Techwriter’s den

Some of you, people, dislike Novell for Mono. Next step would be boycotting any open source application that can make a good use of OpenType fonts. Because the OTF technology, you know, also comes from Microsoft. What’s “worse” is that Adobe participated too

Yes, I’m in a very linuxhaters mood today.

Just a day after I blogged that it’s unknown when LensFun will land to UFRaw the patch entered holy waters of UFRaw’s CVS I bet you’ve been waiting for that for quite a while

The user interface is built so that if the used preset is OK, you don’t go any further. But if you want to tweak options, you have plenty of them to play with:

Looks cool, eh?

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The newly announced Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite X4 includes Deep Exploration Standard Edition that allows viewing and embedding 3D CAD models to PDF files. Which means support for over 80 file formats used in CATIA, Autodesk Inventor, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks and Unigraphics NX.

Since a week or so SVN version of Inkscape can now render OBJ files. While the extension is called “3D Polyhedron”, it can actually render more than that

I also tried the version of this elephant (found in Internet) with 10150 faces (that is 5500 grouped objects) and it renders, but working with such a document is a pain on my old Centrino laptop.

Makes me wonder if it would be possible to extract import/export filters from Blender and marry them to Inkscape. For now let’s say “Thank you!” to someone called inductiveload who posted this nice extension to LP

Sins are like shareware — first you enjoy, but in the end you always pay

A while back I interviewed regular Inkscape developers and Google Summer of Code 2006/2007 students regarding bright and shiny 0.46 version and future plans.

As it turned out, the current engine at inkscape.org doesn’t support posting stuff like that (switch to Drupal is planned, I heard), so after long period of foolish procrastination I ended up uploading it statically. It is available to read now, finally. Russian version is posted too.

Unfortunately two of the interviewed students didn’t get a slot for GSoC2008, but they are quite positive about future involvement into the project anyway. And, just in case you didn’t know, Inkscape organization has 5 projects this year:

• SVG Fonts support by Felipe Sanches, who contributed with code to support more SVG filters in 0.46
• lib2geom: convert Inkscape’s internal representation of paths to a lib2geom type by Johan Engelen, who introduced Live Path Effects in 0.46 thanks to GSoC2007
• lib2geom: little interactive applications showing off the power of lib2geom, by Marco Cecchetti;
• Tech drawing abilities for Inkscape, by Maximilian Albert, who added 3D Box tool to 0.46 thanks to GSoC2007
• A test suite, by Jasper Joris van de Gronde

Many thanks to Google for supporting us again this year!

By the way, as you see, lib2geom world domination proceeds as planned. And you know what, I never told you that :), but Scribus developers have a 2geom card in their sleeve as well. More to follow.

If you read CREATE mailing list or stumbled upon one of my previous blog postings, you might have wondered, what happens to LensFun project.

Here is the news. During LGM Gilles Caulier demoed an initial implementation of LensFun in digiKam. Currently it has no advanced options, but you can choose a lens manufacturer and a lens model and see preview. From what I understood, this will be in version 0.10.0 (first KDE4 version of digiKam) and already is in SVN. Edit: I was just told that chromatic aberrations can be fixed in digiKam now as well thanks to LensFun

Screenshots for digiKam: one, two, three.

The Great Anderses of Rawstudio also demoed (privately) an initial support for LensFun (without advanced options as well). It fixes geometric distorsions only right now and I don’t know when it will be released.

There also exists a patch for UFRaw that is coming directly from Andrew Zabolotny (the LensFun developer) and has advanced options, but it was obsoleted by more recent changes in UFRaw/CVS, so it doesn’t compile right now.

Thus, even if not at the speed of light, changes are coming

For some reason I missed The Great Return of Jörg Anders. If you missed that story, here is a quick reference.

In late 90s Dr. Jörg Anders created a free/libre musical score editor called NoteEdit. For some reason it didn’t get much acknowledgement which (but not only this reason) subsequently led to departure of Mr. Anders from the project which actually left the project headless for several months. Then it was picked by several guys who maintained it until ca. 2006 when they started a new project called Canorus.

Now Jörg Anders is back with a GTK+/Cairo application called NtEd which has two most anticipated features implemented: brackets and page layout. Here is an obligatory screenshot

It’s last day here in Wroclaw at LGM. We slowly are wrapping up, and Andy works as a walking shameless plug for eeePC

This conference is unbelievably fun and useful. Can you imagine Dave Coffin, Udi Fuchs, 3×Anders of Rawstudio and Gilles Caulier in just one room? Easily! You just should have been at Libre Graphics Meeting 2008

More details to follow.

By the way, we now have a dedicated Flickr group.

What is it? Cooking classes?

Nooo! This is actually a Print Party by Open Source Publishing that is ongoing right now in a Wroclaw pub, just two days before Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. If you are around, don’t miss out tomorrow’s type design workshop.

As you may already know, deadline for Google Summer of Code applications submission was extended today till April, 7.

Though this year I’m primary admin for hugin/panotools, I’m neglecting my organization for a second and asking to pay more attention to OpenIcc and GNOME, in particular to project ideas bringing color management to a desktop level.

Currently we have most of the bricks in place to build upon: xicc, oyranos, LittleCMS… We just need people who are passionate enough to make both desktop an easy to use platform for photographers, designers and prepress people.