osp blog - Pierre

Thanks Femke! Thanks Constant!

2013-03-08T08:39:00+01:00

Thanks Femke! Thanks Constant!

OSP print party as bootstrap IV for the Balsa

2013-02-26T02:09:00+01:00

↓
Hello,
Sorry to disturb you. We are a group of designers working in Brussels, Belgium with free software and we've used for 18 months the Ume fonts for the graphical and typographic identity of a theatre. We are preparing a presentation/performance in which we would love to insert some details about the Ume fonts, their history, anecdotes, technical details, anything. We found your 4 names spread out in the log of the Ume font from 2006 till now. Maybe do you know some part, even very little, of the of the journey of that font family?
Many thanks in advance for any help!

↱ Bootstrap IV
Open Source Publishing
Print Party
28/02 - 20h30
http://www.balsamine.be/index.php/Saison2012-2013/BootstrapIV

Depuis 2 ans, la caravane OSP fait l'identité typographique de la Balsa. Depuis 7 ans, la caravane OSP fait des print parties. Dans les deux cas, ces pratiques utilisent des outils libres qui, par leur genèse collaborative, changent les pratiques, qui à leur tour changent les outils. OSP invite Mme Ume, l'ingénieure japonaise dessinatrice d'une famille de police en usage à la Balsa. Sous ses instructions, ils rejouent les journaux intimes des opérations graphiques. Les dialogues donnent voix aux pratiques logicielles muettes et à leur écologie culturelle. Un bootstrap qui crochette les serrures de l'identité balsamique en mode repeat. ↪

"La plupart des auteurs contemporains (artistes, designers, cinéastes,
auteurs, scénographes), créent leur oeuvre à l'aide d'ordinateurs. Ils
utilisent les logiciels par défauts, les mêmes outils que tout le monde
utilise. Imaginez que ces logiciels n'étaient pas seulement faits pour
faire le travail, mais seraient des outils à penser, des instruments à
développer l'imagination, des objets qui repensent le monde dont ils
font partie?" Femke Snelting, "Toolbending", 2012
•
Réservations

interpunctie samples all.pdf

2011-10-26T21:47:00+02:00

From Thursday 20th to Sunday 23rd November OSP went to contemplate the Bolwerk archives landscape from the window of Frans Masereel Centrum. As part of Bolwerk's residency, we were invited to propose a reading of Bolwerk's material inbetween its punctuation. Linked to our actual and future projects, this journey also presented itself as a good start to investigate archive visualization/schematics and digest. We arrived with a proposal focussing on tools development, bases of an archives blender, a small chain of automatic process.

On the spot, in the plastic yurt heated by a wood-burning stove, we discovered 87000+ files on the Bolwerk nas harddrive. All our sources (scripts, tests, drawings and pictures) are gathered in this public git repository. In the current documentation text, you can find links to readable files and preview of the result.

To have an overview of all the digital archives, we first built 4 bash scripts going through the directories looking on 4 criterias:
- time scale
- number of files
- size of the files
- filetypes

From this, we get a text output already drawing a first visual landscape, see landscape-saturday.csv

Then, in a graphic translation attempt, we started a plotter script, to plot this landscape into visual/graphic shapes. Is it the rotary structure of the physical archive in the yurt, or our temporary traveler status here that resonate with Bolwerk's seems permanent one? It's not clear but we had this idea to draw the directories as bags, attributing one parameter to their description elements.
- width : time scale
- height : number of files
- colors of the bag : filetypes
- roundness : size of the files
See plot4.svg (in /plotter directory).

The shapes are distributed along the timeline from left to right (1997-2011). The most large they are the more the files and directories they contain, the vertical piling was defined by the browsing order. The archives has been clearly compiled with 2 past periods of grouping, and a more regular the lasts years (as many archiving of digital files travel from one kind of media to another).

This attempt to draw the landscape with differents bags, raised again questions that were floating around us for a while. How to shape the bags/directories, can we avoid the designer/developer dichotomy (starting from an arbitrary symbol/drawing / from an arbitrary process)? Plot only the dots contained in the files in the directories, as a free interpretation of the screening process present in different place in this graphic farm and in answer for the astonishingly new question from Marthe for us "how the shape of the dot vary with fonts"? Or the files as dots? Why are we somehow reluctant to visualize the data of the archives? After years of Edward Tufte impact on some of us and on the field, is it linked to Ted Byfield's conference in Tel Aviv where he develop some aspects of its critics, or the approximation found at middle page and elsewhere, or around that article or these pamphlets about visualization? Is the muted but even more palpable and strong influence, here at the wood cutting Masereel mansion, of the Isotype system from the team Neurath/woodcutter Arntz and particulary the transformation of complex source information into a sketch for a self-explanatory chart, mainly by the transformer Marie Reidemeister?

Looking to it as a landscape in a contemplative way, looking at the hard-drive in a calm way, different for an top/down approach of some past anthropological pseudo-objectivity or burning with some efficiency in mind, by practicing it like to roving some paths in the forest? Because we feel that practicing the data, chewing it up, became part of it as in any quantum experience was the only way to try to balance a bit the asymmetric and problematic relationship that we can have with a 14 years archive of a multi-crossed-mono-person-organisation (and that we dare to link with Roy Wagner, à propos des relations initiales avec les Daribi de la Nouvelle-Guinée, "leur façon de ne pas me comprendre n'était pas la même que celle que j'avais de ne pas les comprendre" maybe also because our permanent cross-lingual during that residency, which shape also deeply the incorrect writing of the current post).

Our favorite atomic bricks, fonts and her quarks glyphs, and more precisely fonts contained in the pdfs contained in the archive, appears to be possible candidates to bootstrap us from the wood smoke. An excavator is added, the fonts resulting of that operation shows how different applications embed and subset fonts when exporting pdfs. By counting the fonts, merging the fonts that are each directory, based on glyph missing, producing the digital upper-and-lower-cases of Bolwerk.

As a last detour we plotted the samples collection through Scribus outlined pdf, see plotter/samples, like an echo to decrypt from a certain today in the fiction of being already in the future.

- samples_all_outlined.pdf (all the chars of the merged fonts - 458 pages)
- interpunctie_samples.pdf (all the periods of the merged fonts on one sheet)
- interpunctie_samples_all.pdf (more interpunction)
- and interpunctie_all_esthetified.pdf for which Gijs write us as a temporary end dot: "I've put some thought into that name. It felt like a bizarre act / twist:to just center the text out of aesthetic considerations. After such a rough process."

UFOs atlas

2011-10-08T15:36:00+02:00

As attempt to map visually theater activities accross european theater institutions for the Travelogue project, we propose an atlas with three different kind of visualisations.

