Andy Fitzsimon

It will be weeks before I can actually take in all of the developments, conversations, challenges and potential each participating project had benefited from.

I’ll have to categorize the areas of massive development:

It was like a wedding of api’s, libraries, programs and users: All parts of the open source creative chain met together and the fusion was immediate and real.

• Colour: management in our files, our applications and throughout our desktop.
• Typography: management, libraries, designing, accessibility and the authors.
• Geometry: Rendering api, computational libraries, new methods and in our apps
• Publishing: the best workflow, the toolchains, the standards and the content.
• Image: composting frameworks, open formats, editing articulation ..more
• Insight & Implementation: research, usability, interaction design & planning

I’ll try to pull apart these categories to cover each projects benefits of the meeting. Like I said, its a lot to take in… I couldn’t be more happy.

So, Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who made the most of their time during LGM.
You were teaching, learning, coding and planning. As a collective, our understanding grew into other new worlds and our code will benefit.

Thank you to everyone who made LGM happen. You were sponsors, helping out during the day, and making introductions between projects.

Even the people who couldn’t make it to Poland, your efforts made LGM possible and look at the benefits. So thank you, again and again.

I’ve always known open source is the best way to develop software (and ideas) and LGM is such a real demonstration of the fact.

I should probably get preachy and mention that the most expensive proprietary company SLA’s will never get you this kind of synergy between your engineers and the api’s they use. But there’s plenty of time for that later.

Stay tuned for more news soon. I’m off to have some chilli crab!

Lets consider your support of the Libre graphics meeting; as if it were actually paying various software vendors. What would it cost per product?

Illustrator $599
But Inkscape is free, forever .
Inkscape has a brilliant creative canvas with easy to use tools featuring advanced features that help you achieve your outcome faster.

Photoshop $649 or $999 for extended
But Gimp & Krita are free, forever
Crap selection methods? soix selection !
silly rescale? Liquid rescale !
open raster and stacks more !

InDesign $699
Scribus is free, forever.
Scribus provides outstanding control over creating PDF documents. CMYK, Spot colours, bleed, registration & crop marks, large volume text manipulations, preflight checking…. Absolutely what you need to have your printer to meet your EXACT needs. no more “send me the *indd files so i can alter/destroy your final work. Scribus output speaks for itself.

Autodesk maya or 3dsmax $hitloads
I stopped my flirt with modelling & animation in 2002 so I wont speak about Autodesk products versus blender.. but i think one or two blender examples can speak for themselves….

But what’s the total cost going to be?

What do we pay in pure software licenses for a single workstation that can offer most creative graphical services:

AUD $4,455 - Adobe Creative Suite
AUD $5,415 - Maya unlimited
AUD $3,790 - 3Ds Max
AUD $703 - FontlabStudio
AUD $2,167 - Fontlab AsiaFont Studio
AUD $1,400 - Final Cut Pro
Total AUD $17,930

That price DOES NOT include the insanely expensive video compositing software like flame flint or inferno or the automated publishing software used for tricks that inkscape and gimp can do on any server with their advanced command line interfaces.

And don’t forget!
This is only the current version of the software mentioned. Upgrades are forced on us by commercial software vendors.

I haven’t yet visited a studio who was able to purchase a copy of CS2 once CS3 was released. All the major stores took it off the shelves and all studios wanted to keep their workflow on CS2 and still hire new staff…. ‘Staying put’ meant they couldn’t contract to an external agency running the most recent software and be able to manipulate the files afterwards.. this wouldn’t happen with 100% open standards.

I’m not trying to say that there is a complete feature parity between free graphics software and the proprietary offerings; because the missing features go both ways. I do however argue that a proprietary workflow is effectively throwing your time and money in the bin.

Everyone spends time to learn software, so when learning a proprietary workflow; we are paying, only to pay again and again.

When we learn free software, missing features considered, once we have them. they are with us for good, and everyone else too

I really want to play on the fear that you don’t know how much its going to cost next time around .. and that you’re locked into the workflow by spending the time learning it ..

The innovation seeded at LGM is unquantifiable!

• developers attending LGM don’t focus on product pillars
  If things like better selection algorithms or precision geometry libraries are possible to implement: LGM developers go there! who knows when it will pop up to serve your needs
• developers attending LGM freely give extra attention to specialised industries like typography or 3d imaging
  we make software better just because we can.

I was just checking out our Pledgie page for LGM3 and guess what ??

We’ve passed $8000 !

This means means the user community for free graphics software is now a gold sponsor! we’re on our way to being a corner stone sponsor and then achieving our $20,000 target !

LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly a worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!

you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential

Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.

You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.

• will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
• will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
• will pango get used by fontforge ?
• will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
• One thing is certain;

All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!

