osp blog - nicolas

Bienvenue to Hadopi logo

2010-01-14T12:22:00+01:00

The Hadopi is a big thing in France. At its origin, a piece of legislation that implements the three strikes model for illegal downloads. You receive three warnings and then you are 'banned' from the internet. The authority who is in charge of applying the sanction is the Hadopi. A new logo has been created for Hadopi. And provoked a flurry of discussions about ... typography.

It seems that the logo is made with a proprietary font that can only be used by France Telecom (called Bienvenue, ironically). The graphic designers who made the logo issued a statement saying that it was a wrong version of the logo that had been sent by mistake and released the 'right' one made with two other commercial fonts. The problem being they only acquired the licenses for those in the morning of the second release, leading to the suspicion they had them on their hard drives before having bought them.

Laurence, thanks for the tip

Patents threat on photomosaic plugin

2009-08-07T19:28:00+02:00

Found on the developper's website:

The image mosaic plug-in for the GIMP is no longer supported or distributed. Mr. Robert Silvers, the holder of a patent related to the technology that was used in the plug-in, argued that the software would directly infringe his patent rights. It is not clear if the patent is applicable in this case. But I have neither the time, interest or money for legal action. So I complied with the cease and desist request.

PHOTOMOSAIC® is a registered trademark of Runaway Technology, Inc. The photomosaic process is patented (US Patent No. 6,137,498) and protected by the patent, copyright, and other intellectual property laws of the United States and other major countries.

It seems though that someone else has taken the development further:

This software is currently being updated for Gimp 2.2. Please check back regularly. In the meantime, the Gimp 1.x version and instructions can be found below, although they may be somewhat unreliable.

This second version of the plugin avoided the technology covered by the patent or ... sanely ... ignored it?

Free Magenta!

2008-12-15T12:35:00+01:00

Qu'attend-on pour libérer le magenta ? A very good article by Pascal Riché on the website of rue89 on how the trademark law makes it possible for companies to own a color for a specific commercial field.

Autrement dit, si vous voulez repeindre votre maison en magenta (appelé ainsi à cause de la bataille du même nom), pas de souci; en revanche, si vous utilisez cette couleur pour un usage qui se rapproche de près ou de loin à la téléphonie, Deutsche Telekom peut mettre ses avocats à vos trousses.

Spotted via Calcyum, thanks.

...quietly digitizing around 1,000 public domain titles every day

2008-05-19T10:17:00+02:00

A photo-reportage by Dave Bullock, published on the Wired, that shows the process of digitalising books for the Internet Archive. This process is still done manually due to the fragility of old books and their size variance.

"For those picturing an efficient, automated process involving robotic arms and high-tech scanners, the scanning at the University of California's Northern Regional Library Facility is relatively primitive. With monastic diligence, workers sit in book-scanning stations and manually turn pages all day long."

Waiting for SK1

2008-05-10T08:47:00+02:00

After the presentation of Igor Novikov about the new version of sk1, the OSP team can't wait. It is promised to be published for June, in the meantime we installed the current version and are testing our svgs with it.

To install the current version on ubuntu:

grab the three .deb files from the products page, then in a terminal, run:
sudo dpkg -i tcl8.5_8.5.0-2ubuntu10_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i tk8.5_8.5.0-3ubuntu10_i386.deb
via synaptic, add the packages:
python-imaging
python-imaging-tk
python-liblcms

and then,

sudo dpkg -i sk1_0.9.0-rev335-1ubuntu10_i386.deb
Complementary instructions for other platforms are available on the project's website.

Batik, new release

2008-01-17T17:44:00+01:00

The Apache Foundation has released a new version of Batik.

Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes, such as display, generation or manipulation.

Using Batik’s thumbnail function to navigate a complex SVG document

Batik is not only relevant for java developers. It also contains various tools that can help in converting svg files into other formats (see how we used it to convert the svg produced with Inkscape into a pdf), encode ttf fonts in svg font format or simply view an svg document in a browser (batik ships with the squiggle browserwhich is the most reliable svg viewer for the moment)
Last but not least, Batik's latest release now supports many features related to animation.

Download batik hereand enjoy!

Inkscape + xslt = dynamic workflow

2007-09-08T13:19:00+02:00

Use Inkscape and XSLT to Create Cross-Platform Reports and Forms, an article by Chad Files on the Linux Journal website that details a workflow to produce dynamic forms and reports for both print and web using Inkscape and Xslt.

Description of the problem and requirements:

Health-care claims are very intricate (Figure 1). Many boxes and boilerplate text have to be drawn. The conventional way to do this with a software application is to draw a series of lines using coordinates and lengths, and then lay the static and dynamic content on top of the newly drawn lines. [...]

Our requirements were as follows:

* We must be able to print high-quality versions of the claims.
* Claims must be accessible from a Web browser.
* The solution has to be programming language-independent. We use Python, PHP, Perl and Java. The images need to be created using any of these languages.
* We must be able to convert the claim data and form into several different file formats, specifically PDF and PNG.
* The entire solution must be platform-independent.

