First-time user

[This is on a Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop running Ubuntu Gutsy]

I installed Conglomerate 0.9.1debian3ubuntu1 via the Synaptic
installer.  It required conglomerate-common but no other extra
dependencies (I have a lot of stuff installed so I'm guessing that
anything else it needed I already have).

* It would probably be a good idea if it added itself to the Office
   submenu. End-users won't know how to run it.

It does not add anything to the Panel Applications menus, so
startup is by typing conglomerate & in a shell. This pops up a very
small Conglomerate window (411x489) with the message "Welcome to the
much-delayed Conglo" at the bottom (see attached startup.png).

* The initial window should be A4 or Letter proportions and as big as
   will fit (if the screen size can be detected). If not, then the
   default should be sized for an 800x600 screen.

The shell window where the command was typed echoed the error:
--------------------------------------------------------------
   Entity: line 8: parser error : Attribute xml:lang redefined
   <description xml:lang="en_CA" xml:lang="en">This is a document type
                                              ^
** (conglomerate:6926): WARNING **: Problem parsing xds file: readme.xds.
--------------------------------------------------------------
This is because the file readme.xds is invalid: the line quoted uses
the attribute xml:lang twice, which is forbidden by the XML
Specification (3.1, WFC Unique Att Spec). I removed the xml:lang="en"
from the Canadian English instance of the element and restarted the
application without error.

* Internal XML documents must be validated with a command-line
   utility such as onsgmls or rxp before updating the distros.

* While I appreciate the natural affection for specifying your native
   language variant (I use en_IE), it is incorrect to use this to mark
   text which does not specifically use that variant. In this case
   there appears to be nothing specifically Canadian in the sentence
   `This is a document type associated with the "readme" file
   distributed with the initial prototype of Conglomerate.' so it
   is probably redundant as an "en" version is already included.


The NEW button
--------------

This creates a new document. The "assistant" (not a wizard: thank you
:-) offers an empty DocBook document, or an Article, Book, or Set. It
also offers a document containing random content, which then offers a
choice of several DTDs.

* This button should not mix the words "file" and "document" as if
   they were interchangeable. It should use only "document".

* The word "random" MUST be avoided, as it means something different
   in English.  I think this is an artifact of mistranslation. The
   option should say "Other types of document" and the choice of DTDs
   should avoid the acronym "DTD" and use an explanation of the
   document type, eg

     Apache (webserver documentation)
     TEI Lite (Literary, historical, and linguistic documents)
     XHTML Strict (web pages)
     Conglomerate (release notes)
     XSL (stylesheet for transforming XMl to PDF)
     RelaxNG (description of an XML vocabulary)
     ...etc

   If this software is to be useful to authors, it should in the long
   term include all of the common formats used in publishing, eg the
   article DTDs for Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer, etc; the APA and its
   successors; the Mulberry publication DTDs for LoC; and others. It
   should also be able to import an external DTD such as the full TEI.

   ["Random" means olkd'kdnaksjcoiqwjemcf[ciwhejef[x,qheef[iuqhwerf[
    ;orihfeurnpuadbfvpad fvpua [dc a;i dfn[adfnv[adsfdnvoadonfhhv[oa
    but here, "containing random content" implies that the document
    will be filled up with text like lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...etc.
    It is very important to avoid this word here.]

I created a DocBook Article and typed my title. There appears to be no
way to add markup in mixed content yet: what I wanted was

<title>First look at <productname>Conglomerate</productname></title>

Some element type names have a little boxed "An" beside them which is
not obvious what it means or does.

I added an Author, but it seems to misunderstand the structure of the
element. Author cannot be a subelement of Title: it is a sibling. It
appears to be impossible to enter text in the author/surname or
author/firstname elements. When the document is saved, it creates an
invalid title element containing author. It appears to be impossible
to create an Author as a sibling to Title.

I didn't have time to go any further.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The File | Close menu option closes the application instead of the
document. This is a serious error: the Close operation must only close
the open document, never the whole application.

Save As does not obey the directory where the app was launched but
goes to the user's home directory instead. This is incorrect: it
should always default to  the directory where the app was launched.

///Peter