Planet Open Fonts

March 10, 2010

Alexandre Prokoudine

Graphics Planet updated

Okay, now I can introduce new members of Graphics Planet Esteban Tovagliari already was introduced a couple of days ago. But if you’ve just joined, he is developer of Ramen, a free/libre compositing tool for Linux and Mac. Alastair M. Robinson is best known for his work on PhotoPrint, but his recent projects, GPLin and [...]

by Alexandre - March 10, 2010 05:42 PM

March 09, 2010

Alexandre Prokoudine

Omnitarian

I think this talented Inkscape artist nicknamed Omnitarian definitely deserves more credit than he gets

by Alexandre - March 09, 2010 11:46 AM

Ben Weiner

Screen scraping joy

Been doing a touch of screen scraping, scripting with Ruby, against a target that was ‘unwilling’. A few observations:


  • Using Mechanize (available in various forms for Perl, Python and Ruby [homepage for the latter]) is a must. I started with the Ruby HTTP library, then went to Curb (Ruby’s implementation of Curl), but having the pages you retrieve abstracted into an object that you can manipulate in familiar terms (like, say page.forms_with :name => "choose_colour") helps you concentrate on the peculiarities of your task
  • Replicating the path of a real user is important. There could be session variables at the server end that mean jumping about between items that you cannot navigate between as a regular user will generate error pages, but see below
  • Don’t count on friendly HTTP errors from the server, as it might not know it has done anything wrong
  • If the page output looks OK but you cannot parse it, check for funny characters hidden in the HTML. I found ASCII nulls dotted about; these are initially hard to spot for somewhat obvious reasons. Browsers can deal with this kind of dodginess but XML parsers, as @fidothe reminds me, must ignore the elements in which such characters occur. I was able to do this to get around the problem:

  • @agent = Mechanize.new
    class @agent
    alias :orig_get :get
    alias :orig_fetch_page :fetch_page
    # remove the chaff characters
    def get(options, parameters = [], referer = nil)
    page = orig_get(options, parameters, referer)
    page.body = page.body.gsub(/"[0x00]"/,"")
    page
    end
    def fetch_page(params)
    page = orig_fetch_page(params)
    page.body = page.body.gsub(/"[0x00]"/, "")
    page
    end
    end

    [0x00] represents ascii null in the sample code; I was able to select and paste the character from an HTML dump with both vim and a GUI text editor but it tends to be less than visible in the wild and YMMV.

  • Assume that what you’re doing is an unwelcome task. If the points above don’t give you that impression, other curiosities probably will.

by noreply@blogger.com (Ben Weiner) - March 09, 2010 10:14 AM

OSP

Open Clip Art Library

A brand new version of the Open Clip Art Library just came out! 26175 (and growing) scalable vector graphics, all available under a public domain license: they may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods [...]

by OSP - March 09, 2010 12:39 AM

March 08, 2010

Alexandre Prokoudine

Introducing Ramen

It looks like updating Graphics Planet takes too much time, so I’ll introduce one of the upcoming members now As many of you know we are somewhat limited in solid open source VFX production tools on Linux. True, there are all sorts of modellers and Blender seems to become jack of all trades these [...]

by Alexandre - March 08, 2010 04:40 PM

Jon Phillips

Open Clip Art Library 2.0 is Here!

The Open Clip Art Library has grown, from humble beginnings in early 2004, into a massive collection of over 24,000 scalable vector images, all created by 1200+ artists from around the world.

OCAL is a powerful platform, through which, all work uploaded to the site is dedicated to the public through Creative Commons’ “Public Domain Dedication”. This means that anyone can download and use the entire SVG library for any purpose, including both free and commercial works!

OCAL now boasts an easily navigable collection, made possible by new thumbnail previews. It has now become much easier to search and download clip art that suits any situation. The new site layout includes an updated theme, from Andy Fitzsimon, that emphasizes user interaction by placing more importance on the portal to upload created work, as well as displaying selections from the ever-growing collection.

Behind the scenes, members of Fabricatorz, including, among others, Bassel Safadi, Michi, Ronaldo Barbachano, and Brad Phillips, have helped push The Open Clip Art Library onto the Aiki Framework. This new PHP + MYSQL platform allows programmers to easily create and work with content management systems from the web.

