osp blog - tools

OSM to SVG

2018-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Extracting OSM data for SVG use.

I've been meaning to document my OSM to SVG process for a while now, I just had to run the process again recently, so here was a new chance to take screenshots along the way. The basic idea is to process a portion of Open Street Map data into a vector paths and shapes. One of the ways I have been able to accomplish this is using an xml conversion tool, in my case, xsltproc but there are many others. Before we can convert the dot osm xml, here is how I obtain the osm data in the first place:

Note: this process is greatly aided by this page on the OSM wiki, but a lot of the info and links are out of date, hence this document. It remains a good place to start. [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmarender/Convert_osm_data_from_OSM_file_to_an_SVG_image]

Getting the data

It is possible to extract bits of OSM using the API, making a GET request in this format https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map?bbox=-0.5,51.3,-0.4,51.4 but if your request is too big, the OSM api will refuse to treat your request. Most of the time I simply download a full country file from geofabrik http://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html

about the bounding box

Just for reference, a selection area can in this case be called the bounding box. In my experience, most tools that function with OSM expect the bounding box to be set as left,bottom,right,top. Depending on the api or tool, those values will be differenly seperated, but that order seems to be consistent, thank goodness.

Mine was of these values:

-6.59 52.87 -6.21 53.23 meaning left=-6.59 bottom=52.87 right=-6.21 top=53.23

I know there probably are better ways to do this, but I still get my box coordinates from this online tool from geofabrik again: http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox=-6.588098,52.879038,-6.214317,53.220207&tab=1&proj=EPSG:4326&places=2

That tool only gives you the coordinates, now we need to cut out our selection from the large file downloaded earlier.

cut out the piece you need

osmosis is used to cut out section of the map for easier work using a command like this, assuming you want to work with the compressed file* :

bzcat downloaded.osm.bz2 | osmosis --read-xml enableDateParsing=no file=- --bounding-box top=49.5138 left=10.9351 bottom=49.3866 right=11.201 --write-xml file=- | bzip2 > extracted.osm.bz2

you could also uncompress the file, and use the desktop Java OSM editing tool called JOSM. With JOSM, you can open and edit (it's main purpose) OSM data directly.

convert the OSM xml to svg using stylesheets from osmarender

Now comes the complex part of transforming OSM xml into SVG xml. See, OSM after all is basically one enormous xml database. This is an interesting but potentially problematic thing, long term. See emacsen's post about the serious troubles of OpenStreetMaps

If you're reconciled with OSM for now, we need to convert the section of the map DB to svg, for which we need to rule-render the OSM xml to SVG xml. This is done using a stylesheet that can be obtained from osmarender. OSMarender seems to have an xml processor built in but I couldn't get it to function on my system so I used *xsltproc* which reads rules from an xsl file + a stylesheet to convert all xml to all xml.

OSMarender gives us access to a load of zoom-level stylesheets. However when I tried to obtain these using my packet manager, all official links were dead, luckily, clones were made, so get yourself a copy of the OSMarender stylesheets from a place like this https://github.com/pnorman/osmarender-testclone

the xsltproc manual suggest this command structure as a general example: xsltproc -o map.svg osmarender.xsl osm-map-features-z17.xml but in my case, I use the xml fields to select a data file, so the command looks a bit more like this:

xsltproc -o bunclody/bunclody-fullmap.svg ../osmarender.xsl stylesheets/osm-map-features-z17.xml

!! Depending on the zoom level you choose, and the size of your bb, this operation can take multiple hours, be aware of this, and keep an eye on your system, the cpus will have pretty intense xml crunching to deal with !!

Note that this stylesheet includes a section of options in the file header that looks like this:

<rules xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" data="/home/colm/git/osmosis/glendalough.osm" svgBaseProfile="full" scale="1" symbolScale="0.107" textAttenuation="14" minimumMapWidth="0.5" minimumMapHeight="0.5" withOSMLayers="yes" withUntaggedSegments="no" showScale="no" showGrid="no" showBorder="no" showLicense="no" interactive="no" showRelationRoute="no" symbolsDir="../stylesheets/symbols" meter2pixel="0.1375">

Contour lines

Unfortunately, the OSM db does not include any contour lines data. Thankfully, out bounding box can be a query element for earthexplorer using phyghtmap that will give us a .osm export of the bounding box we're interested in.

phyghtmap --earthexplorer-user=colm --earthexplorer-password=********** -a -6.59:52.87:-6.21:53.23

phyghtmap expects left:bottom:right:top as noted above

phyghtmap will need login credentials from earthexplorer, so you'll need an account from there before you can download any of that data. I'm unsure how phyghtmap queries earthexplorer exactly, but in my case, the bounding boxes I set often result in multiple files. To merge the two or more files that your phyghtmap query returns, I use JOSM, import both datasets as different layers and then merge them from the program. This is not exactly a necessary step, but as I'm bringing in the contour lines as a separate svg layers, when merged, the contour lines layer will be exactly the same size as the OSM data we converted earlier, meaning it can be easily aligned to the baselayer.

xsltproc -o bunclody/contours-wscale.svg osmarender.xsl bunclody/stylesheets/osm-contours-only.xml

Next, you need to convert this other OSM-type data into svg also, using a similar xsltproc command. Here this repo was essential again https://github.com/pnorman/osmarender-testclone

merging the two

Bringing together your different svg layers is done with inkscape of course and now you have multiple paths to chose to handle your data. If you're just doing on screen renders, then I believe this text will be enough for you. If you intent is flat printing, I can't help you there yet, as my interests have been around plotting these maps; for this read on.

First of all, I had to (re)discover some inkscape tricks to help me work on the different parts of the maps. I listed some of these below, I may add to this list later:

resize svgs + content to different sizes https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/6574/in-inkscape-resize-both-the-document-and-its-content-at-the-same-time
Find replace tool in inkscape: CTRL + f, open options, uncheck all types, select text or paths to create a dynamic selection that can then be moved to a separate layer.
osmarender follows SVG practices pretty nicely, but if you're tying to convert objects to paths, inkscape will complain about working cloned objects. The tag is a good practice XML SVG feature, but in our pen plotting case, we need all native paths, so: Search for clones (using detailed method above) and then do a edit > clone > unlink clone to re-create all paths as individual style objects, instead of cloned bits of the xsl stylesheet.
I'm still looking for a way to save one single inkscape layer as it's own SVG, any ideas on this topic are appreciated.

Later, I process the SVGs either to HPGL or to GCODE. If your machine uses the latter, I suggest using the ! now built in ! gcodetools extension. If gcode in inkscape is your path, I personally got to grips with the extension with this published method: https://www.norwegiancreations.com/2015/08/an-intro-to-g-code-and-how-to-generate-it-using-inkscape/

Happy mapping !

Spoon

2011-04-29T15:28:00+02:00

"Go into the kitchen and open the first drawer you come to and the odds are you'll find the wooden spoon that is used to stir soups and sauces. If this spoon is of a certain age you will see it no longer has its original shape. It has changed, as if a piece had been cut obliquely off the end. Part of it is missing.
We have (though not all at once, of course) eaten the missing part mixed up in our soup. It is continual use that has given the spoon its new shape. This is the shape the saucepan has made by constantly rubbing away at the spoon until it eventually shows us what shape a spoon for stirring soup should be"

(Bruno Munari. Design as art, Penguin, 2009)

It's possible?

2011-02-16T12:13:00+01:00

The following question was posted by Pascal Lapalme on the Scribus mailinglist:

"I will animate a conf to explain how to use Scribus, Gimp and Inkscape in a classroom with studient to make a news paper (look here : Atelier 108 - Des outils libres pour la création d'un journal ). In my conf, I will ask everyone to use twitter to make comments, ask questions, etc. I would like to use Scribus and his hability to script to take RSS file and make a booklet of all this posts... It's possible ? How can I make it or where do I begin my search in the doc ?"

We are curious to see the result!
Follow the thread here: http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2011-February/041959.html

Hit any key to exit

2011-01-31T23:28:00+01:00

Finally... How to choose and install ~~four~~ three new distributions

Since announcing that it was time for a new adventure, colleagues and friends have advised me what to install and why (see notes below). In the last few weeks I tried to follow up on their tips and I have tried out many distributions.

I decided for a multi-boot with Debian, Fedora plus two other distributions. The plan was that by using the same home partition for different installs, it should be easy to move between them.

In the quiet period between Christmas and New Year, I started up Ubuntu for the last time. I used the usb-live-creator to make a bootable usb-stick with a Debian iso-image on it. Once finished, it ironically congratulated me:
'Now you can run Ubuntu from a stick!'
I reboot, and the adventure begins.

In-between downloads and file-checks, partitions, bootloaders, grub-rescue, lost file systems, unknown linux kernels, Master Boot Records, fdisk, ext2, ext3, ext4, i386, initrd and initramfs I often lose track of what I am trying to do. I start to include the term 'newbie' with my searches; most explanations that come up when I just look for the error messages, make no sense to me. The split that Ubuntu makes between different levels of use (color-coding them!) might be patronizing and annoying, but to typecast myself as beginner, dummie, noob … that feels terrible too.

