Tot Later has arrived! Presentation this Friday 17 June 19:00-21:00 Constant / Rue du Fortstraat 5, 1060 Brussels ++++++++++++++++++++++ In 2008 An Mertens showed a beta-version of the distributed novel CIAO/Tot Later in the exhibition Place@Space/NowHere in Z33 Hasselt. Years passed by and now she’s ready to present her novel CIAO/Tot Later – the author’s […]

Today 5 OSPs travel to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, to participate in Open Design Week. Alex, John, Pierre, Pierre and Stéphanie will be touring through the Mekong Delta to meet up with local F/LOSS fans through workshops, presentations and an exhibition. The second week is reserved for an intense work session with the […]

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 […]

[This is the about section of the the Travels of Baron Munchausen publication :-)] How should I disengage myself? I was not much pleased with my awkward situation — with a wolf face to face; our ogling was not of the most pleasant kind. If I withdrew my arm, then the animal would fly the […]

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” […]

On the way to a new text engine, the nice things that will be lost. As of revision 15877, Scribus displays severals paragraphs, fully shaped and featured, but remains uncertain of where to put them. The Scribus/OIF project goes on, aiming, among other things, to make graphic designers a bit less nervous.

NotCourierSans posters have been sent to Anderlues, Berlin, Bordeaux, Bruxelles, Buvrinnes, Cambrai, Chicago, Garden Grove, Gent, Helsinki, Ixelles, JKL, Köln, Merley Wimborne Dorset, Montesson, Munich, Portland, Romrod, Roscoff, Rotterdam, Saint Etienne, Saint-Maurice, Santa Barbara, Sèvres, Singapore, Southampton, Venegazzù, V.N. Gaia, Winton Bournemouth Dorset, Zürich

“Livre de texte dense, a priori sans soucis de graphisme, et je découvre que c’est tout l’inverse.”1 More pictures: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=30910 “Book of dense text, a priori without concern about graphic design, and I discover that it’s quite the opposite” Ariane Bosshard in: Prix Fernand Baudin: les plus beaux livres à Bruxelles et en Wallonie 2009 […]

Tracks in Electr(on)ic Fields, published by Constant and designed by OSP with ConTeXt and Scribus, has been awarded one of 9 prizes for The Most Beautiful Book of Brussels and Wallonia ✵ ✯ ✵ More about the prize: http://www.prixfernandbaudinprijs.be About the design and production process (also included in the publication): The Making Of Related posts: […]

Tuesday Mardi 24/11 Booklaunch: Tracks in electr(on)ic fields @ Verbindingen/Jonctions 12: By Data We Mean Zennestraat 17 Rue de la Senne, Brussels Bruxelles

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 […]

22 June, 16:00 @ Puerto, Varkensmarkt 23, Brussels Join us this afternoon for the long awaited festive launch of the Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek: 70 delicious recipes, written, translated (Dutch and French) and illustrated in collaboration with the inhabitants of Puerto. Puerto is an organisation working from the center of Brussels, where they generously […]

Yesterday OSP received a Plantin-Moretus prize 2009 for best designed book in the category non fiction. The jury about Cross-over: “It was love at first sight“. The book, published by BAM and Lannoo and edited by Liesbeth Huybregts, uses Libre Fonts and is produced with Scribus and many other F/LOSS tools. We think it is […]

A journey through the history and currents of free education, counter-institutional movements and the economy of information in Silicon Valley + beyond. Free Soil presents a bus tour, exhibition, outdoor film/video festival & on-site exchange in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California. This tour […]

These days i’m in Malmö for The Art of the Overhead festival. For some years now, this art festival has done media archeology about the overhead projector. There was a workshop/space this week, there will be performances this weekend, there will be a psychedelic closing party next weekend, etc. We’re happy to see that the […]

La Selec is a magazine edited by enthousiasts of La Mediatheque, a public service for renting records, movies, games and so on. Each issue La Selec invites a local artist to produce a poster inspired by their recommended selection of medias. This month it was Harrisson, so was consequently OSP. Here’s the poster we did […]

Enfin! FLOSS+Art Book is Launched! Damn it looks good!

