Once again Les Halles are housing the 2014 edition of «Le salon du financement participatif» called Europe Refresh and it looks like it’s going to be a couple of exciting weekends! This year, to maximize the chances of fully funding the projects, the Salon will be set up for a weekend in Brussels then a […]

Good news! Considering how well last years OSP Relearn Summer School went, we’re reiterating and extending the school with all of the people and labs that make up Variable. We’re really exited to be able to make this happen again, especially considering all the extra people that will be joining in this year. Relearn starts on July 6th (Sunday) and […]

Invited at Interpunctie project van Bolwerk, we excavate into the 10+ years of archives by building the first bricks of tools to draw a landscape thanks to bash and python scripts + the legacy Fontforge scripting language.

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

“À l’extérieur de cette boîte si tranquille, de bouillonnantes transformations s’opèrent également!” — From hand movement to vector curves to hand movement

It is difficult to believe that Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 is already over. We spent 9 intense days in Montreal to work, talk, meet, present, cook, interview, listen and cross the city by bike. The meeting provoked many discussions about the future of Libre Graphics so we decided to write this report in the form […]

“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 […]

For the second day of the Royal College of Art workshop we paid homage to Eric Gill’s typographic work. What better place than London to revisit his classic Gill Sans. We worked from several different sources and ended up creating three very unique versions of Gill Sans. The first version was generated by vectorizing a […]

Today, 1st day out of 3 of workshop at Royal College of Art in London. We are doing collective remote publishing by sending commands to Scribus from an IRC channel. We are on irc.freenode.net, channel #rcaws if you want to have a glimpse at it, or do blind design! From 10am to 5pm, London time. […]

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 http://colloque.aquops.qc.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/colloque.woa/wo/0.1.29.1.0.7.0.8). In my conf, I […]

Thanks to Paulo Silva aka nitrofurano, Polsku has now a Latin 1 diacritics and ligatures set. The new version is available for download on OSP Foundry.

Last night, we piped 4 Mac into Dual-Boot Mac OSX and Ubuntu. To follow the steps is now quite a routine which can be combined with cheap beers and pizza. 1 install rEfit; 2 create a new partition using Disk Utility; 3 reboot on a Ubuntu 10.10 dvd. – ? 3 Wins – 1 failure […]

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 […]

Fonzie benefits of the preparation for the next iteration of the (?)-annual Constant main event. With Tesseract (an OCR program and library), there’s a new friend around, the first meeting with Potrace was quite impressive, we can’t wait to see what will happen next. You can dowload the source code of Fonzie with Git on […]

Nous fêtons demain le premier cours Open Source de l’ERG. In September started a fisrt “arts numériques” open source course at the École de Recherche Graphique. Visit the course wiki. The students will be proud to present the first specimens of their pictures-fonts. And in exclusivity we will play with Pierre Marchand’s new friend Fonzie […]

Imagine1 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 […]

Fresh news from Paris: Since a few months the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie supports the Scribus team. The goal is to make the program ready for new developers and users from Asia and Africa and this is *very* good news for the rest of us too! The project goes under the code name “Scribus-OIF” […]

H E Y ! Libre Graphics Magazine #1 is out ! Bravo Ana, ginger, Ricardo + the whole team and participants. Follow the details about the production process and order soon your copy from their blog.

Dear Ubuntu, A few weeks ago I needed to re-install my computer. Using the convenient Startup Disk Creator, I prepared a USB-stick with a fresh version of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, rebooted the computer and clicked ‘install’. While the Ubuntu slide-show took my mind off the wait and the automatized installation process was taking place, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Here are snapshots of SILEX-LEX round 1. Artists, designers and illustrators experimented with Inkscape, a Rhizograph and each other’s layers. Round 2 follows next week in preparation of the vernissage on May 7.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 Crossland […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 Open […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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).