Slowly, through trial and error, I begin to see the difference between the messiness of some installers, and my own misunderstanding of the boot-process. I'm not completely confident about manipulating grub.conf yet, but after two days I get to grips with the system again. In the mean time, I have tried to clarify the goal of the exercise:

Find out about projects that are clear about their allegiance with Free Software
Choose a new distribution that I can work with: somehow inviting different levels of use; minimal needs: functional wireless, multiple screens, microphone, preferably out of the box
Learn about Free Software vocabularies, communities, cultures (visual and textual vocabularies of digital desktops)
Switch to a distro that has an interesting approach to design

When most Free Software activists lie awake about non-free kernel blobs, I care about naming schemes, fonts, logo's and icon-sets. The relation between software politics and visual representation is of special interest to us at OSP; we think that Free Software should run more than kernel-deep.

Three days later, I settle surprisingly (disappointingly?) close to home with just two very similar distributions running: Debian Squeeze ('unstable') and Trisquel. I have tried to install Fedora as a third option, but encounter multiple problems with the install media (live-usb, live-cd, netinstall). I do manage to boot Fedora 13 at some point but for the final installation-round keyboard and mouse are not recognized so I will return to this later.

Debian and Trisquel have very different approaches to 'how free software is made', although both are based on Debian and both use Gnome as the default window-manager. Where Debian clarifies, develops and negotiates it's position based on a constitution, social contract, and policy documents ... Trisquel is more like a cool 'de-branding'-exercise, using scripts to clean out and sometimes replace non-free elements from the Ubuntu kernel. Strict (my Lenovo wireless card won't work as it requires non-free particles) and elegant. It is also one of the rare distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_endorsed_by_the_Free_Software_Foundation)).

The Debian community is not busy with design ((famously the Debian typeface is proprietary http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLogo)) as is evident from their laconicly un-styled documents, manuals and other web pages. Debian apparently leaves all interface decisions to the gnome project; the large and widespread project has really no design-team at work.

Trisquel is a bit more interesting in that sense; if you don't take their neo-druidism too litteral (release names: Awen, Dwyn, Robur and Taranis), it has an intelligent approach to their redrawing of gnome; uses Droid fonts, presents their logo as a Debian-hommage and provides the nicest packagemanager icon as of yet.

But since both Trisquel and Debian use gnome, and the gnome-preferences are stored in the .gconfd folder. In my clever one-home-multiple install solution, both installs point to the same folder so it means that they end up looking exactly the same :-)

Two weeks later, I add CrunchBang to the collection. CrunchBang is another recent Debian spin that a friend at Samedies suggests. It's a relief to work with OpenBox (the windowmanager installed by default) and I enjoy the way it invites to edit config files directly, the way the Conky system-manager works and the tone of the CrunchBang forums feels right: assuming an interest in experimental use, but ready to explain even if questions are basic. “Anyone who uses CrunchBang should be comfortable with occasional or even frequent breakage”.
The project seems to find a nice balance between GUI and configurability, and prefers to direct you to commandline rather than GUI but does so without the kinds of discouraging warnings that Debian likes to issue. With great power comes great responsibility.

Philip Newborough, 'distro leader' of CrunchBang explains why the decision was made to base the newest release on Debian, and not on Ubuntu:

“Unlike the Ubuntu project, Debian does not have a commercial sponsor with any commercial interests. This was never an issue for myself, until recently when Canonical seem to have become less of a sponsor and more of a governing party” ((http://reddevil62-techhead.blogspot.com/2010/03/interview-crunchbang-creator-explains.html))

The list of software included is nicely different from most other Debian derivatives, although I am surprised to find Google Chrome, Flash and Skype installed by default; it might be more about delivering 'modern' and 'sleek' than anything else. CrunchBang aesthetics are a sort of contemporary-geek, meaning that most of the visual identity is made up of text, preferably in black-and-white (("The new design will be changing in the opposite direction to that recently taken by the Ubuntu design team, which only seems fitting. So, whereas the new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of “Light”, the new style for CrunchBang will be inspired by the idea of “Dark”. o_O" http://crunchbanglinux.org/blog/2010/11/20/new-website-design/)).

The next distro on the list is Arch-Linux (and Fedora of course), but for the time being I'll happily stick with CrunchBang.

[to be continued]

