Monthly Archive for September, 2006

On coincidences

Published on September 26, 2006 in Docs. 0 Comments

Well, I’ve just published a russian translation of a tutorial on GIMP, originally in German, how to draw an exploding planet. The original was published middle August this year at gimpusers.de.

And here is the fun: about a month ago some weird russian guy started a web-site where he claims that a comet is going to crash into Germany end of October this year. He doesn’t supply any facts of course, just some clearly homemade fake video of the comet.

Now the spicy part of the story: the gradient used in the tutorial is shipped with GIMP by default and its name is…. drumroll… “German flag smooth”! I think, God has an outstanding sense of humor :)

VIPS magic

Published on September 18, 2006 in Fonts and Graphics. 0 Comments

Recently a friend of mine gave me a whole CD of scanned public domain fonts waiting to be digitized. The usual way I did it before is importing scans of every glyph into Inkscape, then drawing Bezier curves over those bitmaps and saving the result as plain SVG files, then importing them into a FontForge project (sadly, I’m not keen of FF’s native Bezier curve tool).

The problem was that each file is a ca. 7300×12400 px large, 8bit, greyscale PNG, varying from 8 to 13 Mbytes. Both GIMP, Krita and display of ImageMagick practically freezed my X session, trying to load it (I do have 2 gigs of tile cache set in GIMP). No image viewer I had around could display any of them without eating all of available resources. But I was still going to find some tool that would let me view and visually blast each scan into separate glyphs.

The solution came as nip2 — a front-end to excellent VIPS — a “free image processing system half-way between Photoshop and Excel”. Not only it loaded each file in a couple of seconds, but let me pan around and zoom and crop without any painful waiting, not even speaking about killing X.

I wonder if the related code from VIPS could be massively reused in other graphics applications, so that noone would ever have the experience that I had.

Creating fonts

Published on September 11, 2006 in Fonts. 0 Comments

I was lucky to attend a seminar on fonts organized by Paratype last Saturday. These guys are doing amazing proprietary stuff :)

It was pretty interesting to hear about their licensing policy (since I didn’t know much about it really) and their work. Before this event I used to think that fonts are a work of a single person, more or less supported by someone else after the death of original designer. As it turns out, two or more people can participate at creating or localizing a font, which is pretty similar to open source fonts design made by SIL and Linux Libertine guys.

Careful reading of Open Font License is still on my ToDo.

Back

Published on September 5, 2006 in Life and Photography. 0 Comments

Well, vacation is over :)

Spent a great week in St. Petersburg (for the first time in my life, which amused most of my friends) walking, meeting with friends and shooting pictures — unusually much street photography that I never felt I was good at.

A girl feeding pigeons

Now onto work :)