The FLOSS+Art book is finally rolling off the print-on-demand press and in the spirit of the kinds of practices described in the book, GOTO10 distributes our ‘source files’ as a bittorrent:1 Rather than just providing a “free” PDF, FLOSS+Art.v1.1.eBook-GOTO10 is also available and contains all the Fonts, Images, PDF and Scribus source files that were […]

Just out and hopefully in the post soon: The Official Scribus Manual! For less than 30 euros, we ordered ourselves 438 pages of printed documentation, examples and other invaluable info. And at least €12 from each copy goes towards the Scribus project. Get yours here: http://www.flesbooks.com/scribus1.3manual/

At the Polish print party, we tried a possible automation of the nineteen steps. We gave out numbered tickets at the entrance, and at the end there was a numbered copy of the booklet for everyone. The booklets were all different via Python and Scribus. The imposition and printing was very simple Perl. 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 […]

With * new * OSP Yi Jiang we are currently working on typography and lay-out for CROSS-over: Kunst, Media en Design in Vlaanderen, a publication edited by Liesbeth Huybrechts and published by BAM / Lannoo. The book is layed-out in Scribus and contains various database visualisations generated in Inkscape (in collaboration with Michael Murtaugh). It […]

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

Mute Vol 2 #6 – Living in a Bubble: Credit, debt and crisis is out! After a few months of testing and trying, the work flow of the entire magazine was converted to Free Software (OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp and Scribus on Kubuntu and Ubuntu systems) and… with succes. Read low-graphic pdf’s online or order your […]

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 […]

Over the last few months, the OSP and Mute team have established a new design and production workflow for Mute magazine, using Open Source tools. Below are a few of the questions we are encountering during the last stages of this process.

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 […]

Samedi 16 Juin Nepomuk Bar – City Mine(d) – Rue Saint-Jean Nepomucen, 17, Bruxel Click here for English Open Source Publishing est fier de vous inviter à son petit-déjeuner canadien, où vous seront servies leurs dernières aventures dans le monde des Logiciels Libres. Au menu: mise en page animée d’un conte de fée, programmeur chercheur […]

We hope you are as much inspired by these texts as we are. You should read this! We think these texts are essential. These texts need to be seen in context of their time. Would this be of any use? Will you read this please? Please do not take their advice literally! We hope you […]

Interview with Andreas Vox, Scribus-developer While in the background participants to the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 start saying goodbye to each other, Andreas Vox makes time to sit down with us in the hotel lounge. We want to talk to him about Scribus, the open-source application for professional page layout. Not only as users that […]

La conférence d’Alexandre Robin a LGM Association internationnale en science politique. Design Graphique, administration reseau, dévelopement web, Alexandre à choisi de travailler en OS plus par goût que par économie. Une présentation enthousiasmante, menée dans un protocole tout “corporate” il apparait aussi que le sujet était: “comment j’ai caché à mes collègues que je faisais […]

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 […]

Mute Magazine develops Open Source software, and has recently installed Ubuntu on all office machines. Now they want to move their lay-out away from QuarkXpress too. Last week, Simon Worthington and Darron Broad from Mute came over to discuss the project. First of all we will need to make sure their original templates can be […]

Contribution by De Geuzen in Open magazine about Travail Mobile, a workshop for Digitales. After the Crash Test-post a few month ago, finally pictures of the result! Thanks to Peter Linnell (one of the main Scribus developers), who after I posted about some Postscript troubles to the Scribus mailinglist, came to the rescue on IRC.

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 French weekly Le Tigre announces: This week, we have an article about free softwares in “Le Tigre”: http://www.le-tigre.net/No11.html There is a “encadr?” about Scribus. You can see it there: http://rdereel.free.fr/letigre/011/scribus.jpg

Production line set up for the scanning, lay-out (in Scribus of course!), printing and binding of The Continuous Present On May 18-19 The Continuous Present was printed-on-demand at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. This publication was developed in the context of The Tomorrows Book, an ongoing investigation into the possible futures of reading, […]

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 […]

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).

A few days ago, I installed version 1.3.3 and a quick review already shows that the screen-mouse response has come a long way since I used Scribus 1.2 to get this poster printed: Of course, using software seriously for the first time is a disorienting experience in itself, but in this case the application responded […]