Last sunday we drawed a book.
675 417 km2 pour Luce
contour lines of France
scale 1:385142
interval : 30 m
strokes : 0.05 pt
16 binded sections
cover : green cardboard 300 g + clothed back
single copy
Sur base des élévations au pas de 250m proposées au téléchargement par l’I.G.N. France. Calcul des courbes de niveaux et sortie Postscript opérés par GRASS [...]

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!

At the yearly Libre Graphics Meeting, developers and users of our favorite tools get together to work on better software. For some of them, a trip to Brussels is easy to fund, others cannot afford the journey without our help. Let’s pull our resources together and raise 10.000 $ (7350 €) so that they can [...]

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 [...]

Yi and Femke consider cooking heartless vegan food from now on
We’re correcting the second edition of the Puerto Cookbook (first edition sold out!) and stumble over a trivial but frustrating small bug in Scribus. Maybe too long to explain here (you’re welcome to read our bug report), but it means a lot of scrolling back [...]

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

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 [...]

Doing a partition on my computer forced me to cynically erase all my data. Since Mac OSX Tiger did not provide any kind of Bootcamp assistant (it was exclusively held for Leopard) and executing partitions through the Terminal was not really pleased by my system, I was forced to reinstall my whole system… un bouleversement qui est inévitable.

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.

During an internet wandering, and thanks to excellent K-SET website, I found the link to swiss drawing artist GRRRR website I was looking for a long time. Though I’m fan for a long time of his work, from Maika 2 (www.noraduester.net => music) record sleeve to Vitra 2006 catalogue, I hardly found traces of his [...]

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 [...]

(Call forwarded from Isabelle Massu)

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Museums narrate the history of man’s evolution through the display of tools (silex, knife, jar, etc.). In contrast, we are looking for useless tools. This call will result in a vitrine of objects titled ‘Object Inutile’ to be displayed at [...]

Inkboard is an Inkscape extension that allows remote collaboration over the network. In inkscape-devel, there’s a thread where people get all excited over it, and manage to bring down a server as a result
It’s hard not to get overexcited over tools that have collaboration built into them. They give rise to book covers [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Our favourite killer-app Scribus is competing to be included in Hackontest, a “24 hour programming competition between teams of three open source software projects“.
A container designed by E-Toy.corporation will house the competition, which takes place at the Google sponsored OpenExpo (the Swiss conference and trade show for Free and Open Source Software). “This room will [...]

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: [...]

The end of our participation in the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 is in sight…
Over the last few days we have seen many intriguing, surprising and interesting talks; we discovered new tools, rediscovered ‘old’ ones and made connections with developers, users and standards-officials — LGM has been again an inspiring adventure.
We interviewed Dave [...]

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, [...]

These past few days I’ve been navigating a sea of acronyms, neologisms and tiny iconic metaphors here at LGM. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is the tool that pippin of GIMP used for his talk. At first it looked like a PowerPoint clone, but then he started correcting it on-the-fly [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

In the summer of 1997, the NLNet Foundation sold its commercialized internet provision activities to UUNET (the internet subsidiary of WorldCom). This created a fund from which the foundation now supports activities that provide network technology to the community and keep outcomes in the “public domain”. NLnet has picked Identity, Privacy & Presence and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

A late announcement for an ultra useful tool: Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov have released UniConvertor, a universal vector graphics translator. It uses the sK1 engine to convert one format into another.
With UniConvertor you can now convert files from: CorelDRAW ver.7-X3 (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX), Adobe Illustrator up to v. 9 (AI postscript based), Postscript (PS), Encapsulated Postscript [...]

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 [...]

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!

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

Conversation with Igor Novikov and Valek Philippov (SK1)

Excerpts from a conversation with Igor Novikov (Ukraine) and Valek Philippov (Russia) about how and why they are involved in SK1 pre-press software; the joy of reverse engineering and a handy tip for receiving Russian TV in Ukraine too.
igor_valek.mp3 [25mb]

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 [...]

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.

While on our way to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal we’ve done a quick test of Scribus 1.3.4cvs and … good news!
Major New Feature No.1: possibility to add character styles (besides paragraph styles) and a general clean up of the way styles work. More testing needed, but interface and direction taken look promising.
For a [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

A widely used proprietary color-system such as Pantone, obviously raises questions for Open Source graphic tools. Gregory Pittman writes:
* Obviously, no one, including Pantone, can copyright a color, and especially in these days where the RGB/CMYK color systems are freely usable — ie, you can’t put a claim on RGB color “ef9824″.
* They can copyright [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The focus of this recipe is on the last bit: rearranging pages so that you can easily print out nice booklets. For a quick-and-dirty solution you can use Abiword or OpenOffice for the page-lay out part but Scribus is essential when you want to be precise with typography.
The recipe is based on the How-To posted [...]

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 [...]

Xara Xtreme is a vector based software. It runs under Windows and Linux environment. It is a “crossover” software, means it manages pixels and vectors at the same time.
After 15 years of proprietary software status, Xara is operating a strategical migration to open source. The fact that Adobe purchased Macromedia put the developper in a [...]

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 [...]

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.

Le Tigre, here, is not the translation of a Mac os in french, nor a No-Wave grrrrl band. It’s a brand new generalist weekly french magazine that released its first issue 3 days ago. The big thing here is that this mag is entirely set on Scribus, and proove by fact that this FLOSS can [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

Lecture at Freestyle – FLOSS In Design, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam

During my 6 year freelance graphic design practice and 4 years study I gradually became aware of working methods in the general sense. In every aspect of my practice working structures developed, some are critically looked at, some are educated and some seemed to be [...]

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

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).