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 […]

Excellent post by Troy Sobotka explaining why designers should collaborate with Free Software projects and stop responding to contests: “We need a round table interaction where literature, art, design, philosophy, psychology, and sociology can be engaged. We need a cross pollination of creative fields and studies. We need to have developer minds and creative minds […]

After heated debates, intensive collaborative working sessions and many hesitations, OSP feat. Alexandre Leray finally proposed a new identity for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting to the Libre Graphics community. Since the next meeting will take place in in our home town Brussels, we felt that it was important to at least try to shift […]

The Open Font Library is preparing a brand new site (an idea of what’s in store: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki) and this sparked off an interesting discussion about terminology. How to name fonts that are made available on the OFL site?

Chris Lilley writes: “W3C is collecting ideas for work related to downloadable fonts on the Web. This email summarizes the current situation, and asks for feedback on a draft charter for a future W3C Font working group or interest group. Please send feedback on the charter to the publicly archived mailing list www-style@w3.org.” Read his […]

From the CBUD-mailinglist: Subject: RE: FW: Licensee Application From: “DUURKOOP, JULIA” Date: Wed, 1 April 2009 11:20:25 -0400 To: “Daniel Fary” Dear Daniel: Thank you for your inquiries and follow-up e-mails. After consulting with executives, engineers and lawyers at the Company, we have decided to insert a series of gray tones to the PANTONE MATCHING […]

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 […]

Do free software developers need lawyers, when reverse engineering formats such as Corel Draw? How to work on the compatibility of file formats, when risking law suits from patent holders? Should we forget about opening up proprietary formats altogether? Jon Philips takes the position that developers should ‘do until done’: Its good to know generally […]

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 […]

Ellen Lupton’s question: Why would a typeface designer want to give a font away? sparked off a series of comments worth reading. The discussion shows how much typographers struggle with ‘open source’ as an idea. It makes you wonder why Lupton decided to ask ‘to give away a font’ and not ‘to share source’ – […]

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 […]