 
sheet. And still I am not a novelist. No.
I am interested in a software that allows me to create my long and content-
rich reports, backed from database and other external sources, to create my 
leaflets, to create my hangout for the blackboard, invitation cards, content 
enriched letters to friends, tutorials, sheets with drafts for UI and 
architecture of software, drafts for garden design, costume drafts, etc. pp.
With all kind of content types, wildly mixed on the same sheet.
(He, I did the xfig import filter for a reason, like I started on the 
CorelDraw one)

Something where LO, Scribus or Inkscape do not cut it, for different reasons.

Having to write completely different software for reports, for leaflets, for 
hangouts, for invitation cards, for letters, for tutorials, for room concepts, 
for costume drafts, etc. seems insane to me. I still have the hope and many 
ideas, how reusable fine-grained components for the different kind of content 
types should allow to assemble working shells optimized for a certain main 
document type. Like one for doing long reports. And another for doing 
invitation cards. And a third for costume drafts.
Like I can setup my real world desk or bench for different document types, by 
placing the usual content material and working tools in reach.

I did not clean up Calligra code and worked hard to push it together will all 
over the Qt5 hurdle for nothing, there would be lots of more enjoyable things 
in life to do ;) No. Hopefully I qualify not as mad, but I have a long TODO 
list for Calligra libs, and some code drafts. And now we are almost past 
intial Qt5/KF5 port, I so look forward to finally go for improvements.

And as I said elsewhere, my "word processor" will need color correctness. 
Because it can contain colorful content (even if just a photo), and I dislike 
it if things look different on different devices or on paper. Others might 
not, I do. And thus it is important to me :)

Cheers
Friedrich