Cosmographs

2011-10-01T11:51:00+02:00

A quick glimpse on one of Vincent Meessen's Cosmographs for the exhibition of his new works at Khiasma (Paris) during the Hantologie des colonies cycle. Using dot language that Vincent began to use quite instantly and Graphviz as a pense-bête to track vibrating paths around Roland Barthes and his grandfather Louis-Gustave Binger.

[caption id="attachment_6730" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Vincent Meessen"][/caption]

Balsa Jour J-11

2011-09-08T15:13:00+02:00

"À l'extérieur de cette boîte si tranquille, de bouillonnantes transformations s'opèrent également!"

— From hand movement to vector curves to hand movement

Comment le livre devient machine

2011-09-06T12:28:00+02:00

L'entrepreneur et amateur de texte justifié Kaplan nous livre une articulation des futurs du livre efficace comme son tunnel Powerpoint, voie A et b. Le blog Lafeuille reformule et déploie (2 formats donc). Les torsions qui appuient sur le savoir (à l'esprit dirait peut-être Stiegler) quand le livre est capturé dans une application sur une machine fermée restent à creuser, ce qu'ils ne font encore que peu, sans doute pour des raisons différentes.

Year - Mousse

2011-07-21T19:43:00+02:00

A few weeks ago, a 365 pages magazine has been published by Komplot and David Evrard in Brussels. Even if it is not strictly an OSP job (it miss, by exemple, the necessery plural workers), it smells libre graphics around its square ears. Another magazine, Mousse, ask questions, multivoices amongst publishers and designers answer.
[gallery]

What triggered the need to publish something like YEAR?
The need to make the story. Something like that. Tell the story in your own words. When you do something like that, at a point, you can’t do something else. No choice. And the absence of choice is, by definition, necessity! Héhé… You know it’s just something growing on a table with a few people are sitting around…

The interesting feature is its apparent non-linear structure, meaning that it can be read and enjoyed randomly. What do you think are the advantages of a publication based such loose structure?
There are two ideas of time. One of these is : time is a line, and you can highlight some points on this big, general and academic line. This is History. This is competition. The second idea is : time is a collage of moments, a suite, a partition. This is Stories. Using this second idea, you can see time as different layers where time is space. You need time to read/make ? a book. YEAR is about time. We separated the book in 12 parts like a calendar, with internal covers copying the design of existing revues titled with months’ name… i think readers of Mousse easily recognized the US magazine October or the French one May, for example… A calendar is physically made out of this idea of time. The setting is made out of layers… Layers that can be projective… No matter what’s the first. This is not a competition.
The 12 parts and covers refer also to what is call in French a "recueil", a compendium that some publisher produce from all the magazines of a year, pack in a cheap (or luxury, but contrasted from the rest) cover et resold as a different item. So yes, it prays to be read asynchroniously. And so the strange number of pages.

How did you select the contributions for YEAR?
Just like for a surprise party… a scene as an experimental constellation… We also invited people to curate part of the books from their own activities : Devrim Bayar from the Wiels, Yann Chevallier from Le Confort Moderne, Jean Paul Jacquet from La Chaussette or Margot from Etablissement d’en face …

Did you have to give up or compromise with the printing process and binding? Why did you choose a yellow pages kind of paper?
Because it's the cheapest. No kidding. When you decide to produce a 365 pages magazine with quite nothing at the start, very few advertisers, you're in a straight economy. Others decisions came up from that standing point too : rotary printing press, only a quarter of the pages in colour, the stickers on blanco cardboard. The play was then to stretch these rough options to somewhat strange variations, with no additional costs, only by allocating time to convince printers and binders. So the uncut bottom of pages and gluing. About the conception and design process, some parts has follow the same ecology of choice with the use of free not as-in-free-beer handmade software. But only a few, because it seems that no discipline can be relevant for some South-West Brussels inhabitants. At the opposite side, no fonts used has been in contact with a lawyer to write his license. And yes, you spotted it, the main font was grabbed where it's called "a typeface for the nations".

Spring font OSP day

2011-03-21T21:37:00+01:00

Spring cleaning with a long awaited operation : the release of our OSP DIN.

Spring listing our current favorite fonts, in use for projects or planned to be used :

Spring switching on this blog layout, featuring our new Sans Guilt fonts from the RCA workshop. Two versions are used, with some overlaying for the titles emphasising on the hidden dimension of kernings. The body text rendering is provided by the fidel Latin Modern Roman, accompanying the TeX project from the start.

Territorial practice

2010-12-09T11:50:00+01:00

It's hard to believe that we are back for more than three weeks from Tel Aviv, where we participated in Open Code Versus Military Culture? Aspects in Israel Digital Culture. It feels both close and very far away.

[caption id="attachment_5416" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Arriving late night at Dizengoff square, Tel Aviv"][/caption]

Open Code Versus Military Culture? was initiated by digital artist Tsila Hassine, asking pertinent questions about the relationships among technology, politics, culture and art. These questions are obviously ultra relevant in the light of the political situation in the Middle East and even more pressing in Israel where technological culture is largely shaped by defence industries and commercial software corporations.

The conference and work session gave us the opportunity to sense the connections between military, culture and commerce in the Israeli context. It happened through the voices and gestures of the very people involved in the decision making, each having different interests.

Two-day conference: Open Code Versus Military Culture?

The morning sessions came as a bit of a shock, especially for those of us who had just arrived in Israel. A retired brigadier spoke about the importance of 'Thinking out of the box' in response to security threats, and an entrepreneur explained how the civilian market could profit from military research and innovation in a nice way. Their understanding of the dynamics of technological development had a lot in common: both the military and the entrepreneur impose the emergency of a 'time to market' to developers, thinking in an abstract world. Through this phraseology, the cost of human life, in the case of the military, is understood in terms of commodity and the presence of a product delivered timely on the market, for the industrial, as a military operation. Logically then, the computer industry in Israel would sell security-related services, benefiting from the reputation of its army. And due to a constant assimilation of war and marketing, as a response to immediate threat, the Israeli industry would lack time and investment to create infrastructure. As the military culture is one of secrecy, no wonder that it doesn't provide a fertile ground for open source development. As a contrast, a second entrepreneur representing the RedHat-Israel company came to present their open source model for the computer industry. This capitalist with a friendly face celebrated the rebirth of centralized mainframes through the buzzword of cloud-computing, arguing this was the first true innovation driven by F/LOSS. The first question mark was expressed in a presentation about Tsofen, an organisation trying to open up the labour market of the Israeli High Tech Industry for qualified Arab IT engineers living in Israel.