**N O T E S**

*What I was advised to install*: **Free Software Foundation endorsed distributions** Only 10 or so? Very limited list. Excluding even Debian; seems extremely purist. Imagery reflects. Quite a few Ubuntu liberation projects, relatively. This discussion between Shuttleworth and Stallman is reffered to: » (Stallman on cooking and recipes. Comparing proprietary software to colonialism in Tunis. *Don't let freedom slip through your fingers because you don't bother to close their hands. Divide and rule is the nature of proprietary software; giving local elites privileges; in return they can keep others down. Addicts, creating dependencies through gratis software. Recruiting schools as agents.*) Very many projects with Spanish language base, or language issues as a starting point. Ones I find interesting: - BLAG - Trisquel - Ubuntu based - gNewSense - Ubuntu based, next release Debian - Dragora has best image sofar: but hardly any documentation in English - Ututo - Gentoo based - all in Spanish **Peter L** / *OpenSuse* "It runs QT ten times faster and as I told you years ago, you'll certainly notice the difference in running Scribus." **Michael M** / *Mint* "Try Mint. It is just like Ubuntu with the outer layer removed." **OSP** - *Linux Arch* - *Linux From Scratch* (Pierre M: 'Constant needs to run LFS somewhere') - “*Debian* is always there as a fall-back” - *slackware* **Juliane** / *Black Snake* "If you want to be like a system administrator" **Dave C** / *Fedora* I have been using Fedora very happily for 18 month now – it has the most libre policies of any popular distro, and I am very excited about the future of its design team. I think in Fedora’s governance structures and Red Hat’s strategy, RHAT has got the balance between corporate sponsorship/paid contributors and community participation far more right than Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SUSE, or any others. It also helps that is also the most cutting edge distro as well as the most libre :) And the rpmfusion repos are set up very sensibly too, with a good libre archive for things free in EU but not USA. **John H** There are at least two really alternative OSes that I think it would be great for you to try: Haiku and Etoile OS. I think there is probably some optimally old hardware for running Haiku available in the Constant offices already. I'll be doing a reinstall of BeOS on my old k6-2 machine when I am back in the states and comparing it to Haiku on the same hardware. Etoile is a re-implemntation of the entire Alan Kay Dynabook project, complete with Smalltalk programmability and modular application blocks that can be linked together into personal applications :) (Linux? both under MIT/BSD license) **Nicolas M** My last attempt at Debian was… difficult and the technocracy/meritocracy/bureaucracy in place doesn't make me feel more comfortable. I don't feel like leaving Ubuntu yet. Time to experiment multi-boots. I agree the OS is very important but I would really like to understand what is pushing the whole array of closures happening right now and trying to figure out where are the priorities, because we will not be able to be on every front. I have the impression we need to come up with a global critique and proposal from the inside. I think that we need to understand where we made mistakes also ourselves. We, also, made it possible for all this to happen. And nothing was hidden to us. Found this while looking for complementary info about Christophe's text: **Sophie S** / *CrunchBang* "A Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance. Using the nimble Openbox window manager, it is highly customisable and provides a modern, full-featured GNU/Linux system without sacrificing performance." **Alex L + Stephanie V** / *Archlinux* The odd one out. D I S T R I B U T I O N S **Debian** As one of the largest distributions around, it has been referred to as the 'default fallback option' but I think this non-commercial project deserves more than that. Although technically very close to Ubuntu, politically and culturally Debian is on another planet. Preferring slow releases over cutting edge, an almost obsessive attention for permission structures, organised according to a constitution, social contract, and policy documents, this distro targets administrators as well as desktop users like me. The 'Debian Social Contract' establishes the community as a society. “We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created “contrib” and “non-free” areas in our archive for these works. The packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, although they have been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses of the packages in these areas and determine if they can distribute the packages on their CDs. Thus, although non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their use and provide infrastructure for non-free packages (such as our bug tracking system and mailing lists).” I like how they manage to be clear without purism but I am most of all impressed by the discussions this self-defined rule of conduct allows. The establishment of groups that work on the inclusion of women in kernel development for example, is a result of a community that has does not take inclusiveness for granted. Though both Ubuntu-women and Fedora-women exist, Debian was the first to recognize the issue. Its societal approach (elections and votes!) obviously also accounts for a bureaucratic culture that is taking itself extremely serious. Seems largeness of project also invites reflection on why, what, how. “The Debian project has been working in removing non-free firmware from the Linux kernel shipped with Debian for the past two release cycles. At the time of the releases of Debian 4.0 “Etch” and 5.0 “Lenny”, however, it was not yet possible to ship Linux kernels stripped of all non-free firmware bits. Back then we had to acknowledge that freedom issues concerning Linux firmware were not completely sorted out” Why not Fedora: "Red Hat is in a tough spot. Most of their revenue streams are based on sales, support, and training while the open nature of Linux has resulted in thousands of freely-available Linux resources on the Web. Their survival depends on having a product that is proprietary enough to make you dependent upon them for upgrades and support. And when they became a publically-held company they were under pressure to meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts for revenue growth and cash flows every quarter. (Did you think it was just a coincidence that they were churning out new versions of what is now Fedora at an average of two a year?) In time, Red Hat's dominance will likely kill off smaller commercial distributions like Mandrake and TurboLinux and dealing with Red Hat will be no different than dealing with Microsoft." Visual culture is brutal. Amazingly little attention for detail, typography, lay-out. Looks like early days computer culture. Naming scheme: Toy Story :-O Debian = Debra Murdoch + Ian "If you can boot from a CD, boot a live CD that has grub2 and use it to reinstall grub to the master boot record. There are plenty of tutorials explaining how to do this step-by-step." Master Boot Record Familiar with slight differences ... i need to add myself to the sudo-ers file, the same old warning about using power responsibly etc. and upon opening Synaptic, I get this message: "Granted permissions without asking for password. The '/usr/sbin/synaptic' program was started with the privileges of the root user without the need to ask for a password, due to your system's authentication mechanism setup. It is possible that you are being allowed to run specific programs as user root without the need for a password, or that the password is cached. *This is not a problem report; it's simply a notification to make sure you are aware of this*" Switching to Iceweasel - a logo that creates trouble: "Some of the icons and artwork used in Firefox are trademarked and copyrighted. According to my limited understanding, this violates DFSG\#1 which states the component must be freely redistributable and DFSG \#3 which states that the license must allow derivatives. If Debian was granted some sort of special permission to use these trademarked items, it would violate DFSG \#8 which states that licenses must not be specific to Debian. I have also seen some discussion over whether Debian can or should use the “Firefox” name without using the official icons." "This effect of the Mozilla trademark policy led to a long debate within the Debian Project in 2004 and 2005. (...) 'Iceweasel' was subsequently used as the example name for a rebranded Firefox in the Mozilla Trademark Policy, and became the most commonly used name for a hypothetical rebranded version of Firefox. By January 1, 2005, rebranding as a strategy was being referred to as the 'Iceweasel route'." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWeasel](https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/thumb/e/e7/4Foundations.png/150px-4Foundations.png) "There is an extension that lets you change your user agent on-the-fly. Moreover, this site has provided a definition file that lets you browse as if you were on Firefox 2 for Windows XP" **Fedora** “Freedom. Friends. Features. First.”. Logo: eternal 8. All logos carry tm signs. Confident tone: Thanks for downloading Fedora! We know you'll love it! The freedom, friend stuff is a bit much, especially since it blends so well with the other blue F. Do like the way this friendship was presented at LGM. The imagery, tagline puts 'values' high on the list - comparable with Debian. It seems making the difference to Red Hat proper, requires the project to define itself along the lines of this. Remember CC problems: 'sharing' is done amongst friends. Again, the Debian harshness seems more interesting to me. Why exactly? “The four foundations are the core values of the Fedora community. They sprung from work on the Fedora marketing plan, and have replaced the old “infinity, freedom, voice” slogan. The original slogan emerged from the design of the Fedora logo. That logo has become a very powerful and effective part of Fedora's brand and image, but does not sufficiently describe our core values in a clear and effective way.” So, from 'infinity, freedom, voice' to 'Freedom. Friends. Features. First'. Note the full stops replacing comma's. The last F, First might be more interesting than the trophy images promises. “Fedora always aims to provide the future, first”. Well, 'provide the future' is a bit pedantic but there is a sense of curiosity that speaks from the definition of 'first' that I like. It obviously pits itself against the slow development cycle of Debian. Fedora Spins are interesting; a distribution that promotes customization of the distro itself… “Fedora Spins are alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.” "It would be nice to have content in a design spin - but we don't have a policy for packaging content. Content like gimp brushes, color palettes, fonts... eventually one idea was to have a Fedora Design Studio, which would have one for graphic design, web design, etc." Getting frustrated with installation -- try every possible way of creating the Live-usb stick (unetbooting, live-usb creator, commandline) from different sources and with different iso images, but the result is always the same mysterious message: Boot error - Sleeping forever A recurring problem? [http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234025&highlight=LIVEUSB+NO+ROOT https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/report/1?sort=created&asc=0 ](http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=234025&highlight=LIVEUSB+NO+ROOT%20https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/report/1?sort=created&asc=0) Finally, I figure out how to use the netinstall for F12 to install F13 (not latest; netinstall for 14 fails too) and than to upgrade to F14 with the help of Unfortunately no net-install exists for spins. The install is very slow (2 hrs), but successful. While subsequently updating the system (takes over an hour as well) I explore this new territory: Fedora is surprisingly similar in structure, with only small differences, as far as I can discover. Difference between Fedora and Ubuntu: "But when distributions use the same desktop, the way that Fedora and Ubuntu do, then the differences are likely to be unnoticeable to three out of four users. These days, you are even unlikely to find any differences in speed or stability unless you have some unusual hardware configuration." Too small partition, running out of space for the update. Decide to install 3rd system and re-size partition using gparted. gparted does not work on LVM **Trisquel** Visual references, naming scheme: neo-druidry / celtic - releases: Awen, Dwyn, Robur, Taranis. Developed for/in Galician. “Trisquel is a fully free operating system based in GNU/Linux, for home users, small enterprises and educational centers.” “Our logo is the triskelion, a Celtic symbol of evolution and wisdom. Our Trisquel (the Spanish name for this triple spiral form) resembles the Debian logo, as a form of recognition of the distro we originally based our project on. The base color we use is \#004DB1, and the font is Droid Sans.” [http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/logo](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/) "Trisquel does not include the vanilla Linux kernel you can find at the Linux project servers, but a cleaned up version of Ubuntu's version of the kernel. Both the upstream versions include non-free binary-only firmware files, and also a lot of binary blobs hidden in .c and .h files in the form of huge sequences of numbers. To provide our users with a fully free kernel we use a set of scripts based in the ones from Linux-libre, with some modifications of our own." [http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/how-trisquel-made](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/) The 'purifying projects' are scary -- lack humor. Very obedient to Mr. Stallman. Still, the method they choose is super interesting: standing on the hands of giants; nice parasites. Installing trisquel, means no wireless. Help ends me to the FSF list of non-free hardware. I get the point, but what to do? [http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=downloads](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/) I can install Skype (with authentication warning - don't really understand what they mean by 'risk'). Also a bit boring; nothing changes? Otherwise everything works very well; even the microphone works euhm ... as well as in Ubuntu. **CrunchBang** "The new design will be changing in the opposite direction to that recently taken by the Ubuntu design team, which only seems fitting. So, whereas the new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of “Light”, the new style for CrunchBang will be inspired by the idea of “Dark”. o\_O" [http://crunchbanglinux.org/blog/2010/11/20/new-website-design/](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/) "Not recommended for anyone who requires a stable system. Anyone who uses CrunchBang should be comfortable with occasional or even frequent breakage. Remember, CrunchBang Linux could make your computer go CRUNCH! BANG! :)" [http://reddevil62-techhead.blogspot.com/2010/03/interview-crunchbang-creator-explains.html](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/) Other packages I tried to install **BLAG** “works to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and spreading Free Software.” Developed by the “brixton linux action group”, Graphics, language: very English: … quite beautiful. Discovering fluxbox “BLAG 90000 (oxygen) is based on Fedora 9” Not much has been happening the last year - I will come back once the new version is stable? \[live-usb produces infinite sleep as well\] **gNewSense** Visual references, naming scheme: new age? Bonzai tree = logo. “it does not use a lot of the shiny methods that Ubuntu does” “gNewSense is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Its goal is to maintain the user-friendliness of Ubuntu, but with all non-free software and binary blobs removed. The Free Software Foundation considers gNewSense to be a GNU/Linux distribution composed entirely of free software.” “Neither Debian nor Ubuntu are fully free. Ubuntu installs non-free software by default. Debian provides non-free software through its repositories and includes non-free kernel drivers. We were also the first distribution to remove GLX, which Debian had ignored for years” Almost similar approach as Trisquel, but somehow less precise. If I need to choose between neo-druids and neo-zen, the first wins. Esthetic choice? **Linux Mint** Very difficult to feel the political difference between Ubuntu. It is lighter, but how does it make a difference? I really do not see the interest ... seems not very clear? **Tests, choosers, comparison** --> type of license is not a question “Ubuntu provides specific repositories of nonfree software, and Canonical expressly promotes and recommends nonfree software under the Ubuntu name in some of their distribution channels. Even if you try to avoid all of that, the default application installer will advertise nonfree software to you.” M I S C E L L A N E O U S How do you know whether swap is at sdb1 or sdb5? > fdisk

Nice explanation of GRUB:

==============================

Scenario for vowels, consonants and a text-engine

2010-11-23T21:48:00+01:00

Imagine ((This Scenario for vowels, consonants and a text-engine describes the sophisticated new text-engine that the Scribus team is preparing us at this very moment)) a paragraph in Scribus. The first word consists of three vowels and a consonant. The Scribus text-engine receives this cluster of characters as a first input. Now the shaper will start to work; it has to decide what features need to be applied to the cluster. Do characters need to be re-ordered? Do ligatures need to be applied? If the answer is 'yes', the shaper will ask the font-software if there is a ligature available that can be used. Each cluster is treated in this way and subsequently added to the list of glyphs. This list of glyphs output by the shaper is than entered into the second part of the text-engine, the block-compositor. The block-compositor is in contact with the line-lay-outer. It knows that a certain line starts at a given point and it also knows about the width of the frame containing it. The block-compositor will ask the line-lay-outer to come up with a certain amount of propositions per line. Per proposition, a penalty is given, based on the quality of the break (does it require hyphenation?) and the amount of stretching needed to reach the width of the frame. Now the block-composer can produce an oriented graph ((http://mathworld.wolfram.com/OrientedGraph.html)) on the basis of which it can decide what is the least penalized route ((Compare the concept of badness in TeX: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/definition/badness))). But a second parameter is also taken into account: what combination of line-propositions will result in the most uniform distribution of line-width per paragraph? After the block-compositor has found the optimal solution, the text engine outputs the paragraph to the canvas.

diff git imagemagick

2010-10-19T12:03:00+02:00

From wikipedia: In computing, diff is a file comparison utility that outputs the differences between two files.