The solution:

Basically, we would take an SVG image of the claim form and make it into an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), because the SVG format is a special XML format. Then, we would pull the claim data from our database and convert it into an XML string. Using any of our languages, we could then take the XSLT and the XML and create an SVG image of the claim. This solution met all of our requirements. It was language- and platform-independent. We could print the SVG images and embed them into Web pages. Furthermore, SVG images can be converted into different file formats easily. Another nice feature of this solution is the small file size of the SVG images. If we wanted to archive the images, they would take a fraction of the space the old solution did. Because SVG images are text, not compressed binary, the files can be compressed and save even more space.

Read the article for the details of the implementation and test the sample code.

Liberation fonts

2007-05-14T15:12:00+02:00

A news found on Linuxhelp:

Visit any random website and chances are the website expects your machine to have a set of fonts which have become the de-facto standard on the Internet. The fonts being Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New and so on. While it may not be illegal to install these fonts on a Linux machine, they are propritery and are owned by Microsoft. And Microsoft does not licence third parties to redistribute these fonts - a reason why you don't find these commonly used popular fonts installed in Linux by default.

This is going to change once and for all.

Red Hat in association with Ascender Corp has developed a set of fonts which are the metric equivalent of the most popular Microsoft fonts, and they have released it under the GPL+exception license.

Read the full article

A few more details from the Redhat press release:

To address this issue and to take a key step toward liberating desktops, Red Hat contracted with Ascender Corp., one of the leading commercial developers of fonts, to develop a set of fonts that are metrically equivalent to the key Microsoft fonts. Under the terms of that development agreement, Ascender retains rights in the fonts and can provide them under a traditional proprietary license to those who require such a license, e.g. printers that have fonts embedded in their firmware, but Red Hat receives a license that permits us to sublicense the fonts at no cost under the GPL+font exception. The fonts are being developed in two stages. The first release is a set of fully usable fonts, but they will lack the fully hinting capability (hinting adjusts font pixelization so that the fonts render with high quality at large and small sizes) provided by TrueType/FreeType technology. That release is now ready. The second release will provide full hinting of the fonts, and that release will be available by the end of the calendar year.

Read the details of the press release.

And last but not least, download the first version of the fonts from here

Who's Afraid of Adobe? - Not me, says the Mozilla foundation.

2006-12-09T19:43:00+01:00

As we already mentioned in this blog, Adobe owns many of the (proprietary) tools used by designers nowadays: Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and after having acquired Macromedia, it also owns Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, etc. Monopoly rhymes with monoculture.

However, Adobe has not always been the enemy of free formats. A recent example being the viewer for SVG they released when Flash was still a product from a competitor. Logically the support for the SVG viewer is now discontinued, Flash having become an asset of the company. End of life.

A complementary explanation could be that the SVG format is also read natively within a major open-source browser, firefox. Who needs a plugin anymore?
If we applaud the development of the SVG support within firefox, we regret that the softwares that have been developed specifically for the functionnalities added to the Adobe's SVG plugin may end with the software itself or will need to be rewritten. As the source code for the SVG player has not been published under a free license, we end up in a paradox: the programmers that wrote code for the functionalities specific to the Adobe's player chose SVG because it was free and open, but the player was itself a black box. And now, part of this code will be locked in this box because the same functionalities are not present in the firefox implementation. The Adobe viewer will be removed from the download area of adobe.com and the license doesn't allow for redistribution.

Why wouldn't Adobe donate the code of its SVG player to firefox? Wouldn't it be better than to simply drop it? An alliance between proprietary software giant and one of the open source biggest achievement may seem odd. But it is already happening for another product and it makes the news. Adobe announced it would donate the code of its javascript engine, under the name Tamarin, to the Mozilla foundation that is behind firefox. This reflects the renewed interest of the company for the open source software. What Cnet.com calls a "quiet effort to become more involved with desktop Linux".

Contrarily to what has been said here and there, Adobe is not giving the code for the flash player to firefox but an important component that will help the open source browser to interpret more efficiently the javascript code and therefore boost the Ajax development.

From JD on EP, a series of interesting comments:

Frank Hecker (Mozilla staffer) offers a great orientation to the Adobe engine and the collaboration, particularly oriented to those in the Mozilla community. "Note that Tamarin is not an open source version of the Flash player; it is simply the virtual machine embedded within Flash Player 9, and does not include all the other components that make up Flash (including the bits that display graphics and play music and video). Adobe will continue to develop and distribute the Flash player on its own as a product separate from Firefox itself... The current SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine (used in Firefox, etc.) will not be replaced, as it does more than just provide a virtual machine; rather the Tamarin code will be integrated into SpiderMonkey. On compilers, the current SpiderMonkey engine can convert JavaScript to byte code, but does not have the ability to convert byte code to native machine instructions; this is a major feature that Tamarin provides... Not only do we gain an important new piece of technology that's critical to our products, we and Adobe both gain the benefit of being able to more closely work together on ECMAScript language technology and avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts; this in turn will allow both the Mozilla project and Adobe to put more resources into other areas important for future innovations." [via Mike Potter]

To summarize:

So this has nothing to do with putting Flash into Firefox. Firefox users will still require the Flash plugin to run SWFs. But contributing a high-performance virtual machine for a type-checked, object-oriented language is still a big deal!

