I recently installed Inkscape. This was interesting for me because Inkscape is similar to OpenOffice.org on the Mac. It too needs X11 to run and has a special launcher to help integrate the program with the OS.

They have the easy installation similar to what will be introduced in the next release of OpenOffice.org.

What is more interesting is that on first start they have a message “Font caches may need to be updated”. This allow the user torun a program called fc-cache.

I don’t know if this could be of any use in OpenOffice.org. As OpenOffice.org on the Mac has done various things to allow the support of fonts installed for Mac OS X applications to be used in OpenOffice.org too.

Something that was even more interesting for me was the application that produced the Mac OS X integration. It seemed that they didn’t use a simple Applescript droplet. Instead they seem to have used an Applescript studio or XCode application and used Interface Builder to produce the application. One advantage is that way you don’t need to have a menu called “edit” with a menu item in it called “edit script”. This has confused a number of OpenOffice.org users before.