We have been playing with git. There's more coming! For now, this quick prototype (30M) illustrates some ideas about diff, and images files. It will hopefully be improved in the future :)

In the context of a configuration file, we are combining git's flexibility regarding the choice of a difftool with the image compare features of Imagemagick:

[difftool "mydifftool"] cmd = composite $LOCAL $REMOTE -compose difference x:

It's a digest of two stackoverflow threads:
Are there revision control systems for images?
How do I view 'git diff' output with visual diff program?

It's all lo-fi.

One thing leads to another

2010-07-11T13:36:00+02:00

Following a trackback, Alexandre discovered the work of Lafkon studio a few days ago. Than, through Antonio Roberts' comment on this same post, I find out about his work with animated fontfiles. Antonio writes:

"Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer"

http://www.hellocatfood.com/2010/06/30/i-am-sitting-in-a-room/

Exploring his blog further, I am intrigued by a series of inkscape-animations, and learn they are based on the svgbuild script in Ed Halley's Programmer's Notebook:

"This script takes a SVG (scaleable vector graphics) file, and uses the InkScape application to render each frame of a movie animation. If viewed in sequence, a virtual "camera" is animated along a tour of the image as it is constructed, entity by entity, from nothing up to the final construction."

http://halley.cc/code/?python/svgbuild.py

Ed Halleys' notebook contains many more interesting things to play with. buzz.py ("a phrase generator which assembles phrases from random pieces") or strokes.py ("Routines for recognizing handwriting strokes and gestures").

It will lead to something else one day.

Speak my language

2010-07-06T15:30:00+02:00

A couple of days ago I was looking at the OSP blog trackback list and discovered the Fork/Memo blog. It documents the work of Lafkon studio. Lafkon is Christoph Haag and Benjamin Stephan -- two graphic designers working with unconventional tools for graphic design, including Latex and shell scripts among others Unix commands, to make generative designs. With the Unix philosophy in mind, they show how written language -- be it found in the graphic resources coded in plain text (SVG), the scripts, and even in the filenames -- can be used as a powerful interface/means to produce graphics.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="352" caption="One of the Linux Audio Conference 2008 posters"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_4706" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Individual SVG files get connected thanks to their filename"][/caption]

The Icing on the cake: all the material they produce is released under copyleft licenses!

http://www.forkable.eu/memo/
http://www.forkable.eu/
http://www.lafkon.net/

mybadge.png

2010-02-27T19:00:00+01:00

Alexandre Leray has written a nice tutorial on how to create your own pledgie-badge: http://rw.stdin.fr/CookBook/Pledgie

Thank you ginger coons for your tasty habanero pepper and don't forget to donate to http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926!

A postcard from Amsterdam

2009-11-13T18:16:00+01:00

Alessandro Ludivico proudly presents the latest issue of Neural with OSP-designed ad for By Data We Mean

At a conference in Amsterdam, the Ippolita collective proposes us to build (and use?) convivial tools, a method for users that 'neither want to rule nor to be ruled by the Society of the Query':

Detect and locate the borders of your local world
Decide in advance how many times / until when you will play the game
Mesh up different existing tools
Enjoy because no sacrifice is allowed (you are not representing anyone, you are not saving the world!)

Read more about Tools for Conviviality in this text by Ivan Illich: http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_conviviality/

Thank You PoDoFo

2009-10-02T10:18:00+02:00

When budget is limited and time is short: PoDoFo tiling + wallpaper glue + NotCourierSans to the rescue!

Clementine mounts the Constant Verlag colophon for its launch last night in 17 Rue de la Senne

Free Software and Cars

2009-08-12T22:55:00+02:00

In this recent Toyota campaign, a race-driver draws a font. And if you watch the fast-paced 'making-of' video closely, it seems that Please Make Me Design (a band of type-designers from Brussels) used Free Software to produce it: FontForge and OpenLayers are used to create the project.

A few years ago, I started to collect Free-Software-screenshots-featuring-cars. I was thinking about the design of softwares, which means to somehow imagine how a tool will be used, even before it exists. I started looking at the kinds of screenshots F/LOSS graphics projects put out to advertise their projects, because it might show something about the nature of the practice that it intends to support. At that time, many of them featured ... cars. Confirming all the gendered cliché's of your typical software developer, Scribus, Gimp and Inkscape had independently decided to feature high powered, mean machines as the main subject to demo their softwares with. Luckily, the collection never grew very large, and I am starting to think there is a chance the F/LOSS community finally will is coming to terms with its own blind spot vis-a-vis the lack of diversity within.

"There is no such thing as a perfect application, just as there are no perfect automobiles, and the designers know this" ((Gregory Pittman compares the look-and-feel of Scribus to that of a Mercedes car. Scribus mailinglist, http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2008-February/027866.html))

To see Free Software being featured in a car-ad is an exciting development; it hints at the possibility of those tools being interesting and mature enough to appear on the radar of design agencies. But it is also frustrating that designers + developers meet on the same predictable representation of technology.

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!

\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!

Figlet...Cowsay...

2008-08-25T00:13:00+02:00

During the Polish Print Party, a scene performed silently behind the bar counter...

they are about :

=== FIGlet ==============================

Go to Synaptic to install the Figlet package
Find the pre-installed fonts: /usr/share/figlet
To add more fonts:/usr/share/figlet (That is for all users. Otherwise, you have to put the new fonts in a directory of your choice by indicated with -d(directory))

It will look like this

yi@core2duo:\~\$ figlet -f banner it will be looked like this

or like this

yi@core2duo:\~\$ figlet -d /home/yi/figfonts -f isometric2 or like this

Have fun with Frank, Ivan and Glen's letters!

=== Cowsay / Cowthink =========================

find out cow's home to start installation
then: sudo apt-get install cowsay
open file: .bashrc
add line
echo Bonjour \$USER

Sometimes it looks like this

yi@core2duo:\~\$ cowsay -d \$M like this

Sometimes it looks like that

yi@core2duo:\~\$ cowsay -p \$M like that

Or like...

yi@core2duo:\~\$ cowsay -f dragon.cow like...

A vous de jouer :)

What you won't get for 100$

2008-06-03T12:35:00+02:00

On his weblog Infinite Knots, Inkscape's Bryce Harrington explains that if you want to have a feature implemented in an open source project, offering money will probably not help. He describes how "folks who aren't developers" challenged Inkscape developers to make the application work on MacOSX, after first having tried doing it themselves.

if you want to get some feature or fix into an open source project, rather than offering money, have a go at it yourself. Even if it is well beyond your technical ability or time availability, your efforts may be enough to stimulate someone else to eventually have a go at it too. This could be a detailed procedure you followed that got close to working but had a fatal problem. Or a messy patch you made that *should* work but doesn't. Or it might be a list of possible solutions you've ruled out and why.

But what does he mean exactly by "aren't developers"?

http://www.bryceharrington.org/drupal/node/52

We could save the term by using it

2008-05-14T22:40:00+02:00

A lively discussion about the terminology used in Scribus:
http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus/2008-May/028994.html

All started with this post from Hans-Josef Heck, linking the language of digital lay-out to that of historical printing techniques:

"Master" is the perfect English term. The master masters a page, a paragraph, etc.

The Webster (edition 1994) says:
3: controlling the operation of other mechanism (e.g. master cylinder)
4: establishing a standard for reference (e.g. master gauge).

To use "page master" instead of "master page" stresses, what the function
is, namely "mastering".

"master" means "ruling". There is no equivalent in German, I think, which could we used here. In German "Mutter" (mother) is a possible solution, which means "stems from" (e.g. Mutterbaum, Mutterpflanze). In the printing trade there are in the German nomenclature two terms, that stem from Latin "mater", (Mutter, mother):

1. Mater = a mould for a founding patterns for printing. It was positive, as the printing block had to be negative.
2. Matrize = a stencil, positive, the ink was pressed through or those, where the printing colour was imposed on the back and then used with a kind of alcohol for copying.

These techniques are gone. Laser copies or digital (offset) printing we use instead. But we could save the term by using it.

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.

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.

Summer of Code / Season of Usability

2008-03-20T12:11:00+01:00

Scribus is included in this year's Google Summer of Code and now looking for contributions in the form of proposals and feedback to already formulated ideas: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas
Scribus is also actively looking for student applications:
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Example_proposal

From the Gnome Usability list:
"Season of Usability is a series of mentored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects. It offers an excellent way to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface
solutions in international software projects."
http://season.openusability.org/index.php/projects

Multiple pages with (linked) boxes in Scribus

2008-03-12T13:31:00+01:00

Besides pagenumbers, Scribus masterpages can currently only hold static elements. Ivan Monroy Lopez wrote us a very handy python script which puts as many linked or unlinked text boxes on as many pages you want. You can also run the script multiple times...

measurements.py
template.py

The script is split into two files: measurements.py and template.py. Template.py should be run from inside Scribus (In the main menu choose: Script > Execute Script). Put info about boxes (size, amount, page start etc.) into measurements.py.