By the time the second session Critical Perspectives on the Uses and Discourses of Digital Technology and the Military had started, entrepreneurs and military representatives unfortunately had already left the premises. Dr. Eyal Weizman (flown back to London right after his lecture before any questions could be asked) held a stunning talk on the issue of proportionality, presenting the design of the separation wall on the West Bank as a form of collaborative design. "Our algorithmic society has become irrevocably obsessed with calculating and reducing the evil it has itself perpetrated" ((Talk partially overlapped with this text: http://www.allvoices.com/s/event-6743881/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5vcGVuZGVtb2NyYWN5Lm5ldC9leWFsLXdlaXptYW4vbWF0ZXJpYWwtcHJvcG9ydGlvbmFsaXR5LXBhdWwtaGlyc3QtbWVtb3JpYWwtbGVjdHVyZS0yMDEw))

Sheizaf Rafaeli from Haifa University toured us through Digital Culture in Israel and showed that it is at the same time vibrant, diverse and dispersed. The reality of the World Wide Web in fact allows very different communities to exist in parallel, without being connected at all. The presentation by Eran Sachs was both impressing and moving, as he related his experience in military service (where he was taught signal theory and analysis by ear as part of his service with the IDF Electronic Intelligence unit) to his art sound projects, connecting both with his ad hoc slogan "want + can → will": about driving habits of israeli roads; an art sound project in the evacuated buildings of Hebron where he produced sound to visualize space by throwing stones on walls; a precise, humorous and detailed explanation about what the convolution of waves means; to a sudden final, beautiful and vibrant assembly of some of these parts in a call for convolution as a civilian strategy of smooth but strong counter-power to current politics. After that, the Minister of Improvement of Government Services talked to us about the new government website for a while until he finally was called away to appear on tv. The day ended with an exposé from Professor Langdon Winner about how Open Source might in the end be the only hope for saving democracy in The United States.

The second day of the conference was devoted to cultural practice. The first panel was called Cultural and Artistic Approaches to Code Practices and as you might have guessed, this was the panel we were in. Matthew Fuller started off with Executing Software Studies, and the need to look at software as a culture. For the OSP presentation we had decided to speak through very concrete and detailed examples about the ways F/LOSS tools help unimagine practice. We were trying to be sincere but it also felt rather futile. Ayelet Karmon and Yair Reshef gave an informative overview of various projects applying code-practices to physical objects and the session was concluded by Mushon Zer-Aviv ((based on ideas discussed here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/09/01/the-case-for-open-source-design-can-design-by-committee-work)), a graphic designer based in Tel Aviv. He ended his talk Towards Open Source Design with the statement that "[T]he substantial parts of design that still cannot be easily quantified or assessed on shared rational ground should be managed through trust and leadership. A resilient community of practice must be able to develop design leadership whose work and guidance is respected and appreciated even without the convenient meter of coding meritocracy.", an idea we tried to challenge at the dinner table (with not much success yet, but we might have another chance at an upcoming LGM). The last sessions were devoted to data visualization. It started with a short presentation of openknesset.org, a group of activists monitoring the Israeli Parliament. In the same vein, Roberto Therón stated that data visualization is a tool to foster change. Interestingly, his practice of data viz is related to collective methodologies as the ones developed in collaboration with Media Lab Prado that welcome open contributions, modifications of the project through a dialogue with the participants; the production of data visualisation is the occasion for an exchange within emerging communities of researchers ranging from academics, hackers, activists and artists. Ted Byfield impressed with a sharp analysis that ended with a call for politically oriented graphs ((some of it can be found here: http://streamingculture.parsons.edu/parsons-the-new-school-for-design-050710-0516pm/)). Vinca Kruk from Metahaven Design Collective did an attempt to unravel the Eden Abergill case, but unfortunately only managed to scratch the surface of the complicated context in which these images continue to appear.

Worksession: Territorial Practice

The two day OSP-workshop Territorial Practice took place in Holon, a suburb south of Tel Aviv. As we hoped, working collectively with maps proved to be a productive interface to speak with participants on different levels.

[caption id="attachment_5407" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Francis Alys, The Green Line. “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic”"][/caption]

We discussed perspective, delieniation, territory and cartography as a subjective process. We consequently tried to construct the map of the Holon neighbourhood through observation and notetaking on the ground and than combined our observations into multi-layered collective images.

We were happy to have a chance to work for two days with Nira, a retired urban and regional planner who used to work for the government in Jerusalem; with Orna, a photographer, architect and activist living with her daughter in Jaffa and with Sva, a multidisciplinary artist whose activities range from dance to practical philosophy.

[caption id="attachment_5414" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Orna gave us a selection of her beautiful textile-mounted maps of the area, now de-classified but in use by British military in the 1910-20's"][/caption]

The second day, a group of interaction design students from Shenkar School of Art and Design joined. They energetically updated the OpenStreetMap data on the Holon area and stated that 'they will never look at maps the same way again'.

[caption id="attachment_5434" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Notes on Walking Paper print"][/caption]

The Open Street Map project and the wonderful Walking Papers project ((http://walking-papers.org/)) proved to be interesting tools for dialog. They provided us with a provisional and fragile basis for a conversation between participants, but also helped understand better our own approaches/practices/sensibilities vis-a-vis questions of mapping.

[caption id="attachment_5415" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Participants re-enact Esther Ferrer's performance: Walking is the way"][/caption]

More images: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/index.php?level=album&id=48

Examples discussed in the workshop

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/arts/design/13chan.html
Peter Westenberg, Op, van, -se: http://westenberg.constantvzw.org/?p=57
The Towards project: http://www.towards.be
Text: Cartography as a common good http://www.towards.be/site/spip.php?article367
List of Free, Libre Open Source cartographic resources: http://www.stormy-weather.be/wiki/index.php/MappingRessources
Animation of 2008 commits to Openstreetmap: http://vimeo.com/2598878
Jaffa, Autobiography of a City: http://www.jaffaproject.org/
Map Compare, comparing openstreetmap to Google Maps: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/
Ben Fry, All streets: http://benfry.com/allstreets/
Esther Ferrer, Walking is the way: http://www.arteleku.net/estherferrer
The relation of territory to maps: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Map-territory_relation
Ohad Matalon:
http://www.taviartgallery.com/ViewExPhoto.php?p=0&n=84&pic=956
OpenStreetMap of our small area in Holon after edition by us, the Hebrew version of streetnames were added by Talkat.

Notes

a poetic and political necessity

2010-10-29T19:17:00+02:00

Next week another delegation of OSP travels to Tel Aviv to present at the conference Open Code Versus Military Culture? Aspects in Israel Digital Culture organised by the Shenkar College for Engineering and Design. Following the talk, there will be a worksession at the Israeli Center for Digital Art.