Wade: hey
Wade: check this
Wade: http://www.devx.com/RichInternetApps/Article/35208
Wade: they use inkscapez

On a personal note… I’m not yet sure what to think of Silverlight
EEE bullshit ? or a real opportunity ?

Some people have it all wrong!

I’m fairly certain that the ‘best tool for the job’ can be open-source and still be the best.
So why doesn’t Adobe open source their creative suite?

Stephen offers a good opinion here

UPDATE: mizmo’s got some things to say.

Here’s what i tried to post as a comment on Adobe’s busted moveable type installation
—————–

One of the many defining reasons I have now committed my career towards open source creative software was that it took less than half the time of learning the proprietary alternatives that I already knew.

Tell me, what else can open projects like Inkscape do to remove that fictitious barrier of ‘wasted time’ that is invested in learning a new creative tool.

Honestly I do not see it.

The only wasted time I see is bookshelves brimming with Adobe-related technical books. Those things have made an entire market around attempting to explain the non-intuitive quirks of many proprietary software offerings.

Free software most certainly expands someones creative potential and pushes creative works to entirely new audiences thanks to (but not limited to) the wide accessibility of software with no cost or platform dependency. Any idea how many clients I’ve been able to hand over the source files along with the software I used to create their assets with? I’ve lost count!

So what is it that helps you out more during a tight deadline with a client?

• Spending the time and money learning a mediocre proprietary work-flow that lets you down on feature X when you needed it yesterday ? (wait 6 months and hope you are part of a large audience for your vendor)
• Or can you download something intuitive, new and free that allows you to break new ground and puts you directly in contact with the people who actually created it.

By investing your time producing with any tool, be it a pencil or a piece of software, you are helping the manufacturers of that tool. The pencil manufacturers get more orders or the software makers see more attention put on their products.
With proprietary vs open source software you have a story of two vendors: one wants your money whereas the other is only happy you are using their work and would appreciate your feedback.

I am happy to share the experience of using free software because I know I won’t have to pay later for a product built on my feedback, a product that I cannot change.

- Andy

————

Please revise your revenue model Adobe, nobody can live on bullshit forever. We’re not mushrooms.

To a user its not always about the price, its also about how its made and how its used. Free software offers less limitations.

The latest awesome addition to the Inkscape tool arsenal is the warp tool.
It enables ability to select a bunch of shapes and bend, pull, grow/shrink and even add a grunge noise effect.
If are anything like me (an iwarp junkie for mates photos in the gimp) you’ll love this tool and its creative potential.

In an exciting tun of events I’ll be heading to Melbourne and teaching both overview and master courses on open source graphic design.

I’ll also be chatting at the Linux Users Victoria (LUV) meeting and hopefully grabbing dinner with a few of my favorite Inkscape and Batik developers

Can’t wait to see all the cool kids there.

Many thanks to Richard Keech for setting this up.

And blending mode filters in inkscape is one of them.

Yaaaahhhooooo

Last post I used Pngcrush to compress a set of images.  I thought I’d just post the scripts I use almost daily to keep my PNG assets lean.

Honestly I wish Pngcrush had these options without the need for crazy bash find or for-loops. But hey, It does one thing and does it well. I’m not complaining for its awesomeness.

All of these scripts use the –brute option which brute forces its way through numerous compression options until it finds the most effective way to describe your image in PNG for the smallest filesize.

Compress all PNG’s in a directory and replace them with compressed version

for i in *.png;do 
    pngcrush -brute -d tmp "$i" ; 
done; 
mv -f tmp/* .; rm -rf tmp

Compress PNG’s and put them in a new directory called ‘tmp’

find * -name "*png" -execdir pngcrush -d tmp {} ;

Recursively explore directories for PNG’s and compress then replace with compressed version

for file in `find . -name "*.png"`;do 
    echo $file; 
    pngcrush -brute "$file" tmp_img_file.png; 
    mv -f tmp_img_file.png $file; 
done;

I’m going to show you how to internationalize your graphics using inkscape and the gnome desktop.

Prior Considerations

Translations are always going to be variable length.
What might look short and snappy in Simplified Chinese may be a whole sentence to explain in Brazillian Portugese.

For this reason you should create designs with generous amounts of space around your words.
With SVG you may need to define a flowtext region. This is done in Inkscape by selecting the text tool and dragging. Centering text also works a treat.

We’re going to be creating .po files for translation without the need of opening the entire SVG XML or editing with inkscape. If you work with a translation community, this is much more considerate than throwing them headfirst into a text editor or inkscape.

Right, so here we go

Say we have a web graphic, a presentation, an advertisement, diagram whatever.
We’re going to translate it into 23 languages and walkaway unharmed.