This is what measurements.py looks like if you would want to end up with a 22 page document with 2 linked columns of equal length on each page:

#the script will start inserting boxes at page start = 1 #the script will stop inserting boxes at page end = 22
#the definition of text boxes follows the format: #[x-position, y-position, width, height] #x and y positions refer to top-left corner of boxes. #units are based on the default set for the document.
#text boxes needed in even pages. edit as needed. even = [[0, 0, 100, 100], [100, 100, 100, 100]]
#text boxes needed in odd pages. edit as needed. odd = [[0, 100, 100, 100], [100, 0, 100, 100]]
#will the text boxes be linked? (yes or no) link = 'yes' #link = 'no'

both measurements.py and template.py should be in the same directory.

FOSDEM 2008

2008-02-23T20:26:00+01:00

This weekend the annual meeting of Free and Open Source Developers (FOSDEM) takes place in Brussels. As usual, the ULB fills up with developers from all over Europe, discussing large scale projects such as Gnome desktop, Mozilla, Xorg and PHP. Unfortunately none of the talks addressed our usual working tools (we'll see more of that in LGM 2008 coming May), but many relevant issues were/are discussed.

Community and Code

It is impressive how large scale software projects with thousands of volunteers can function, and Robert Watson spoke about exactly that. Using the long history of developing FreeBSD (30 years!) as a case study, he spoke about tools and approaches that matter when keeping such a project alive. Interesting elements were the use of parallel version control systems; Perforce allows for more flexible project management and CVS keeps track of long term development. He also discussed ways they resolve conflicts and the joy of having some of the original programmers around - this might have inspired their successful mentoring projects.

Standards versus Patents

Pieter Hintjens introduced the term: 'captive standards' as a way to make understandable the difference between proprietary standards such as OOXML, and let's say HTML. While a standard might be public (i.e. the specifications are published), it can still be patented and owned by a single company. The owner can than at any time decide to make changes, retract, prevent others to implement or to make users pay; this is what Hintjens means by a standard being captive. With the current push by governments for open standards (recently for example in The Netherlands) it is important to ensure that the difference between open standard and captive standard remains clear.

Women in FreeJava

In the FreeJava development room, we were introduced to Duchess, an international network of female Java Programmers. Asked to speak about their project and about why they felt the need to start such a group, an interesting discussion sparked off about why women are less present (especially in Free Software!). It was interesting to witness a generally felt concern with the lack of diversity in software projects, and at the same time frustrating that it is so hard to speak about what could be done about it. I think this studies (Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology, 2006) might be a good place to start: http://www.flosspols.org/ and particularly Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

Sound Copyright

Although The Sound Copyright Campaign was introduced in the left over minutes of one of the so-called 'lightning talks', and it's url passed around on little handcut notes... the issue deserves center stage. Now that tracks from the first golden age of recorded sound reach the end of their copyright term (50 years), recording companies are trying to extend the lease. This just at the moment seminal soul, reggae, and rock and roll recordings are about to be free from legal restrictions, allowing anyone (including performers themselves and their heirs) to preserve, reissue, and remix them. Sign the petition!

Inkscape plugins in Python

2008-02-17T22:39:00+01:00

Inkscape allows python scripts to be used as effects plugins. In a nutshell: you use the DOM to create / manipulate the structure of the SVG document and use CSS properties to style -- so there's quite some overlap with "regular" CGI & web programming.

This example (circles) is based on the example given on the Inkscape wiki. I started by making a simple Inkscape file (with a single circle), saving the file, then opened it in a text editor to view the "raw" XML structure of the SVG. I used this as a guide for what the code needed to produce.

circles.zip

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!

Page tiling with poster

2007-11-06T18:09:00+01:00

Virginie and Laurence checking the V/J10 program in real size.

Poster is an excellent tool to print .eps or .ps documents in tiles. You can adjust the final size of the file, the amount of overlap, size of the media you print on, work from a percentage ('enlarge 500%') etc. Install poster through Synaptic package manager (Debian / Ubuntu) or download here.

To print an A2 file on A4 sheets, you need to type this line in your terminal (all in one line):

$ poster -ma4 -ia2 -pa2 -v /home/yourfolder/file.eps > /home/yourfolder/tiles.eps

Poster will than produce a 9 page .eps document on A4 size with crop marks and cutting marks.

Only downside is that the resulting file is very large; in fact 9 times as large as the original file.

Importing Inkscape in Fontforge

2007-10-20T11:03:00+02:00

Fontforge is an ideal font design program, as far we could test it out:
Opening mac fonts (on ppc here) is more direct, and drawing tools are really ok to take on. Soft seems more fluid than previous version and... it can easely import inkscape svgs!

Here is a way to make correspond inkscape size of document and fontforge size of font. This means you don't have to resize your imported svgs, they would pop up at the right place in FontForge when opened. Follow those steps:

By default, fontforge glyph dimension box is 1000 x 1000 postscript units.
The baseline line is set at 0pt.
ascenders goes up to 800pt
and descender down to 200pt.

In Inkscape, create a new document
In document properties, set all your units in inkscape in pixels (px).
Set the document dimension to 1000px x 1000px
Set an horizontal guide at 200px
Draw your letter.
Save it on svg.

Import it on fontforge, selecting SVG in the file import menu box.
Dimensions an placement should be the same as the ones in the Inkscape document.

Super!

OSP for VJ10

2007-10-17T16:01:00+02:00

OSP are currently working and testing hard for Verbindingen - Jonction 10 festival, organised by meta collaborators Constant. Offset CYMK Printout (5000 ex.) expected for next wednesday, with all the blurs, transparencies, gradients and fonts...

While trying to export the svg from inkscape to pdf, we encountered few problems with transparencies, and blur was completely ignored. We found a solution with using the batik SVG toolset from Apache.

Steps to reproduce:

Download the batik SVG toolset from http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/#download
Let's assume you unpacked the batik toolset in a folder: /home/you/batik
In the commandline, type: cd /home/you/batik/batik-1.7 (this may vary depending on the version of batik you have downloaded)
Let's assume you saved your svg file produced in inkscape here: /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.svg
In the commandline, type: java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar -m application/pdf /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.svg
This produces the file /home/you/yourfolder/yourfile.pdf with correct transparency and perfectly rendered blurs!

Creative License: Take as much as you want

2007-10-16T09:18:00+02:00

Adobe's new Creative Suite is currently advertised with the slogan: Creative License - Take as much as you want. Terms and Conditions which apply when you submit a feature request or a bug report:

You agree that by submitting your Idea, you acknowledge and agree that any such Idea is nonconfidential, and that Adobe has no obligation to return anything submitted, respond to, or confirm receipt of your Idea. You warrant that no other person or corporation has a property interest in the submitted Idea. You understand and acknowledge that Adobe may itself be developing and creating similar Ideas, and/or that Adobe may have received or may someday receive similar Ideas from others, and that existing or planned products and services independently developed without use of your Idea may contain Ideas or concepts similar or identical to those you submit. You acknowledge and agree that your submission shall not preclude Adobe from developing or acquiring such Ideas without obligation to you. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, Adobe shall be free to use any Idea that you submit on a perpetual, royalty-free basis, for any purpose whatsoever, including use, modification, display, and distribution, and/or in the development, manufacture, marketing, and maintenance of Adobe products and services without any obligation to you.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Inconsolata

2007-07-24T12:06:00+02:00

One of our Rotterdam reporters made us notice Inconsolata, a monospaced font designed by Ghostscript maintainer Raph Levien. Levien offers an OTF version, plus 'raw' fontforge files on his webpage.

First and foremost, Inconsolata is a humanist sans design. I strove for the clarity and clean lines of Adrian Frutiger's Avenir (the lowercase "a", in particular, pays homage to this wonderful design), but also looked to Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic family for guidance on some of my favorite glyphs, such as lowercase "g" and "S", and, most especially, the numerals. (Ralph Levien)

Dutch sample text generated in Scribus:

Scribus uses the Gutenberg text version of Multatuli's Max Havelaar. The English default is Bram Stoker's Dracula. Of course you could select your own preferred source!

CMYK overprint

2007-06-28T14:10:00+02:00

Wonderful Inkscape unfortunately does not support black overprinting. You can define colors in CMYK but it will not allow values such as 40% C + 40% M + 40% Y + 100% K (Inkscape for some reason automatically converts these back to 0% C + 0% M + 0% Y + 100% K).

Left: cyan plate after importing .svg in Scribus.
Right: cyan plate after adjusting colors.

But with the help of excellent Scribus, this is easy to fix. Simply import the .svg into Scribus, and go to edit > colors. All colors in imported Inkscape illustrations, will be RGB; most likely black has ended up as 'FromSVG#000000', or 'Grey0'. Change this color from RGB to CMYK and change values to 40% C + 40% M + 40% Y + 100% K. Check in print preview and ... voilà!

How to turn a frog into a prince

2007-06-27T17:19:00+02:00

Frog and Prince is a fairytale featuring free software, python scripting and an open font. The story was premièred at LGM 2007 (Montréal, Canada), and formed the centerpiece of the Canadian Printing Breakfast (Brussels, June 2007). Below is everything you need to make the recipe, but you can also browse through sample documents for each of the steps in the transformation process. Ingredients are there to be opened up, re-distributed, changed and improved upon. Please report back when you use or abuse.