From the conference description:

"The interest in the effects of technology on culture, and reciprocally, the effects of culture on technology, peaked with the unprecedented spread of the Internet. This conference seeks to promote public discussion about the significant relationships among technology, politics, culture and art. Israel has a very successful hi-tech industry. However, the local digital-technological culture is largely shaped by defense industries and software corporations."

http://www.shenkar.ac.il/digitalcultureconf/digitalcultureconf_eng.html

Talk description:
Unimagining practice
Contemporary creative work depends largely on software tools. Full of "accepted ideas" about the way things ought to be done, tools are unavoidably shaped by conventional models of production and distribution. In 2006, OSP decided to use Free, Libre and Open Source Software only. We had grown frustrated with the perceived neutrality of the default designer toolset and wanted to take part in the construction of software that circumscribes what we make. In this talk we'll go through some of the consequences of that choice: how it changed our habitual vocabulary, radically reorganised our workflow and in what way we engaged with the F/LOSS community developing those tools.

Workshop description:
Territorial practice
A two day worksession on F/LOSS cartographic tactics at the Israeli Center for Digital Art
Even if cartography is generally produced from a bird's eye perspective, details cannot be drawn from a remote location; they must be confirmed/corrected/added on the spot. The territory must be literally practiced by annotating and drawing.

Working on location with territories and the people living onto it, offers both beautiful and efficient ways of exchanging practiced of space, and builds connections while mediating localized knowledges. Being able to consult, create, publish and exchange maps, to have access to cartographic data and know precisely where the openings are is both a poetic and a political necessity.

On Thursday 10 November, in the morning, OSP starts with a presentation of maps we are interested in, some of the projects we have worked on and the questions they raise. For the afternoon session, we invite participants to bring samples of maps they like/dislike, data they think that deserves geo-location, ideas for maps or edits to existing maps.
On Friday 11 November, we will group participants according to their interests and work together in response to needs, questions and ideas.
Depending on the input of the participants, the work will concentrate more on practical issues or conceptual ones.

Tools and materials we could decide to work with on day 2: OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap, drawing, geonames, GPS-tracking, gpsbabel, web services and API's...

The four freedoms, two rules and one jam

2010-06-05T16:31:00+02:00

At our Bauhaus Weimar presentation, we decide to make jam. So an adaptation of the GPL principles seems useful.

(Free Art Licence)

LGM radio

2010-05-26T23:45:00+02:00

The Radio Panik show "Good morning Stallman" interviews 3 LGM fellas. Audio condensed. Listen to the podcast.

Nancy -0,2

2010-03-25T18:22:00+01:00

And some open pictures from... the my.monkey Facebook account (via a tagging of Damien and Pierre ×PLMD)!

Hop frogs on the map

2010-03-08T02:24:00+01:00

identi.ca/osp make his best to track our recent activity via our differents IP addresses, where Brussels seems synthetise by 4 positions, here with the background lazy to display, osp frogs above water.

A few minutes later, a new osp -Ivan- connection from Schaerbeek, North of Brussels, strangely shrink the scale by positionning a bright new frog on Bruges, 100km+ away, and muxing a big taurus frog on Brussels.

TeX, Fata Morgana et une promesse

2010-02-15T16:10:00+01:00

Les organisateurs du Prix Fernand Baudin nous ont demandé de répondre à trois questions concernant le livre, en vue d'intégrer les réponses dans le catalogue en préparation actuellement. Nos réponses sous forme d'extraits traduits en français du texte publié à la fin du livre. (Full version in English)

— Brèves explications du concept/déroulé du livre:

"Making Of" - p.323 : "Cette publication a été conçue et produite à l'aide d'outils numériques très peu utilisés habituellement en dehors du champ des publications scientifiques : TeX, LaTeX et ConTeXt. Alors que la plupart des contributions et traductions de ‘Traces dans les champs électr(on)iques’ arrivaient à leur stade final, nous, OSP, avons commencé à discuter de la manière de réaliser un livre qui réponde avec justesse au thème du festival lui-même (OSP est un collectif de designers qui utilisent des logiciels en licence libre, et dont la relation au logiciel est particulière à dessein). Une investigation des connexions intimes entre forme, contenu et technologie se trouve au cœur de notre pratique. Ce qui suit est le rapport d'une expérimentation qui s'étira sur un peu plus d'un an."

— Quel est le détail/aspect/page/partie du livre que vous appréciez et dont vous aimeriez parler?

"Making Of" - p.325 : "Un logiciel libre exotique comme TeX, fermement ancré dans le contexte académique plutôt que dans celui du design commercial, pourrait nous aider à ré-imaginer notre adresse habituelle à poser du texte sur une page. En opérant ce décalage de champs d'utilisation, nous espérons découvrir une autre expérience du faire, et trouver une relation plus constructive entre forme, contenu et technologie [...] Layouter une publication en LaTeX est une expérience entièrement différente que de travailler sur un logiciel visuel de type wysiwyg. Les décisions de mise en page sont appliquées par le biais de balises qui rappellent dans une certaine mesure le travail en CSS ou en HTML. Le résultat mis en page ne se produit qu'après avoir compilé le document, et c'est là que la magie de TeX opère. Le logiciel passe plusieurs fois à travers un document balisé .tex, décidant incrémentiellement où poser la césure dans tel ou tel mot, où placer un paragraphe ou une image. En principe, le concept de page ne s'applique qu'après le succès de la compilation. Le travail de design se déplace donc radicalement de l'acte de placement absolu vers celui de co-gérer un flux. Chaque élément reste placé de manière relative jusqu'au dernier passage, et pendant que les messages d'erreurs, les alertes et les décisions de césures défilent en commande en ligne, la sensation d'élasticité est quasi tangible. Et en effet, quand l'élasticité maximale d'un paragraphe est dépassée, des mots jaillissent littéralement hors de la grille (un exemple page 34). [...] En feuilletant à plusieurs reprises les manuels et nombreux guides qui existent, nous avons plaisir à découvrir une nouvelle culture. Bien que nous grinçons parfois des dents à l'humour paternaliste qui semble avoir infecté tous les recoins de la communauté TeX et qui est clairement inspiré des mots d'esprit du père fondateur, Donald Knuth lui-même, nous ressentons comment la légèreté, la structure souple de TeX permet une structure de travail moins hiérarchique et non-linéaire, ce qui rend plus facile la collaboration sur un projet. C'est une expérience assez exaltante de produire un lay-out dans le dialogue avec un outil, et le processus de conception prend une qualité presque rythmique, itérative et incrémentielle. Il commence aussi à devenir clair que cette souplesse vient avec un prix."