"AJAX in Flash, with a Web 2.0 hype engine. May god have mercy on us all."

To end this post about Adobe and open source software, it is still worthy to recap some info about the alternatives to produce flash movies with open source tools:

Open source flash on linux:
http://osflash.org/linux?s=linux

Flash from PHP with Ming:
http://www16.brinkster.com/gazb/ming/index.html

And last but not least, to throw an eye on this article based on an interview with Paul Betlem, senior director of engineering for Adobe, who explains 'Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long':
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/21/2138216&from=rss

But why you would use open source tools to lock your software in a proprietary format will be the subject of another post.

Thanks to Peter Westenberg to have sent me precious informations.

Convert tiff to transparent PNG

2006-11-26T17:39:00+01:00

Since long, we wished to write about scripting for image creation and manipulation. There are many reason why you would spend some time to do it. To resize a lot of images by hand can be a tedious task, or your software misses a component to achieve a particular result. Or you want to turn a web application into an image editor, etc.

We will start with a modest example taken from a real life situation. We, Femke and Nicolas, are working on an illustration in Inkscape. For this illustration, we have scanned a lot of notes we have written on paper. The scanned images have been saved in tiff. We have imported them in Inkscape and started making the composition. Half-way we realise that it should be a lot more easier to work with the same images but saved as PNG with a transparent background. As there is 165 images to transform, to do it one by one in Gimp sounds just frightening. This is where the wonderful Imagemagick software enters into play.

Imagemagick is shipped with every major linux distribution or can easily be installed by the different package managers. It is also available on windows; and on MacosX via the Fink installer. Once there, Imagemagick gives you many tools to edit, resize, transform images. One of them is convert that takes a file in input and converts it into (nearly) any format. In our case, a simple conversion was not enough since we wanted also to transform the white colour into a transparent background. The following command did the trick for one image:

convert myfile.tiff -transparent white myfile.png

To apply it to a whole directory of images and keep the filenames, we had to include it in a small shell script:

#!/bin/sh
for file in `ls | grep tiff`
do
  convert "$file" -fuzz 5% -transparent white "${: #image158}.png"
  echo "writing ${: #image158}.png"
done

The fuzz parameter makes it possible to give transparency to 'nearly-white' pixels.

This font is a ripoff, said the Invalidity Division

2006-04-05T09:40:00+02:00

Invalidity Division, sounds like science-fiction, doesn't it? Registered community design is not bad either. Time to start a jargon file...

[...]this time the dispute is over fonts; specifically Segoe, one of the typefaces Microsoft wants to use in Vista (the new Windows, "bringing clarity to your world"). Microsoft filed its "registered community design" for the font back in January of 2004, paid the required fee, and everything was great—until December.

Just days before the end of 2004, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG sought a "declaration of invalidity" from the Invalidity Division (yes, that is it's real name) of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market. As the owner of the Linotype brand, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen claimed that Microsoft's "new" font was a blatant ripoff of Linotype's own Frutiger LT 45 Light, which has been sold by the company for years. [...]

"The typefaces of both designs have the same stroke thickness. The ratio from cap-height to descender height is equal. The proportion of character height to character pitch is identical. The type face in the specimen text does not show any differences."
So they threw Microsoft's application out and ordered the company to pay all the fees incurred by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen.

Read online: http://arstechnica.com/news.ar...

Domestic manners

2006-03-16T10:54:00+01:00

http://www.dustismo.com/

Domestic Manners, by Dustin Norlander.

"This font is basically my handwritting. Why anyone would want to use my crappy handwritting for anything, I can't say. It would be a good way to forge a note from me I guess. Anyway, use it for whatever you want, its released under the GPL so change it if you need to. The name come from the book Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Fanny Trollope."

Dustin Norlander has also released a series of font under the GPL license including Dustismo Roman, a standard serifed roman.

"It contains all the characters you should ever need, accents and special characters. I created this to be used with linux, as there was definitely a lack of quality fonts available for linux. Since then Bitstream released their Vera serif and sans-serif typeface under an open source style license--oh well. I like this one, its good for whatever you need. Released under the GPL so go ahead and include it in your own personal Linux variation."

Fonts for human beings

2006-03-01T21:34:00+01:00

The "user-friendly" distribution Ubuntu is distributing its font under the LGPL. I have not heard the same from other distributions. It seems that Redhat or Novell do not want to share their corporate identity with the rest of us. Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his company Thawte(a company that issues security certificates) to become the first African citizen in space, supports free software. He understands the free in free software as in freedom but also as in free beer since the distribution is supposed to be always free of charge.

The team behind Ubuntu makes the following public commitment to its users:

*Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.
*Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from hundreds of companies around the world. Ubuntu is released regularly and predictably; a new release is made every six months. Each release is supported with free security updates and fixes for at least 18 months.
*Ubuntu will include the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Ubuntu usable by as many people as possible. We collaborate as widely as possible on bug fixing and code sharing.
*Ubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free software development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Although the community marketing of Ubuntu is sometimes getting on my nerves, a panorama of the tools for open publishing would be incomplete without Ubuntu-title.ttf.