Now that Scribus supports inserting 7 types of typographic spaces directly from menu, you might find useful a tutorial by Pierre-Luc Auclair “Adding typographic spaces to fonts with FontForge”. Read it here.
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
Another brain feeding idea for upcoming LGM 
Recently I compiled SVN build of Hydrogen — a cross platform open source drum machine. Hydrogen uses drumkits — libraries of drum samples that are usually stored in a local directory. SVN version features a network drumkits installator. It fetches updated list of available drumkits and lets users download new ones or remove existing ones.
What do you think about creating a similar online repository for shared resources and either internal or external clients to it? Internal client for each application means tighter integration, but also more work in common. External standalone-client means less work, but also less integration.
The most serious cons, I guess, is that this would clearly be installation into ~/.create and thus not efficient for multiuser desktops.
Subjects to further consideration:
- introducing modularization of shared resources (and thus having separate branches in repo for each kind of shared resource);
- introducing basic metadata for resources (name, description);
- organization of repository;
- administration of repository.
Oh dear, every time someone posts an article on opensource “creative” applications, a flood of mood flushes green meadows away.
I once wrote an article in Russian about motivations to start open source projects. I was actually hoping that it will make it clear to people who have wrong impression of open source, since I’ve been actively contributing to different projects for last 5 years and thus I know the insides and the outsides. That doesn’t always happen.
Basic things one should understand about open source are:
- Open source is about liberty, not money.
- Open source is very pragmatical in its heart. It’s meant to bring profit to both developers and users.
As soon as one understands it, (s)he can get things right. If one doesn’t understand it, then another troll might be born to the world.
The primary goal for any open source developer is to create a powerful application. You can’t make him do something for you just because you need it.
Have a look at list of Inkscape’s RFEs. There are ~110 of them since January 2006. That makes ca. 1,5 feaure requests a day. And the projects exists for 3 years. Get the idea? Any chance you can have your requested feature implemented today? Tomorrow? Next weeek? That depends pretty much on the particular requested feature and the way you request it.
Let’s play an RPG 
Continue reading ‘Who owes whom, or New Open Source RPG’
Excellent stuff. Draw a presentation template in Inkscape and convert it to LaTeX style for presentations using a Python script.
This is the very first release, some Inkscape’s limitations get in the way, but still this is a very nice approach.
You might already know that OpenDocument is shaping up to a widely accepted set of standards.
It looks like we are about to start working on another OpenDocument format for multilayered raster graphics. This is actually all about filling the gap. We have OMF and AES when it comes to exchanging audio projects, we have AAF when it comes to video. But there is no one uniform standard to store multiply layers, their compositing options, clipping paths, text on path etc.
When I say “we”, I mean developers from different projects. Several people independantly from each other were talking about very much the same at the same time. However, Boudewijn Rempt and Simon Budig were the guys pushed the magic button in this case
What is the point behind creating such a file format? Continue reading ‘Exchanging graphics project data’