[Preview of the final result]

[download all sample documents as a .zip file]

Tools you will need:

Internet connection
Gimp image editor
Inkscape vector editor
Terminal (command line) application
Scribus lay-out application
Python script (scripted by Ivan Monroy-Lopez)
Pdf toolset: psnbook, psnup, ps2pdf, pdftops
Printer
Stapler

1. Prepare ingredients

Find the Grimm story 'The Princess and the frog', available through the Gutenberg project. Identify two sections: one telling the story of the frog, and the other starting at the moment the frog turns into a prince. Save the first section as Frog.txt, the second as Prince.txt.

Look for an image of a prince, and convert it to Scalable Vector Format (svg) using Gimp, Inkscape and Potrace. Do the same for an image of a frog.

2. Install font

In your home directory, create a folder called '.fonts'. The dot is important (Make sure you have view invisible files selected in file browser)! Copy CharterOSP-Roman.ttf into this folder. From the command line, run:

$ fc-cache

This is to update the fontconfig settings. The CharterOSP-Roman should now be available to all applications.

3. Prepare document

Open Scribus (version 1.3.3.9 or lower) and create a new document, size A5.

Import Frog.svg and Prince.svg (File > Import > Import SVG) into Scribus and place them on top of each other on page 1. Convert both objects to a textframe (contextual menu: Convert to > Text frame).

Change name of the objects into respectively 'Frog' and 'Prince' (View > Properties and change name in X,Y,Z tab.)

Define the following 4 colors (Edit > Colors > New) and make sure you use the exact same names:

FrogInitialFill => the color of the fill of Frog on page 1
FrogFinalFill => the color of the fill of Frog on last page
PrinceInitialFill => the color of the fill of Prince on page 1
PrinceFinalFill => the color of the fill of Prince on last page

Before you can run the script, the 1-page .sla file (FrogPrince.sla) must be saved in the same directory as the Prince.txt and Frog.txt files. The Python script (Story.py) should be saved in the same directory.

4. Run script

To run the script: script > execute script and select Story.py

Now a series of dialogue boxes will pop up.

The one about scale goes like this:
0.1 == one tenth of the original size
0.25 == one quarter of the original size
0.5 == one half of the original size

Keep in mind that in the end, the script only shrinks objects. the shrunk frog will appear on the last page, while the shrunk prince will appear on the first page.

When running, the script creates the following sequence of colors:
FrogFill2 ... FrogFilln, where n = (numberOfPages - 1)
PrinceFill2 ... PrinceFilln, where n = (numberOfPages -1)
so it's best not to have colors with those names in the sla file, to avoid conflicts.

5. Style text

In the newly created document Story.sla, make two new styles, one for Prince and another for Frog. Choose OSP Charter, 6 points for FrogStyle and 11 points for PrinceStyle in order to fill out the text over as many text boxes as possible.

Apply styles to Frog and Prince.

Export the document as pdf (Story.pdf); make sure to embed all fonts. (File > Export as PDF. In Font tab, select 'embed all fonts')

6. Prepare for printing

For more detailed instructions, see How to print a booklet in 19 easy steps.

Use the command line, convert the .pdf document to a postscript document:

$ pdftops -paper match '/home/user/Desktop/Story.pdf' '/home/user/Desktop/Story.ps'

Then arrange the order of pages for imposition:

$ psbook -s16 '/home/user/Story.ps' '/home/user/Desktop/StoryB.ps'

If all goes well, you will see the following:

[16] [1] [2] [15] [14] [3] [4] [13] [12] [5] [6] [11] [10] [7] [8] [9] Wrote 16 pages, 5937633 bytes

Make spreads, placing 2 A5's on an A4:

$ psnup -2 -PA5 '/home/user/Desktop/StoryB.ps' '/home/user/Desktop/StoryC.ps'

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Wrote 8 pages, 5944599 bytes

Convert the document back to pdf:

$ ps2pdf '/home/user/Desktop/StoryC.ps' '/home/user/Desktop/StoryC.pdf'

8. Print
[this step has bugs in Ubuntu 7.04; other versions/systems should be al right.]

You can use the commandline to print first the even pages (myprinter is the name of your printer, n is the amount of copies)

$ lpr -P myprinter -o page-set=even -#1 infile.pdf

Once the even pages are printed, you need to re-arrange the order of the pages so that the first page comes last.

Put the pages upside down back in the printer

Now print the odd pages

$ lpr -P myprinter -o page-set=odd -#1 infile.pdf

Fold the pages from A4 to A5

Fold the stack back open and place it on the piece of cardboard with the cover facing you.

Click open your stapler so you can staple the stack in the middle

Gently remove the stack (which is now stuck to the cardboard) and fold the staples back in.

Sample documents:

Tea for Tiles

2007-06-06T19:19:00+02:00

Good way to practice softwares is getting jobs done for friends. This week, Maluka, an excellent, enthusiasming and courageous organic shop (placed at the corner of our office street, which helps!), asked us to design them a logo and cards. Here is the proposal, using Vera Sans Serif and Inkscape, and specifically its magic "clone tile tool".

As works are also a good way to share knowledge, it is the good context to show a specificity of the clone tile tool that Cédric Gemy showed me in Montreal, after LGM Inkscape presentation.

Clone tile tool allows to duplicate an element on a specific area of the page, using parameters such as shift, symetry, scale, rotation, blur, transparency... and trace

Example: vecto-pixelization (very handy for vinyl cuttings)
1 Open an image (such as jpg) in inkscape. (image can also be another element drew in inkscape, such as type!)
2 Draw what will be the "pixel" (here, a star).
3 Place this on the upper left corner of the image.

3 In the clone tile tool box, go to tab "trace"
4 Select the caracteristic you want to be transcribed (here it is the lightness of the jpg)

5 Select your motif and "create"

This feature needs a bit of test and practice, but it's worth playing with. Ressources are almost infinite.
There are plenty of random settings you can set (as I did for Manuka)...

And... fasten your seat belt, here are few bonus tricks!

Matching Tools

2007-06-06T08:39:00+02:00

Today's challenge brought to you by indexer and typesetter John Culleton.

These four covers were done using three different tools:

Tex (context)

Gimp

Inkscape

Who can match covers 1 through 4 with the correct tool?
http://typebye.com/test2.html

Libre Graphics Meeting

2007-05-09T07:33:00+02:00

Montreal, 4-6 May 2007

An intense meeting of demos and how-to’s – LGM takes place in three fairly intimate rooms in the Ecole Polytechnique of the University of Montreal, which means we have enough time and opportunity to ask our questions, set up interviews, discuss bread baking with developers, designers, typographers, researchers gathered.

The university is located on the slopes of the Mont Royal so between presentations we spot skunks and squirls in the park.

It is both inspiring and strangely intimidating to meet the makers of many familiar tools: The Scribus team is present in full force, key developers of Blender, Gimp and Inkscape are around and speak about their tools with infectiuous enthusiasm. We need to make a bit of an effort to make people understand that our interest goes beyond feature requests and bug reports. Collective charm needed to convince George Williams, developer of FontForge, to do an interview with us. “I have nothing interesting to say” he keeps telling us during the Grand Supper. Well, he finally agreed to an interview so judge for your selves.

Friday 4 May we land in LGM with a talk by Bryce Harrington + team, presenting a history of Inkscape in screen shots (slides), and an overview of ways FLOSS projects are usually structured. Inkscape is according to Bryce Harrington based on a 'hive' model; a relatively unstructured coming and going of high energy collective work. Bryce ends with presenting the upcoming release of Inkscape 0.46. New features will amongst others include: gradient in typography / etching effect / print dialogue. He also brings up Inkbook – decentralized, networked drawing in .svg; interesting stuff.

Jakob Steiner demos Inkscapes' ability to produce photo realistic illustrations, such as Motorola phones and shiny racing cars thanks to blur, transparency and mask functions.

Of the more strange but fascinating kind: Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov reverse engineer the Corel Draw image format. Their hallucinating travels through endless bin-hex dumps show, that also for them, structure reveals itself through transformation. Igor presents CDR-Explorer, a tool to visualize binary formats for reverse engineering purposes. The Explorer allows you to look at a raw file as if you look at a folder structure, which facilitates the understanding of its various building blocks.

Peter Linell starts his talk on Scribus with telling about his first encounter with developer/initiator Franz Schmidt. He portrays Scribus as a program built around robust + safe pdf-export. Linell goes in to various new features, amongst which the ability to import layered Photoshop images, and ways to process images inside Scribus – duotone etc. can now be edited from inside the software. Apart from the ability to add bleed and registration marks, he presents The Color Wheel, including the ability to pre-visualise a document as seen by someone with various flavors of colorblindness (this feature deserves its own post!). Andreas Vox follows with the new lay-out system (NLS), in Scribus, explaining the transition from old, convoluted code via a 'legacy mode' in to the New Lay-out System. Character styles, word spacing and optical alignment are amongst new additions. In the near future we can expect paragraph optimisation for hyphenation too.

The evening is reserved for the Grand Souper LGM with live music and convivial atmosphere in the very orange patio of the Ecole Polytechnique.

The OSP presentation is planned early morning on Saturday May 5. We speak about the relation between tools and what they produce; about creativity and efficiency, using the tale of the frog that turned into a prince (text and images follow!). The small audience that is present in the lecture room early enough, seems pleased though slightly surprised by our unorthodox approach.