Please help support the new Open Clip Art site launch by registering (if you haven’t already) and uploading artwork of your own!.

Read the entire Announcement 2.0 here and at the Fabricatorz post.

by bradphillips - March 08, 2010 04:09 PM

OSP

Hop frogs on the map

identi.ca/osp make his best to track our recent activity via our differents IP addresses, where Brussels seems synthetise by 4 positions, here with the background lazy to display, osp frogs above water. A few minutes later, a new osp -Ivan- connection from Schaerbeek, North of Brussels, strangely shrink the scale by positionning a bright new frog [...]

by Pierre - March 08, 2010 12:24 AM

March 07, 2010

OSP

Launching OSP-works

5 years of Free, Libre and Open Source design experiments. Now available in chronological order: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/works

by OSP - March 07, 2010 10:00 PM

March 05, 2010

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary)

5 Mar 2010

Very promising plans underway for a new Ubuntu open font

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, recently announced the commission of a new open font for Ubuntu and Canonical:

"We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface. The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised for screen legibility. It will be published under an open font license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.

It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font widely used in 10.10. The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people.

Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen usage globally. We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set.

The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that purpose. Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom and collaboration. We’ll publish more as soon as we have it."

What's not to love about this announcement? Seriously, this is very promising... Talk about best practises for setting up an open font project and setting the pace for global derivative branding of a whole family of projects!

Just look at the multiple layers of awesomeness: commissionning very experienced typographers to design an original brand and interface font family for screen and print with wide coverage of major scripts beyond the usual Western scripts (Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic) along with plans to extend it even further via a global internship program. With all this serious work to be released under a community-approved license allowing wide modification, redistribution and re-use in tune with the Ubuntu ethos and in respect of Ubuntu's and Canonical's trademarks.

It's very encouraging to see all the attention, energy and resources dedicated to design and language coverage issues in the Ubuntu community: "Every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice" as indicated in the Ubuntu philosophy are not empty words!

A big kudos to all involved!

The community as a whole has made a lot of progress in this difficult area over the past few years (decade?), look at this previous post when Mark was challenging the community to help tackle the font challenges!

And if you didn't know already about the work done for the visual identity Ubuntu has been using until now: there is Andy's Fitzismon's Ubuntu-title with various branches from the community but the new project will reach much further.

March 05, 2010 01:48 PM

OSP

Contour book one

Last sunday we drawed a book. 675 417 km2 pour Luce contour lines of France scale 1:385142 interval : 30 m strokes : 0.05 pt 16 binded sections cover : green cardboard 300 g + clothed back single copy Sur base des élévations au pas de 250m proposées au téléchargement par l’I.G.N. France. Calcul des courbes de niveaux et sortie Postscript opérés par GRASS [...]

by Ludi - March 05, 2010 01:29 PM

Thank You for Voting!

We asked your opinion: Should the logo we proposed for the Libre Graphics Meeting drip or not? 50 readers voted, and yes was selected in total 51 times and no 34 times (more than one answer possible). Apart from that, strong opinions were voiced on- and offline. Interestingly, these often were against the drip. [...]

by OSP - March 05, 2010 11:36 AM

March 03, 2010

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary)

3 Mar 2010

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting

Do you enjoy using a range of libre graphics software, including open fonts and all the tools forming the open font design toolkit?

Then please consider supporting the upcoming LGM: the major yearly event where the community of developers and core contributors for libre graphics software come together. Your support will help even more useful interaction and progress to happen during the LGM to the benefit of the wider community.

For details see the create wiki and of course the preparation efforts by OSP (this year's organizer).

March 03, 2010 03:25 PM

March 02, 2010

OSP

Biscoitos da Sorte

Ricardo Lafuente and Ana Carvalho imported/exported a Print Party to Porto. With live Fortune Cookies … how brave! (Recipe for cookies + messages)

by OSP - March 02, 2010 10:20 PM

Governmental support for LGM

Remember that we entered a subsidy dossier in October 2009? The Design and Architecture committee of the Flemish ministry for culture has decided to grant our application and support LGM 2010. Besides the fact that any financial support is more than welcome in hard times like these, it is above all an encouraging expression of support for [...]

by OSP - March 02, 2010 11:39 AM

February 28, 2010

Simos Xenitellis

Επιλέξτε πρώτο το Firefox!