Something to avoid is duplicating editable text.

You might want a drop shadow, blurred mask or some other effect layered above or behind your text. If so, make sure you clone (<use>) and not copy. You may be getting free translations from the community, it helps to not make them type the same phrase over and over again.

xml2po to the rescue

gnome-doc-utils sure is a beautiful package. The awesome GNOME developers have created a tool that will pull strings of text from your xml document and issue them as strings in a pofile.

Here is a test file for you to use for this exercise. Make sure you right click the link and select “save link as”.

xml2po -a -o en-US.po chrome.svg

Create locale specific po files

We’re just going to copy the upstream po file and rename it as per each locale.

cp en-US.po as-IN.po
cp en-US.po bn-IN.po
cp en-US.po de-DE.po
cp en-US.po es-ES.po
cp en-US.po fr-FR.po
cp en-US.po gu-IN.po
cp en-US.po hi-IN.po
cp en-US.po it-IT.po
cp en-US.po ja-JP.po
cp en-US.po kn-IN.po
cp en-US.po ko-KR.po
cp en-US.po ml-IN.po
cp en-US.po mr-IN.po
cp en-US.po or-IN.po
cp en-US.po pa-IN.po
cp en-US.po pt-BR.po
cp en-US.po ru-RU.po
cp en-US.po si-LK.po
cp en-US.po ta-IN.po
cp en-US.po te-IN.po
cp en-US.po zh-CN.po
cp en-US.po zh-TW.po

Translate the po files

kbabel or gtranslator are the apps of choice for many open source translators. They will open up your pofiles and give friendly preview of only the text strings in your SVG and nothing else.

A word of warning. The depth of text in your SVG reflects the order the strings will appear in your pofiles.
This means you may confuse the logical flow of text by arranging text above or below shapes. Text sent to the bottom depth is displayed at the start of the generated pofile.

Another word of warning to your translators

That “image/svg+xml” string you see at the top of each pofile is unfortunately pulled into your pofiles via xml2po and shouldn’t be translated otherwise you may break the validity of your SVG.

Time to merge translated pofiles back into SVG

Once your pofiles are given the all clear from translators you can generate the translation changes back into svg files specific to their locale.

xml2po -a -p en-US.po chrome.svg > chrome-as-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p as-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-as-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p bn-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-bn-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p de-DE.po chrome.svg > chrome-de-DE.svg
xml2po -a -p es-ES.po chrome.svg > chrome-es-ES.svg
xml2po -a -p fr-FR.po chrome.svg > chrome-fr-FR.svg
xml2po -a -p gu-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-gu-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p hi-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-hi-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p it-IT.po chrome.svg > chrome-it-IT.svg
xml2po -a -p ja-JP.po chrome.svg > chrome-ja-JP.svg
xml2po -a -p kn-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-kn-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p ko-KR.po chrome.svg > chrome-ko-KR.svg
xml2po -a -p ml-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-ml-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p mr-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-mr-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p or-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-or-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p pa-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-pa-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p pt-BR.po chrome.svg > chrome-pt-BR.svg
xml2po -a -p ru-RU.po chrome.svg > chrome-ru-RU.svg
xml2po -a -p si-LK.po chrome.svg > chrome-si-LK.svg
xml2po -a -p ta-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-ta-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p te-IN.po chrome.svg > chrome-te-IN.svg
xml2po -a -p zh-CN.po chrome.svg > chrome-zh-CN.svg
xml2po -a -p zh-TW.po chrome.svg > chrome-zh-TW.svg

Now you have a directory of svg images the same as your upstream.

Export Images

If you are working with an environment that deals with PDF’s, you may want to ignore this step.
SVG’s are best sent through things like Batik when using FOP to create a pdf rather than rendered PNG for obvious reasons (vector=love)

If you are exporting to web or something else and want to be friendly to software that cant read your Inkscape crafted SVG:
This is the step for you.

for i in *.svg;do inkscape -e "${i/.svg/.png}" "$i" ;done

Compressing PNG’s

Of course on the web every byte counts pngcrush will give you the best file size without losing a pixel.

for i in *.png;do pngcrush -brute -d tmp "$i" ;done; mv -f tmp/* .; rm -rf tmp

Benefits of using this technique…

If you are a creating technical illustrations or diagrams you may want to alter your upstream version (In this case: en-US) as the conceptual changes.

Thankfully xml2po will regenerate translations from upstream regardless of new objects you create, styles you change or transformations you make to your original. This is wonderful for when management ask for their illustrations to be larger and changed to cornflower blue. More on automating that sort of thing across a set in a later post.

UPDATE:

My good mate prokoudine has ported this article to RU