In one of the classrooms reserved for LGM, Karin Delvare (The Gimp) tours through different layers of participation in FLOSS projects and explains amongst others the art of doing a bug report. In the main hall, Hubert Figuiere speaks about how to organise images using metadata; his presentation is concluded with a discussion about various media/supports for archiving.

Michael Terry from the University of Waterloo is involved in developing InGimp. This software automatically archives userdata / behavior for the purpose of usability studies. Interesting was that the system makes log files automatically publicly available (leaving out any data that might breach privacy), allowing developers to analyse incredible amounts of ultra precise data on for example the amount of time spent on certain tasks, patterns of access, combinations and successions of tasks. As a gadget / feature the team developed a 'dynamic profile visualisation' – basically a stick figure with representations of assumed tasks, of ways of working.

Back in the classroom, Cedric Gémy (~~responsible~~ contributor to Inkscape and Gimp documentation) demonstrates with élan the possibilities of using free standards and open source software, moving from Inkskape to Blender to Gimp to Scribus; Boudewijn Rempt and Cyrille Berger show new functionalities of Krita, a simple image editor with the ability to do for example realistically behaving watercolour images (colours actually blend!) and dry brushtrokes.

For the presentation of Alexandre Robin: Our first year of Graphic Design 100% Open Source, see this OSP post.

Dave Crossland (designer, lecturer) and Nicolas Spalinger (SIL) speak about the Open Font License, and the way metadata on fonts could reflect these licenses. They spend the second part of their presentation showing Spiro which caused great enthusiasm in the audience.

In a lively Q +A session, Peter Linnell demonstrates the robustness of Scribus in a prepress context, explaining the set-up of PDF export and how 'self-defensive-code' is employed to please even the most conservative printshop requirements. To his mind often faulty fonts are the cause of output problems – Scribus therefore is ultra careful with loaded fonts; it is the reason why a first start-up is slow; each font is checked glyph by glyph before it is added to the list.

The day ends with a crisp presentation of Raphael Meltz, Le Tigre, a French monthly magazine entirely layed-out in Scribus. Raphael shows Le Tigres' work flow of both their monthly print and daily pdf-publication; including a rudimentar end-to-end solution between SPIP (a web based Content Management System) and Scribus. Raphael was clear about their economical and philosophical motivations for using FLOSS, without being shy about the possible problems and difficulties, which had most of all to do with html import-export issues.

At the end of the day we interview Nicolas Spalinger and Pierre-Luc Auclair (contributor to the Deja-Vu font project). The evening FLOSS font enthusiasts gather in Concordia University to watch Helvetica, a full length documentary on the modernist typeface premiering in Montreal.

Sunday May 6 starts gently with a private tutorial on Inkscape and Scribus by Cedric Gémy; we talk lay-out with Raphael Mertz.

The second presentation this weekend by Igor Novikov is even more exciting, demonstrating SK1, a vector illustration programme, specifically for prepress. SK1 offers solutions for many problems with CMYK export we find in other programs. Their user interface is refreshingly different and their set of sample images fantastic. Discussing the history of the program (a fork of Skencil), shows that the Ukraine context requires its own approach. That is more or less the subject of the interview we do later with Igor and Valek.

Andy Fitzsimon impresses with his virtuosity in Inkscape (glassy icons galore!) but most of all with his intelligent approach to the management of translatable design elements across multiple languages. Making use of .svg, he manages to employ the .po format (used in many translation projects) to translate styled typography. We are also interested in his use of the xml-editor as design tool.

Jon Phillips presents The Open Clipart Project, and most of all ccHost, a sort of repository system where images, sounds and other files licensed under Creative Commons can be made available for download; making direct connections from applications such as Inkscape to ccHost ('save to ccHost'). George Williams (FontForge) was interested to add the possibility to direct upload fonts from FontForge too.

After the conference is officially over, a BOF is (Birds Of Feathers: developers gathering) organised on type management and its future.

About 10 developers involved in projects relevant to typography, gather around the table for an intense session on standards, the workings of fontconfig ... Exciting to witness how everyone seems to come up with real proposals that will undoubtly alter the future of using fonts on linux systems.

We spend Monday morning interviewing Andreas Vox about Scribus and Igor and Valek about SK1 and Ukrainian software culture; soon here on OSP.

Smooth curves drawing font revolution?

2007-05-07T00:40:00+02:00

Spiro is a toolkit for curve design, especially font design, created by Raph Levien. It is a smooth alternative to the wide known Bézier curves... It is VERY impressive using.

Dave Crossland and Nicolas Spalinger (OFL – Fontly) demoed a chain of process: a script that takes a scanned sample of fonts, contrast it, then recognises and chops automaticaly the glyphs, and import them as background for Spiro PPEDIT application. You can then use the spiro to draw the outlines, in an easier and smoother way than beziers (and reducing the amount of points). Automatisation of the work process is a terrible gain of time, and made me dream the whole night. The spiros curves are accepted by Fontforge, and tranformed as editable beziers curves... On linux systems, files produced by ppedit are immediately send to the famous font editor...

levien.com/spiro

A MacOs version has just been released: enjoy the incredible souplesse of the curves manipulation. The tensions angles seems to be very automatised - and are difficult to stress, but I hardly tryed it... You can't save the curves done... yet. Some more info will be released this week!

The Flow of Text in MasterPages

2007-04-23T20:33:00+02:00

The scripting in Scribus happens in the house of Python. The Scribus module is loaded into scripts with the standard import scribus or from scribus import *. In this post, we'll be using only one function off this module:

createText(x, y, width, height)

This function puts a TextBox of the specified width and height at the (x, y)-coordinates of your document. This is its documentation.

The TextBoxes of Scribus Templates are eerily insular. Since we really didn't find a way to make text flow in Scribus MasterPages, we were forced to write a script. It builds on a script that was posted some time ago on the Scribus mailing list.

We have added an alternate to the Flow of Text that may be useful to the users of the script. The TextFlow in the original is fine, but ours is fine, too. To push the Text as a River metaphor a bit further: the text must flow, and we're redirecting it with a Dam.

To see the difference, it's probably best to run the script itself. Fetch the TextBoxes.py and Boxes.py files, and put them in the same directory. Open Scribus and load a document. Things will only work if there's already a Scribus document open.

even = [[30, 30, 10, 10], [50, 50, 20, 20], [80, 80, 30, 30]]
odd = [[30, 240, 10, 10], [50, 210, 20, 20], [80, 170, 30, 30]]

The above are the lines in Boxes.py where you specify the size and position of your TextBoxes. It uses the same units as your Already opened Scribus document. Note that you can have different layouts for odd and even pages. Once you've written a layout, execute TextBoxes.py from the aptly named Script menu.

Boxes.py may be the only file that you will need to edit. It has a couple of other tweakable parameters. Explore : )

Use-ability

2007-02-27T11:19:00+01:00

At the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers Meeting) conference in Brussels, two openSuse developers presented their research on usability of KDE desktops.

Their testing methods consists of interviews, questionnaires, screen recordings plus precise video documentation of a group of 10 people trying to accomplish 12 tasks using various desktop systems (KDE classic, KDE reloaded and Windows Vista). Besides looking for 'succes rate' and 'accomplishment time', they also measured 'the hedonic aspect' which I thought was pretty interesting. The AttrakDiff standard (which is in itself a proprietary method ;-)) measures 'pleasure' i.e. the joy of using a system. Instead of asking: 'Did the interface do what you expected', it tries to find out whether it was an interesting experience. Which of course could also mean, that the system did the opposite of what you thought it would do.

Unlock + collect for output

2006-12-11T02:29:00+01:00

The same illustration that got us to post about image scripting, also brought up an interesting discovery plus a feature/plug-in for Inkscape.

Detail of illustration for Mute Magazine. Click to view .jpg or download complete zipped .svg file + images

Lock layer
It is often helpful to lock an object (in this case the glow in the background), so that when you move things around, you do not have to worry about whether it stays at the right place. Quickly done with Inkscape, but unfortunately not as easily undone. The only way to unlock, is to open up the document in an editor, look for the line describing the locked object, and then delete the line: sodipidi:insensitive. Pfff...

Collect for output
Inkscape does not embed images, but links to them. It is therefore fast to work with (especially when using many images and layers as is the case with this illustration) but not easy when you have to send out the file to a printer or someone else - there is no way to check whether one of the images is missing.

Pim Snel wrote an extension to collect all bitmaps, create relative links to them in the Inkscape document and zip everything up in one go. Wonderful! A description of how to use the script at Jakub 'jimmac' Steiner's weblog.

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.

Watch this thread: Scribus mailinglist

2006-06-17T10:47:00+02:00

The Scribus mailinglist is a good place to start when you want to find out about printing, PDF, typography, color management and everything else related to open source publishing. Developers and other users discuss solutions to problems, but also give background information on why certain technical constraints exist, what licensing issues arise. The Scribus list seems exceptionally generous and has made it its policy to welcome questions on all levels.

