That said, I think this isn't really a DTP app. It doesn't export to printshop-ready PDF or postscript, and it doesn't seem to support magazines etc.; just a single drawing. In that sense, it's a vector graphics app. Combined with blender's animation, it would make a nice solution for 2D cartoons as well.

If you ever work on rendering to postscript for printer support, please make that a patch that also applies to mainline blender. I'd really love to be able to render directly to my printer, at optimum resolution, from blender :)

yes admittedly there are only 3 or that have been consistant and made hugh chages. but take your rapping, problem. Its not a hugh thing to add to the code. but maks a hugh diffrence.

Even if people only get involved a little at first. They maybe able to get a head of you for your own needs ;)

thanks for the hard work though. I would love it if we got a DTP. i love the blender enviroment.

ah, I don't expect the project to become all that much bigger ;) I add a few features here and there as I need them (for example, I'm currently making a little brochure for a client, with lots of text, which inspires me to add automatic text flow around objects :)… it all depends on my requirements ;) But if other developers get interested and add stuff, that would be great of course. Though, I heavily doubt it, because even with official blender (which has around 1000 times as many users ;-), there are just maybe 3 or 4 really active developers.

I sure do understand that that's just the beginning of a big project so I don't expect to see a whole bunch of things being available out of the box — I though that maybe it'll be good thing to share some ideas with you even though it may be to soon to make some wishlist ;).

The start is very interresting and promising so I hope too that more devs will gather around soon to help you!

That's why practical usefulness is a more important issue than guidelines or newbie-friendlyness – still, I hope releasing it to the public will at least help some people to get more work done ;) and I'm sure it will again be an inspiration for the official Blender devs :)

In my opinion most important thing in this project is a fact that Blender has been used as a platform. That's neat! The thing seams very similar to history of GTK+. From a simple toolkit that enabled creation of GIMP it arose to be a starting point for whole huge class of apps and even bigger projects (to mention Gnome or XFCE). I think that's quite interesting situation we have here. The way of GTK+ is of course not assured for Blender yet it is possible.

I must confess that I thought that the first application that will mimic or use Blender as a basis would be a raster graphics editor. But seeing DTP app being first doesn't disappoints me at all :).

I agree with some arguments pointed earlier (especially with the one about CMYK color model) but still the project is more than promising. Speeking about CMYK — why should we stop with that? There's many more color models and possibility of working with them would be also profitable for Blender itself. Imagine images rendered in CMYK natively (I know, I know… it's narrower than RGB but still…) or with dou-, tri-, quad-, [even-more]-tones.

Another thing that I want to praise the authors for is font selection mechanism. Kudos! I thought about it too and I'm similarly frustrated with traditional selectors with tiny viewports and takes-ages-to-scroll list of fonts (here graphical systems are to blame). Posibility of cathegorizing fonts by myself makes me just more calm ;). I wish xorg devs could implement such philosophy shortly (I hope they will since modularization process of server-and-friends is complete).

Anyway. To end this post: my best wishes of good luck to all DTP Blender devs out there!

:)

Most of it can't be ported to the main blender codebase because it's simply not suitable… it's just two different applications.

Have fun!

Is there a chance that this will be brought back into the main blender and allow other dev's to work on it?

I think the ideais quite strong, opening it up will allow it to be developed for better use in the profecional enviroment. More pros using it the more acuret and refinded it will be come.

An intesting idea would be looking at more stable output format. Personly i avoid jpeg or any other losy format for profetional work, its just awaist of effort in the first place. PNG great but as mentioned before, PDF or something on that leavel would be perfect.

Thanks for a brilliant idea, i've been waiting for some one to try this for a while. I'm off to go play with it some more.