— Parfois, certains aléas, contraintes, problèmes techniques vous ont poussés à prendre certaines décisions dont vous voudriez parler pour que nous comprenions mieux l'histoire du livre. Pouvez-vous les décrire?

"Making Of" - p.326-329 : "«Les utilisateurs ont juste besoin d'apprendre des commandes facile à comprendre qui spécifient la structure logique d'un document », promet L'Introduction Pas Si Courte À LaTeX. [...] Cela explique pourquoi LaTeX cesse d'être facile à comprendre une fois que vous essayez de dépasser son modèle strict de «livre», «article» ou «thèse» : les «utilisateurs» qui abordent LaTeX ne sont pas des graphistes et auteurs comme nous. À ce point, nous hésitons à arrêter ou continuer [ ...] En février, plus de six mois après le début du processus, nous envisageons brièvement de passer à OpenOffice [...] ou de revenir à Scribus [...] Puis nous nous souvenons de ConTeXt, un ensemble relativement jeune de macros qui utilise le moteur de TeX lui aussi. «Alors que LaTeX isole l'auteur des détails typographiques, ConTeXt offre une approche complémentaire en fournissant des commandes structurées de traitement typographique, y compris un support étendu des couleurs, arrières-plans, hyperliens, présentations, intégration figures-textes et de compilation conditionnelle». C'est ce que nous recherchons. [...] Même s'il est frustrant de réapprendre un nouveau langage de balises (même si les deux sont basées sur le langage TeX, la majorité des commandes LaTeX ne fonctionnent pas dans ConTeXt et vice-versa), la plupart des fonctions que nous ne pourrions atteindre qu'au travers de hacks en LaTeX, sont intégrés et facilement disponibles dans ConTeXt. Avec l'aide de la liste de diffusion de ConTeXt, très active, nous trouvons un moyen d'utiliser, enfin, nos propres polices et si tout un tas de questions, bogues et zones sombres subsistent, on dirait que nous nous approchons de pouvoir produire le type de publication multilingue, multi-format et multi-couches que nous imaginons pour Traces dans les champs électr(on)iques. [...] Comme le temps passe, nous trouvons qu'il est de plus en plus difficile de consacrer du temps concentré à apprendre et c'est une leçon d'humilité que l'acquisition d'une sorte de fluidité semble nous pousser dans toutes les directions. La nature extensible du processus nourrit aussi notre insécurité. Peut-être nous devrions essayer aussi cet ensemble de commande? Avons-nous lu ce manuel correctement? Avons-nous lu le bon manuel? Avons-nous vraiment compris ces instructions? Si nous étions nous-mêmes des développeurs, pourrions-nous savoir ce qu'il faut faire? Paradoxalement, plus nous investissons dans ce processus, mentalement et physiquement, plus il est difficile de lâcher prise. Refusons-nous de voir les limites de cet outil, voire, plus effrayant, nos propres limites? Pouvons-nous accepter que l'expérience que nous espérions se révèle beaucoup plus banale que les résultats sublimes dont nous avions secrètement rêvé? [...] En août, lors de l'écriture de ce rapport, le livre est plus ou moins prêt à partir chez l'imprimeur. Bien qu'il semble «beau» selon certains, à cause de bogues inattendus et des contraintes du temps, nous avons dû laisser tomber quelques-unes des interventions que nous espérions mettre en œuvre. En y posant le regard, il ne se révèle clairement pas être le genre d'expérience typographique révélatrice dont nous avons rêvé et, malheureusement, nous ne saurons jamais si cela est dû à notre propre compréhension limitée de TeX, LaTeX et de ConTeXt, aux limites inhérentes à ces outils eux-mêmes, ou à notre décision brute de terminer de force le lay-out en deux semaines. Probablement est-ce un mélange de tout ce qui précède, et c'est d'abord un soulagement que la publication existe enfin. Revenant sur le processus, je me souviens des paroles pleines de sagesse de Joseph Weizenbaum, qui affirmait que «seul rarement, voire jamais, un outil et un travail original conjoints sont inventés ensemble» (Joseph Weizenbaum, Puissance des ordinateurs et raison humaine: du jugement au calcul. MIT, 1976). Pendant que ce livre s'effondrait presque sous le poids des projections qu'il devait porter, j'ai souvent pensé qu'à l'extérieur du monde de la publication académique, la puissance de TeX est un peu comme une Fata Morgana. Hypnotisante et toujours hors de portée, TeX représente la promesse d'un paysage technologique alternatif qui maintient notre rêve de changer les habitudes logicielles en vie."
Femke Snelting

— Aussi, il nous serait nécessaire d'obtenir deux exemplaires supplémentaires avant le 6 janvier pour les expositions et prise de vue avec des livres neufs. Pensez-vous cela possible?

Oui.

INFORMATIONS GÉNÉRALES:
Titre(s) et sous-titre(s): Tracks in electr(on)ic fields - VJ10
Auteur(s): Collectif
Éditeur(s): Constant vzw
Équipe graphique et/ou collaboration(s): Pierre Huyghebaert et Femke Snelting
Imprimeur: Offset Geers
Traducteur(s): Collectif
Langue(s): EN, NL, FR
Nombre d'exemplaires: 1000
ISBN: -
Dépôt Légal: -
Poids: 383 gr
Date de parution: Novembre 2009

INTÉRIEUR:
Format fermé: 130 × 185 mm
Format ouvert: 260 × 185 mm
Nombre de pages: 332 p
Nombre de cahiers: 11
Papier(s): blanc offset 80 gr/m²
Impression: offset quadri r°/v°
Type de reliure ou de brochage: dos carré collé + Otabind
Police(s) de caractère: Latin Modern Roman, Latin Modern Typewriter

COUVERTURE:
Format fermé: 130 × 185 mm
Format ouvert: 278 × 185 mm
Nombre de pages: 4
Papier: blanc couché 175 gr/m²
Impression: offset quadri r°/v°
Finition : coupe trilatérale

Pelgrimage to Pragma

2009-06-29T23:34:00+02:00

Designing with TeX: episode IV

Today we drove up North to the headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL), La Place from where ConTeXt, a document markup language and document preparation system based on TeX, is being developed. The goal of the journey was to resolve some of the issues we encounter while designing a multi lingual publication for Constant. We returned a little wiser about ConTeXt and the things it can do well, and cannot (yet) do. We also brought back a few working installations, a beautiful solution for image linking, the understanding that CMYK is easy, some answers to the problem of line-height switching plus a basic hack for multiple language streams. This all against the usual tarif.