Από την πρώτη Μαρτίου 2010, οι χρήστες Windows στην Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση έχουν την επιλογή για το λογισμικό του περιηγητή (web browser). Η επιλογή θα ενεργοποιηθεί μέσω του συστήματος WindowsUpdate.

Σελίδα BrowserChoice.eu

Μπορείτε να δείτε πως φαίνεται η ελληνική σελίδα από το σύνδεσμο επιλογής λογισμικού περιήγησης για την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση.

BrowserChoice.eu επιλέξτε πρώτο το Firefox

Επιλέξτε πρώτο το Mozilla Firefox διότι πρώτο μέλημα του λογισμικού είναι η ασφάλειά σας.

Η δικτυακός τόπος browserchoice.eu παρέχεται από τη Microsoft. Τη λειτουργία του browserchoice.eu την έχει επιβάλει η Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση όταν καταδίκασε τη Microsoft σε πρόσφατη δίκη περί μονοπωλίου.

Στους όρους χρήσης του browserchoice.eu η Microsoft αναφέρει για το θέμα αυτό

ΚΟΙΝΟΠΟΙΗΣΕΙΣ

Η τοποθεσία BrowserChoice.eu σχεδιάστηκε σύμφωνα με μια απόφαση της νομοθεσίας περί ανταγωνισμού της Ευρωπαϊκής Επιτροπής τον Δεκέμβριο του 2009.

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. Με επιφύλαξη κάθε νόμιμου δικαιώματος.

One comment

by Simos Xenitellis - February 28, 2010 04:14 PM

February 27, 2010

OSP

mybadge.png

Alexandre Leray has written a nice tutorial on how to create your own pledgie-badge: http://rw.stdin.fr/CookBook/Pledgie Thank you ginger coons for your tasty habanero pepper and don’t forget to donate to http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926!

by OSP - February 27, 2010 05:00 PM

A beautiful compliment

“Livre de texte dense, a priori sans soucis de graphisme, et je découvre que c’est tout l’inverse.” More pictures: http://gallery.constantvzw.org/main.php?g2_itemId=30910

by OSP - February 27, 2010 09:00 AM

February 26, 2010

Alexandre Prokoudine

GIMP developers on loose

You’ve been craving for that, you really have: Yes, not only you can edit text on canvas in GIMP now, you can also use different styles in same text block. It’s as simple as selecting text and clicking a button. And full undo/redo works on text level too. All praise goes to Michael Natterer There’s [...]

by Alexandre - February 26, 2010 04:12 AM

February 25, 2010

OSP

Dingbats in a monkey

The Dingbats Liberation Fest adventure continues in Nancy from March 25 to May 6. Invited by the my.monkey gallery, OSP présentera quelques uns de ses travaux et ouvrira un nouvel atelier Dingbats Liberation Fest into the grid. Le projet de fonte collaborative Dingbats Liberation Fest propose de redessiner les caractères Dingbats et Miscellaneous Symbols d’Unicode. Après 2 premiers [...]

by Ludi - February 25, 2010 04:33 PM

February 24, 2010

OSP

Banners to match

Anything else we can do to make you donate a few dollars to LGM2010 ? <a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner.png’></a> <a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner_red.png’></a> <a style=’border-style:none’ href=’http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926′><img src=’http://stdin.fr/lgm/pledgie/pledgie_banner_navy.png’></a>

by OSP - February 24, 2010 04:03 PM

February 22, 2010

OSP

Support LGM2010!

At the yearly Libre Graphics Meeting, developers and users of our favorite tools get together to work on better software. For some of them, a trip to Brussels is easy to fund, others cannot afford the journey without our help. Let’s pull our resources together and raise 10.000 $ (7350 €) so that they can [...]

by OSP - February 22, 2010 06:00 AM

February 21, 2010

OSP