Planet Open Fonts

Alexandre Prokoudine: Screencasting

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:44:22 +0000

As far as I can tell, the best way to deal with inability to do good public presentations (yes, I do mean my darktable talk at last LGM) is to tame and reprogram it. For you it means a series of truly horrible screencasts with voiceovers The first one is out along with usual textual review to do some promo for Gpick — a real kick-ass color exploration tool for Linux and Windows.

And I think it’s time to have another look at RecordItNow in case it can unscrew screencasting on Linux just a little.

Google web fonts: Introducing Expletus Sans

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Crossland) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:57:11 +0000

Expletus Sans was added to Google Web Fonts this week.

Jasper de Waard, born in 1996, first came in contact with the beauty of type design when he was 10, and developed his skills as a type and graphic designer ever since. He was born and raised in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and went to a bilingual high school there, training him to read and write English fluently and have a more international focus. He is currently in his third year, three years before his exam. He hopes to continue his practices in the fields of type and graphic design after he finishes school and release many more typefaces in the future.

His love for the tiny details, balance in proportions and urge for perfection made him into what he is today. However, the great support and feedback from people on several forums can't be denied as a great source of inspiration and evaluation material, giving him a greater understanding of the method behind type design. He is also available for custom type work and identity design.

Q: What inspired you to create the font?

It was a single x in a logo that started me off, but it was largely a search for my own opinions in type design so in a way you could say Expletus Sans was 'self-inspired'.

Q: Did you try to accomplish something specific with this font, and did you succeed?

I wanted to create a look that was completely different from everything I knew. I feel like I definitely succeeded in this.

Q: What kinds of documents are most appropriate for this font?

It could be used for anything that needs a good dose of elegance. I would personally love to see it in identity work.

Q: Designing a new font is a long journey. What inspires you to keep motivated throughout all the different stages?

Ones I put my mind to something, I finish it. With designing a typeface I feel like I have no choice. Once I've started, I get obsessed with perfection. Apart from that, it was the many great responses I got on the internet on my work that kept me motivated.

Q: What is your favourite part of the type design process, and why?

The very beginning. Trying to work out the basic lines of a concept and see the skeleton of the typeface emerge. It pleases me most, because it's the fastest and most rewarding process. After that it's months of tiny little details.

Q: Can you recommend how other type designers can learn the skills involved in making a font like this?

Start drawing or straight on the computer and post your work on as many type-related websites as you can think of. Take your time to read through feedback and never dismiss an idea before you have seen it. Don't give yourself a deadline. You'll never make it in time.

Q: What are your favourite fonts, and why?

All fonts by Robert Slimbach, because of his brilliant eye for perfection. Dolly, because of it's comfortable, yet fresh feel. The Centro superfamily, for excellence throughout all styles. Many more, for even more different reasons.

Q: What do you think could be improved about the type design process?

Multiple Master should be used more extensively and automated processes like iKern are underrated.

Q: How do you feel about publishing your font as an open source project?

It just happened to me. I never particularly thought about it, until you knocked at my door. It seems like a good way to start and increases the chance of seeing my work in use. I feel like it gives me the chance to make the world just a little bit more beautiful and let others enjoy that too, without charge.

Posted by Dave Crossland

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 2 Mar 2011

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:36:45 +0000

In order to do the equivalent of "git pull --dry-run" (which doesn't exist as such) --

git fetch git diff master origin/master

(From Jim Meyering, thanks Jim. He admits "There's probably a much easier way".)

OSP (Open Source Publishing): A journey to Vietnam and an open call

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:12:10 +0000

At LGM 2010 in Brussels, we met Hong-Phuc Dang, a young Vietnamese woman full of energy, willing to organize events around Libre Graphics in Asia in addition to her involvement in FOSS/ASIA, a meeting around Free and Open Source Software. We can’t believe it’s been almost a year of planning and that the trip is [...]

Máirín Duffy: Preparing for Fedora’s SXSW Debut

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:06:11 +0000

Fedora is going to have a booth at the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) music, film, and interface conference expo in Austin, TX in just a little over a couple of weeks now.

Why are we going? Well, our plan is on the Fedora wiki, but my main goal in attending is to promote free software to all of the designers (and developers, too!) that will be attending for the interactive conference, and hopefully even drum up in them some interest in getting involved themselves and help them get started.

We do not have enough designers in the free software community, and I believe we desperately need them. Are we going to find them at the Linux and free software-centric conferences we attend every year? Unless they’re already a member of our community – no, probably not. Are we going to find them at SXSW? I believe so – a show like SXSW is a far more natural habitat for the folks we need!

So this is a little pilot foray into seeking out a certain skillset we need, on their turf! We’ll see how it goes. In preparation, myself and Emily have been spending a lot quality time with Inkscape and Scribus making sure we’ve got all the materials we’ll need off to the various vendors in time to have swag for our booth. Here’s what I worked on this week:

Stamp Postcards

Print-ready CMYK PDF
Scribus SLA source
‘Creative Hands’ image on Open Clip Art Library – I remixed it from Asrafil’s ‘Free Culture’ design.