So, in case you were wondering what happened to our project to design with TeX: we are still working on it!

Opening the blackbox of printing

2009-06-27T21:30:00+02:00

When we began to think about how to establish a more rich and warm collaboration with printers after the cold alerts we experienced during OSP production, Georges Charlier's appetite for research and openness to exotic solutions reappeared in Pierre's mind. And since we are preparing some new books, it was time for an update on his approach.

Georges Charlier is the passionate owner of pre-press, printing and publishing house Salto. He lives and works in Ulbeek, Limburg (B) where he restores a former brewery, and transforms it into a platform for the production and conception of extraordinary publications.

Every printed book is an original
On this mornings' motorway road to Campine, Pierre remembers for Femke his first (and only) meeting with Georges Charlier, around 10 years earlier. Thierry Van Hasselt, comics author and publisher, had spot books outputted by a fantastic printer, that built a model printshop on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands, near the Meuse, in a haunted park. This man would be able to provide extraordinary color separation and printing quality, maybe the best in the world... Thierry and me felt they needed this kind of quality in order to reproduce the subtle greasy drawings in Gloria Lopez, Thierry's book they were working on at the time. Follows a fever meeting and tour by former photographer Georges through the whole chain he has built: a repro-table with natural light and Nasa photo sensor, to avoid the brutal lighting of hi-res scanners (too high contrast); ultra high care color separation with in-house software recipes; exotic screening with an optimised solution of half 600 lpi and half stochastic rasterization and luxurious printing, combining warm grey, transparent and an opaque black 'skeleton' to match the matte quality of a litho crayon.

Far from the kind of glitter fireworks printers usually send us as new year's eve auto-promotion, this exceptional person was convinced that every book, even in large scale print run, is an original, the original. And that every stage in the process is a step to achieve the final and best result in the hands of the viewer, or user. A statement we 100% shared for the contemporary comics like Fréon was publishing. A few weeks after, Thierry literally lived there on the machine and an impressive volume was produced.

The tunnel of production
Today Georges Charlier explains how he felt frustrated by the tunnel view approach to much contemporary printing workflows. The effect of ISO-standardization might be that overall printing quality has increased, but often there is not much space for experimentation and above all specific quality. "In the United States, color specialist became known as agitators, as troublemakers. In the interest of survival, the printing business tries to streamline the process from digital file to a printed product as much as possible"

Printer without printshop
It might be the result of very practical and economical constraints, but it does not come as a surprise that Georges habitually uses the presses of his colleagues rather than his own printshop. Out of necessity, he has learned how to practice high quality printing without attaching himself to his own machine park. The experience of traveling between materials and setups has made him aware of the differences between presses of various makes. As a way to enforce a serious conversation with press manufacturers, he eventually made up his own 'acid test'. A collection of seemingly simple black and white images enables the analyses of radical shifts in quality between machines. We imagined the tense silence in the Heidelberg boardroom when he unfolded his test sheets, the complete management had gathered for the occasion. He printed the same sheet not only on the respectable German presses but also on a Roland, a Mitshibishu, a Komori and a KBA. Afterwards, in the corridor, the staff of engineers thanked him for pointing out to their bosses that even at Heidelberg there was room for improvement.

Material knowledge
On multiple levels, our conversation touches on the way material and knowledge, objects and software are intimately interwoven. It has motivated Georges to develop his own tools, and also his own paper. After an intense collaboration with the technical staff of a small paper factory in The Netherlands, he managed to develop a paper fit to his needs: a slightly ivory, matte but silky surface which supports the reproduction of a series of photographs by Bauhaus photographer Moï Ver. But the company went bankrupt, and although he still has access to the recipe, without their expertise and equipment he will not be able to produce the same quality paper ever again.

Spectral colors
"I met likeminded people like in the Netherlands, and we said to each other: let’s drop the old Lab color system, and try instead to build a new spectral system". Georges is busy developing color systems that are not limited to the traditional 3, 4, 6 or 7 values, but that are based on various separation operations that depend on what we want to store and retrieve on paper.

When the CIE Commission internationale de l'éclairage begin to build the RGB color models in the 1920's, it made sense (and fit with the mathematical computation power available at the time), to simulate the regular way our eyes simplify, with the help of three kinds of cones, infinite physical color wavelengths into three color values, as an event, before they are quantified and evaluated by our brain. These models were developped using some statistical averaging between samples of observers. And these subjective observations were than normalized to build a model that pinpoints specific and measurable wavelengths.

So the perception of these observers ended up in two overlapping simulations at work when we look at printed pictures: the one their cones have provided, and the result of the combination of three different inks chosen for their direct relation with the wavelengths that please these same cones. This synchronized simplification helped further models based on RGB (notably XYZ and Lab) and paved the way for the current ISO separation model used widely for most of the quadrichromatic printed images nowadays.

But we lost a diversity of color events in that double reduction: mostly all saturated colors in between, and colors that look the same under certain conditions but not under others (a phenomenon linked to metamerism). And if we experience everyday marvelous and rich color events in our brains, all different depending on our sex and origin, we have also progressively standardised the way we perceive printed color separation and the amount of colorised experiences we've acknowledged not to find in there.

Georges' openness to rethink the color model will not only benefit color reproduction, but also in another field of his activity, the archiving of sensible material. And it's use can even be enlarged with the archiving of information about actual pigments in the file format that stores the full spectral data of an image.

Explorations
He is finishing a special edition of images from the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute. He puts on white gloves and shows us 5 cahiers of photographs taken by Herbert Ponting. The images document the catastrophic Terra Nova expedition undertaken by Robert Falcon Scott in 1912. Duplicates rather than reproductions, these contemporary platinotypes are meant to survive their originals (assumed life span ca. 1000 years). Their exceptionally refined quality is accentuated by the bristle character of their subject matter. Scott and their party never returned from the Terra Nova expedition. But the penetrating gaze of those adventurous men, dressed in layers of self repaired clothes, will miraculously survive after being photographed, archived, scanned, digitized, described, retouched and finally printed in three monochromes on acid free paper.

Captain Scott in his cabin

Adjustment of a bone under the skin

2009-06-25T13:20:00+02:00

Last LGM and its typographic excitements has brought the DIN - Das Ist Norm - Loch Ness project to the surface of the Saint Laurent river again in a discussion with Denis Jacquerye from Deja Vu. Back in Brussels, we meet Denis in the temporary OSP Studio at Rue de la Senne to begin to define on what criteria and with which tool to work (name dropping : stroke parts - stroke fonts in FontForge - svg fonts in Inkscape - Metafont - ...). So we browse through some of the pictures we brought back from the DIN archive.

