Andy Fitzsimon

Let the flood of remixing begin!

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.

I haven’t quite kept up to date on this blog, but since Ive now registered andyfitz.org .net and .com.au I figured its time to put a little more online.
Actually, some photography fella has the .com but hopefully I can beat his googlejuice.

For those that have been wondering here’s whats new with Andy:

• I attended Libre Graphics Meeting(my 2nd x-mas) in Montreal
• I then visited Red Hat HQ in Raleigh (also did some traveling around the trip)
• Yesterday I became a member of the GNOME Foundation. Thank you jdub and thos
• I’ve been doing some long late night skates from my place and around the city
• I’ve taken up yoga at jwulf’s awesome atmayoga on Albert St
• I’ve gotten camping and festival tickets for splendour in the grass
• Started helping with the Brisbane bid for LCA2009 / LGM2009
• I also plan to leave my beautiful Australia for a 1-2 year period of time. more news on that later

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

While reviewing the submissions for the Open Font Library logo competition we came across many concepts that nicely tied into the OpenClipart aesthetic. That was great.

We also noticed a tenancy to use glyphs from other scripts which was great but this really limits the brand for those coming from other nationalities who’s alphabet didn’t make it into the 3 used in the logo.

The best way to deal with this? Make a derivative logo for all locales!

As an exercise I took one submission by Marty, cleaned up the aesthetic a little and had it translated in 23 languages :-).

Considering I know only English and dumb English (translated here), It’s a privilege to have brilliant translators as colleagues.

Tools:

Inkscape (design)

XML2PO (conversion from SVG into pofiles )

RSVG locale specific style tweaks+rendering),

UPDATE:

I’ve published the major part of the technique for creating these translatable graphics here.

Forgot to mention.
A while back I got called up for an aussie round-table on FOSS Graphic design for a podcast.

you can directly download: MP3 OGG

Costume party on the weekend and the host actually put a video of me on youtube. scandal.

For those still confused.
To everyone’s time I wasted I’m sorry. I’m sure thats all of you.