Some older and newer threads to watch:

Maintaining text with Scribus
Imagine you could connect your desktop publishing software to a weblog or other content management system? Collaboratively edit, and lay out the results in Scribus? Printing publications "on-demand" from your database? If it would be possible to import and export correct xml files, it would be not just large publishing houses that could do such operations. Gregory Pittman shows his python script frameslist.py, and explains what it is capable of and what not.
scribus/2006-June/thread.html#18471

Scribus in the Art Lab
The use of open source tools in design education is not evident. Some feel it would deprive students of "real life" experience with "what the industry wants", others think it might make students more independent and self-learning. Tutors report on their motivations, methods and problems.
scribus/2006-April/thread.html#16749

offtopic: microsoft must pay to adobe to include pdf exportcapability
Sometimes issues related to desk top publishing, but not necessarily to Scribus itself are brought up on the list. This is a good way to learn about the politics of (design-)software. Here is the thread on PDF export troubles between Microsoft and Adobe that I reported on last week:
scribus/2006-June/thread.html#18348

CMYK Processing in open source
One of the issues that is hard to overcome, and returns time and time again on the list, is the problem of CMYK export. This is not a Scribus issue in itself (color separation of graphic elements is no problem; it is a feature missing from image processing softwares), but is obviously frustrating when you are working with pictures in your document. The reasons why and possible (future) solutions are discussed here:
scribus/2006-March/thread.html#16421

DTPblender

2006-06-04T13:25:00+02:00

A new kid on the block? Makers of 3D-modeling software Blender announce that they have developed a "solution for fast and flexible creation of 2D graphics and layouts for web site design and print". Its interface -no surprise - resembles Blender and other proprietary animation packages such as Flash; the website mentions upfront that the package does not offer output like CMYK or Postscript. Although a first quick try is not immediately convincing (but this could be because I am not very familiar with the strand of softwares DTPblender is based on), it could be interesting to radically combine web design and page lay-out. More after further testing.

More information and download here: http://dtpblender.instinctive.de

It is in the air

2006-03-21T18:41:00+01:00

Reporting bugs is frustrating work. I feel pretty stupid when a bug apparently was already reported months ago (was it worth reporting? Am I simply annoying developers by telling them once again something does not work? Should I have spent even more time finding duplicates?), but at the same time it would be worse when it was just me having an idea or experience.

Anyways, I am really happy to find many versions of the same issue:

Differential paragraph styles
Cascading styles
Depending paragraph styles

... it is in the air.

If Scribus could pull that off... it would make Open Source Publishing radically different and exciting.

Stylesheets

2006-03-21T11:57:00+01:00

Often I have wondered why DTP programmes did not have both an "edit source" view and a "preview mode", so that you could alternate between those two views and apply styles with more rigour if needed.

You can see why I am so excited about using the Story Editor in Scribus. It feels much closer to marking up HTML, which in turn is familiar to the pre-computer practice of writing type setting instructions.

But looking at a Scribus .sla file in an editor, I realise that typographic markup is completely mixed with character data (how on earth does the story editor manage to pick out the right information!), which might explain why this idea could be obvious in theory but harder to achieve in practice.

Part of the unpredictability of style-behaviour in Scribus (in fact, this is a problem with any text-layout programme I have ever used) I guess has to do with this mixing as I can imagine re-applying styles a few times will result in messy code. It feels quite similar to what happens when applying deprecated markup in NVU or Dreamweaver from the WYSIWYG editor, without cleaning up the source.

Other problems might occur through irregular interpretation of cascading effects, but this is just a guess.

Right now, Styles in Scribus operate way more confused and less sophisticated than even the simplest Cascading Style Sheet does. If Scribus would apply the web standards ethics (separating content from form ;-)), could it be possible to simply edit those styles in a file?

Over the last few years many graphic designers have taught themselves to handle CSS stylesheets with grace, and it would seem logic to apply that logic / these skills to Desk top publishing too.

In this way, Scribus could become more transparent and compatible with other media. Not only through the way it handles its file-formats (import-export), but also through how it connects different practices of design.

LaTeX Project

2006-03-17T15:31:00+01:00

From WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
by Florian Cramer
(p22)

The idea that beauty materializes in numerical proportions according to mathematical laws continues to be popular in scientific and engineering cultures, too. Since the early 1970s, Donald Knuth, widely considered the founder of computer science as an independent academic discipline, published his textbooks under the title The Art of Computer Programming. He understands “art” as the formal beauty and logical elegance of the source code. The software TeX which he wrote to typeset his books correspondingly implements a classicist post-Renaissance typography whose notions of beauty are embedded in Knuth’s algorithms for line spacing and paragraph adjustment. At MIT, Knuth initiated a project God and computers whose results were an exhibition of Bible calligraphies and, in 2001, a book Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. In this book, Knuth remembers how as a student he read a computer program code that he found “absolutely beautiful. Reading it was just like hearing a symphony.” This was how he “got into software,” teaching it as an art rather than a science. The hacker credo put down by Steven Levy in 1983 that “you can create art and beauty with computers” has its roots in Knuth’s teaching. It ultimately means that a program is not a transparent tool for creating beauty—like, for example, a graphics program—, but that it is beautiful by itself. Both schools, highbrow academic computer science and more underground hacker culture, perpetuate a Pythagorean, classicist understanding of art as formal beauty. This concept blatantly lags behind modern concepts of art. Since romanticism and 20th century art, aesthetic understandings of art were not just about beauty, but included the sublime, grotesque and ugly as well. The same is true, implicitly at least, for the Greek and Roman antiquity whose highest art form, tragedies, were about violence and despair.

Download the text here:
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh/

Don't keep it to yourself!

2006-03-15T22:53:00+01:00

http://www.orgdot.com/aliasfonts/
(c) 2001 http://www.orgdot.com: you can copy, use, modify and distribute this code and/or artwork for educational, commercial or recreational use.
All we ask is that you include this copyright notice in the material you distribute. for compiled code, you will need to make accessible this copyright notice somewhere in the distribution, and/or via a link on the web. there are several reasons for this caveat - the most important being that open source is based on one main principle: what you find and use, others should also have access to. don't keep it to yourself!

this software is provided by the author and contributors "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. in no event shall the author or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

A double spread in scribus

2006-03-04T17:08:00+01:00

Thanks to Philip May and Perl5 software that generated text, it was possible to realise a double spread of a "Babels book". Text is composed of the combinatory of the 26 letters of the alphabet, dot, comma and space, as described in Library of Babel, in Fictions Borges book. Those books are 410 page, 40 lines per page and 80 character per line. Capitals were added in the script. Those 2 pages were then set with Scribus.

See the pdf

Obviously, scribus needs a strong amelioration of its ergonomy. It took something like 3 hours to compose those 2 pages.
Here is a Scribus Bug Report, encounted during the exercice:

among other...

But the pdf generator seems to work ok so far, it was very easy to export.

Woven silk pyjamas exchanged for blue quartz

2006-02-20T11:08:00+01:00

Instead of using the usual The Quick Brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog, this rather absurd text is set as default in Scribus Font Preview:

I wonder who decided to use this particular sentence, and why?
Alternative pangrams to choose from: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/pangrams.htm …

Scribus Bug Reporting

2006-02-12T18:00:00+01:00

New addiction: reading through the thousands of bug-reports on the rigourously precise Scribus bugtracking system.

http://bugs.scribus.net/view_all_bug_page.php

It is somehow consoling to see those thousands of minor and major problems scroll by. We will be adding our own reports over the coming weeks (see below).

Looks like change of name in Paragraph style means as much as deleting that style. Should be prevented or not be the case.
Hardly any control over selecting blocks of text in preview mode. Can't figure out why.
'Paste' (text within story editor) is extremely slow; screen can freezes for up to 50 sec. before applying change.
Paste from other applications (Mozilla Thunderbird, gedit, Character Map) does not work.
After 'replace' has been executed, feedback should be 'Replaced x amount of elements' (not: 'Search Finished')
Application of changes through Properties is completely irregular. some changes have effect, some not... some changes trail behind, others are erased... Sometimes styles are overruled by others, sometimes not.
Font size, line height etc. are not forced when applied over selected text; it seems especially messy when that selection had different styles/sizes etc. to begin with. When multiple paragraphs are selected, styles are sometimes applied, sometimes not.
Feedback in Properties does not reflect the actual formatting of selected text.
When a block of text with more than one style applied (or having different sizes, colors etc.) is selected, the dialogue in properties would need to grey out/go blank for those specifications that are mixed. (and not suggest that all selected text has one particular size, color)
It is too risky to only be able to check the result on screen (or scanning the text word by word).
'Wordstyles' should be dominant over Paragraph styles and a paragraph style applied- now if f.e. a line return is removed in a paragraph on which a paragraph style applies, 'wordstyles' are removed.
Changes applied through story editor seem to be more consistently applied but hard to handle because of visual feedback lacking. Also it is not possible to change line-height from there.
When a paragraph style is removed under Menu>Edit>Paragraph styles, it remains available under Properties>Style (Confusing because there is no way to check or correct these styles; they do not exist anymore. Or do they?)
'No styles' produces a different effect every time. It should simply REMOVE ALL STYLES and set text to 'default style'
Rendering of underlined text is very poor (line is extremely heavy)
When ALL text is selected in a linked text box, ALL text should be selected... Now sometimes the whole text is made active (Copy) and sometimes not; there is no feedback available to find this out.
'UNDO' does often not work; never for text corrections/changes (in Preview nor Story Editor); also not after Select all>Delete; also not after changing specifications in Properties.
Line spacing can not be changed per paragraph from Properties>Line Spacing (it changes line spacing in other paragraphs around it too)
Outlined texts: not possible to select outline color?