From the different versions we have seen in the archives, it seems that the main DIN letters models are based on solo strokes drawn on a grid at small size. It was the regular usage for most of the texts in the engineering environment. The thickness of the tool used (pencil, drawing pen, ball nose mill) defined the boldness of the strokes and the round or less round shape of their extremities, like flesh on bones.

Later this was also applied to larger lettering, so strokes became surfaces and the drawing began to be defined by the contour, by its skin. Simple geometric extrapolation from strokes were operated, using the unit of the grid as unit for the thickness of the stroke, to normalize sizes. In the oblique letters, the angle of the shape at the end of strokes became angled and goes farther than the regular width, defined by the grid. So, as these letter parts could be less open in their 'fill' version than in their 'stroke' one, the core was moved a little towards the inside of the glyph to fit in the grid.

That shift from calligraphy to typography is traditionaly hidden in the progressive adaptations by generations of letterers. But in the case of the DIN lettering, as a norm, the movement must be described in detail. And that effort produced the beautiful figure that appeared before Harrisson and me two year ago on a screen of the library of the DIN Institute...

Retrouvailles and Alexandre

2009-05-06T21:45:00+02:00

Now that we cross Alexandre-Prokoudine-magic-glue-between-developers again in the corridors of LGM 2009, we've been able to physically get pictures taken by him in his sans-fatigue hunt for images at LGM last year! I don't know if he gimped the files but on the protraits we're looking like out of a shiny Rock&Folk magazine... (but it's a beautiful surprise, thank you Alexandre!)

LGM analogic planning

2009-04-30T14:45:00+02:00

The preparation of LGP 2009 Montreal is on his way (OSP is very excited!) and the LGM website offers this fine view of the planning exercice for the talks. Beautiful way of showing the still open program.

[caption id="attachment_2513" align="alignnone" width="440" caption="Paper made"]

\definetypeface

2009-03-14T10:42:00+01:00

Designing with TeX: episode III

Thanks to the super active ConTeXt mailinglist, we are finally able to load our own fonts! And of course, once we know how, we are almost disappointed that it is so easy to do.

if you compile this file:

\definetypeface[Libertinage][rm][Xserif][Libertinage] \setupbodyfont[Libertinage, 24pt] \starttext \input knuth \stoptext

with this command:

texexec --xtx fontsample.tex

you end up with this.

Lions and tulips

2009-02-18T10:53:00+01:00

Designing with TeX: episode II

"Users only need to learn a few easy-to-understand commands that specify the logical structure of a document". If only we had sooner understood that user here is writer, not designer, we might have given up earlier. The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2 goes on to explain: "They almost never need to tinker with the actual layout of the document" ((The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2 in 141 minutes; by Tobias Oetiker; Hubert Partl, Irene Hyna and Elisabeth Schlegl; Version 4.26, September 25, 2008)).

'Funny' lions (TeX and LaTeX) and digital tulips (ConTeXt)

It is harder than we imagined, to start from scratch. How on earth does one change a font? How to work across packages? Marking up a LaTex document does resemble working with CSS or HTML, but only slightly. Each command, each tag is particular to the magnificent world of LaTeX itself. Many times we meet the paternalist humor of TeX's father, as it has infected the whole TeX community it seems. We learn to understand the tong-in-cheek concept of 'badness' (depending on the tension put on hyphenated paragraphs, compiling a .tex document produces 'badness' for each block on a scale from 0 to 10.000), and a long history of wonderful but often incoherent layers of development, that envelope the mysterious lasagna beauty of TeX's typographic algorithms. One day we will try to draw you that on the map.

But however exciting to designers like us, LaTeX does resist anything that shifts it's model of 'book', 'article' or 'thesis'. Fit for academic publishing but too tight for the kind of publication we'd like Verbindingen/Jonctions 10 to be: multilingual, multi-format, multi-layered. Small changes can be made without much trouble, but major ones (try for example to combine a custom paper size AND change the display of headers simultaneously) explode the document beyond repair.

At the point we are ready to give up, we remember Pierre Marchand's comment to our earlier post. Following his advice, we finally decide to try out ConTeXt, another 'macro package' that uses the TeX engine. "While LaTeX insulates the writer from typographical details, ConTeXt takes a complementary approach by providing structured interfaces for handling typography, including extensive support for colors, backgrounds, hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation" ((http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt)). This could be what we were looking for.

ConTeXt was developed in the 1990's by a Dutch company specialised in 'Advanced Document Engineering'. They needed to produce complex educational materials and workplace manuals and came up with this interface to TeX. "The development was purely driven by demand and configurability, and this meant that we could optimize most workflows that involved text editing." ((http://www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/hans-hagen.html))

However frustrating it is to re-learn yet another type of markup (even if all two are based on the same TeX language, none of the LaTeX commands works in ConTeXt and vice versa), many of the things that in LaTeX we could only achieve by means of 'hack', now are built in and readily available. There are plenty of questions, bugs and dark areas still but we breath again.

We're in the middle now of typesetting the book we've been working on for so long, so it is a bit early to know whether we will succeed in the end.

To be continued!

A pièce of coin

2008-10-31T11:57:00+01:00

The hard and well documented workof a ~~Dutch~~ Belgian Python artist and designer - Stani - to produce a coin devoted to Dutch contemporary architecture, using only floss. The stroke font he design for it is simply beautiful (currently no info on availability). Via Dave's understanding blog.

We're not here to be polite

2008-09-08T15:19:00+02:00

It's rentrée day at OSP and we're shaking our website. The future ~~hours~~ days will show some chaos on pages and categories and html renderings...

Towards #2 is out

2008-06-25T13:20:00+02:00

Towards is a cartographic project close to OSP and the second publication is finally out and available after a long 9 months of preparation. Following our informations, it's the last one that will be produced using proprietary software ;)... But the timeline present on the cover and backcover, made from all the posts written since the beginning of the Toward’s website, is already manufactured with an open smile. It has been generated programmatically : a php script has pulled all the information from the database and produced an svg file. A shell script has spidered all the images attached to the posts. All these elements have been glued together using inkscape. The positioning of the blocks have been finalized by hand and with the help of the inkscape connectors. More info and download the code on www.towards.be/code.

Mathematics, fonts, free and money

2008-05-17T11:02:00+02:00

In a déjà old interview (2000) by Advogato, Donald Knuth (TeX and Metafont author) answers in his sometimes-very-short sometimes-generous style. In the middle of these all interesting things, a few exchanges about relations between mathematics, fonts, free and money. Enough close to some parts of talks at Wroclaw, like the Dave Crossland's one, and some of our interviews, to serve as an intuitive background.

Advogato : There was a quote that you had in the "Mathematical Typography" essay reprinted in "Digital Typography" where you said, "Mathematics belongs to God."

Donald Knuth : Yes. When you have something expressed mathematically, I don't see how you can claim... In the context, that was about fonts. That was when I had defined the shape of the letter in terms of numbers. And once I've done that, I don't know how you're going to keep those numbers a secret...

[...]

Advogato : Fonts seem like a really interesting edge case for that argument, because a font is in some ways a mathematical formula, especially a TeX font, much more so than what came before, but it's also an artwork.

Donald Knuth : Absolutely. It absolutely requires great artistry. So the other part of this is that artists are traditionally not paid like scientists. Scientists are supported by the National Science Foundation to discover science, which benefits the human race. Artists, or font designers, are not supported by the National Font Foundation to develop fonts that are going to be beneficial to the human race. Fonts are beneficial to the human race, they just don't traditionally get supported that way. I don't know why. They're both important aspects of our life. It's just that one part has traditionally gotten funded by a royalty type mechanism and the other by public welfare grants for the whole country.

Advogato : Perhaps that has something to do with the absolute necessity in science to have open access to the results of others, that if you did science in a closed, proprietary framework that the disadvantages would be so clear.

Donald Knuth : With fonts, it was pretty clear to me.

[...]

Advogato : You've gotten a number of free fonts contributed by artists, in some cases very beautiful fonts, to TeX and to the Metafont project. In general, this has been a real struggle for open source development these days (OSP : in 2000!), to get free fonts. Do have any thoughts?

Donald Knuth : I think it's still part of this idea of how are the font designers going to get compensated for what they do. If they were like a scientist, then they've got their salary for doing their science. But as font designers, where do they get their salary? And musicians. It's just a matter of tradition as to how these people are getting paid.

Advogato : But how did you address those problems with the fonts that got contributed to TeX?

Donald Knuth : In my case, I hired research associates and they put their fonts out into the open. Or else, other people learned it and they did it for the love of it. Some of the excellent fonts came about because they were for Armenian and Ethiopian and so on, where there wasn't that much money. It was either them taking time and making the fonts or else their favorite language would be forever backwards, so I made tools by which they could do this. But in every case, the people who did it weren't relying on this for their income. If we had somebody who would commission fonts and pay the font designer, the font designer wouldn't be upset at all about having it open, as long as the font designer gets some support.

Advogato : And you did some of that.

Donald Knuth : Yeah. In fact, I worked with some of the absolute best type designers*, and they were thrilled by the idea that they could tell what they knew to students and have it published and everything. They weren't interested in closed stuff. They're interested in controlling the quality, that somebody isn't going to spoil it, but we could assure them of that.

Advogato : Right. Working with the creator of the software.

Donald Knuth : Yeah, if they didn't like the software, I could fix it for them.

(* Herman Zapf, Matthew Carter and lots of others known names has been around Knuth for some times thirty years ago, but the complex and difficult relations between designers and Metafont definitely need a separate and future post, I'm still a nàíve garçöñ...)

Audio + screencast of our intervention at LGM 2008

2008-05-13T11:26:00+02:00

Kaveh Bazargan has patiently recorded the sound and the screen of every interventions at LGM. Here is ours: http://media.river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm2008/quicktime/0103-Harrisson.html. (At the end of the conference, we discovered that Kaveh is a TeX guy for 20 years, so we've asked him a few questions. Transcript will come.)

Contributors portrait of the W Drogę typeface

2008-05-12T12:53:00+02:00

Thanks to Andy Fitzsimon for the picture (in CC full open)!

Road to South-Wrocław

2008-05-05T19:42:00+02:00

This Wednesday, join us for our type workshop in the OPT cultural center in Wrocław from 11am to ongeveer 6pm. For those who arrive directly from the airport, you can begin with this path then please print this map, because it seem that it is not easy to find for taxi driver (our journey was epic) or even for Google Maps (just waiting for Towards).
See ya!

Potrace --alphamax 1.334 (or the limit between artificial and natural)

2008-05-05T11:10:00+02:00

Since the first time I've used an autotrace program -Adobe Streamline 1.0 in the early nineties- I've been disappointed by the unavoidable angles in curves, named kinks or cusps, that pledged the vector output. Lots of designers and developers seem not to care about it, but for me it is simply the difference between artificial shapes that scream "I'm a vector!" and natural shapes where every sharp edge is a small curve when you look really close. That kind of ultra detail may seem useless and/or nerdy, but it can really make the difference in typography. Like in my work where I use bitmaps as sources.

So for 17 years+, I've tried all options and all autotrace softwares I've found for that simple but invisible holy grail function : a real smooth aligned anchor for all curves. No way. The only cheat strategy I've found was to produce polygons with no curves at all, then to round all them... Sometimes ok, but really not satisfactory.

A few weeks ago, during my first real hands on Inkscape, I've made some tests on the Potrace function. That FLOSS package will be more open to custom settings? I founded the "smooth corners" setting, like in so much other packages. After a few tests, with the maximum and strange value of 1.34, it's reveal to produce those precious precisely aligned anchors! Ma-gni-fi-que.

And today, having a bunch of tif pictures to autotrace for a "regular" "proprietary" job, I decided to try potrace more extensively and to try to process them in batch. So I read the potrace documentation, and in a flow of features I read with *real* emotion :
"-a n, --alphamax n
set the corner threshold parameter. The default value is 1. The smaller this value, the more sharp corners will be produced. If this parameter is negative, then no smoothing will be performed and the output is a polygon. The largest useful value is 4/3 or 1.334, which suppresses all corners and leads to completely smooth output." (from http://potrace.sourceforge.net/potrace.1.html)

So the cryptic Alphamax setting, with a 4/3 value define precisely the limit between artificial and natural in the autotrace and vector world!...

And I immediately use it :

rename to avoid spaces :
for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | sed -e 's/ */_/g' -e 's/_-_/-/g'`; done
convert tif files (not supported by potrace) to pbm files and insert "pbm-" at the beginning of the filename :
for pic in `ls *.tif` ; do echo "converting $pic"; convert $pic pbm-$pic.pbm; done
(it take some time : pbm files, as other portable anymap files not compressed, are \~30 x more heavy than tif)
trace the pbm and produce eps files with "eps-" at the beginning of the filename :
for pic in `ls *.pbm`; do echo "potrace $pic"; potrace --alphamax 1.334 --turdsize 2 --longcurve --turnpolicy black -o eps-$pic.eps $pic; done

Even if it has me place three hours closer of my job's deadline, in this rude white night in pure designer style, I continue to smile.