The idea here (I think it was originally Spot or Emily’s idea) is to have a postcard we hand out at our booth, with four slots to be stamped on the back. The expo is four days long – March 14-17 – so the idea is that we’ll have a different stamp for each of the four days. Folks who want to enter our contest for a sweet prize (TBD) will need to come by our booth each day to fill out their stamp cards to be eligible.

Since we’re trying to reach out primarily to designers / creatives here, I decided with folks’ input in #fedora-design when I was working on it that our stamps are going to represent four awesome free software design applications. We had also considered doing one stamp for each of the four foundations of Fedora, but as Felix had pointed out, we’ve not really had formal materials to support upstream apps we carry in Fedora at events before so it’d be an interesting first-time thing to do. I also think each day the stamp could be an interesting conversation starter – for those who might just drop by to enter the contest, they might ask about what the stamp means and it’ll open up the way for a conversation and maybe even a demo of the app in action. And when the conference is over, they have a listing of free software apps to try out on their postcard. Maybe moving to a completely new operating system would be quite a bit to ask of them…. but trying out a cross-platform piece of free software and having a good experience with it might have a kind of “gateway” effect that could lead them on to trying more and more free software until they do end up trying out Linux (and I hope giving back, once they start getting our culture and what we’re all about! We share a lot of common interests – such as net neutrality, bridging the digital divide, open collaboration, and a passion for technology – as Diana Harrelson pointed out during her FUDcon Tempe talk last month.)

Stamps

Inkscape SVG source

These are the designs for the stamps themselves.

Incidentally, I had made by hand the original GNOME event box GNOME foot stamps for use at sponsored pub events a few years ago. I think at some point some time back the event box with them was stolen. I found a supplier who will do custom stamps for a really reasonable price, so if they turn out nicely I think we should use them to replace the GNOME event box GNOME foot stamps (if there is interest in that.)

Media Sleeve

We are going to have updated versions of the Fedora 14 Design Suite available as handouts at the booth. They’ll have our highlighted apps and of course tons more pre-installed. With John Biebel’s help, we figured out that they won’t boot on newer Powerbooks, but Matthew Garrett helped us figure out a couple of workarounds to suggest for Mac-bearing folks who want to use the discs to try Fedora out.

We’d also considered putting together some discs with cross-platform installers for the free creative apps, but time and budget constraints led to us dropping that.

Print-ready 300 DPI CMYK PDF
Scribus SLA source (linked image in same directory)

Badge Stickers

Print-ready CMYK PDF
Scribus SLA source

We wanted to have some type of sticker handout – from perusing folks’ photos from previous SXSW events, stickers seem to be a really popular handout. So we made these little icons – I’d first seen this style of sticker at LGM in 2007 – that folks could stick on their badges to give a bit of their personality.

We found a great vendor to produce these for us, and were able to work out a clever budget-friendly solution for them. I must have spoken on the phone or had email exchanges with over a dozen vendors in the past week, so let me share my experience:

It seems most sticker vendors, first off, will not produce a sheet of multiple die-cut stickers – instead they want to do rolls of a single sticker design. So finding a vendor who could even do sheet-style stickers was rough. Then, when you get into vendors who can do sheets, many do a lot of business printing labels – for sticking on jars and various other form-factor products. The most popular (in the US) form factor for these label sheets to come in is 8 1/2″ x 11″ US Letter size sticker paper, and the vast majority of these vendors’ dies seem to be made for this size paper. We wanted a small, easy-to-stow-away form-factor for our sticker sheets, no larger than 5″x7″. Not only would this cause die charges as most places don’t already have dies for this, but it would cost a lot in paper since they’d have to cut down a full 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet to make one 5″x7″ish sheet. So the vendor we ended up with, Consolidated Label, is going to cut down each 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of 1″ diameter die-cut stickers into four smaller sheets for us. We’ll actually end up cutting through two rows of unused die-cut circles to do this – but for about a third of the cost of getting the same number of sheets at the same size.

I hope they’ll come out all right. They are a pretty serious vendor though; they do work with some pretty big, well-known clients. I was really, really happy when they called me to tell me a change needed to be made to the color of some of the text to make it more readable – I thought I was going to have to send them another draft of the file but they told me no need – the Scribus-produced PDF I sent them was apparently clean and easy-to-work-with and they were able to make the change for me.

More is afoot

We’ve got some more cool things planned for SXSW… well, you could cheat and read our plans (damn you, transparency!) or try to not click on the link and wait to be surprised as we give you more updates on this pretty exciting happening for Fedora.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team Tagged: Fedora, sxsw

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 26 Feb 2011

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:42:36 +0000

Belatedly learned that Randy Kobes passed away last September. Apparently the university is keeping his machine up, since the CTAN and GNU redirectors have been cruising happily along. Started reimplementing them elsewhere now, though ...

Rogério Brito: My problems with Chromium

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 14:55:06 +0000

Given that Chromium/Chrome is used more and more (as became apparent with the discussion of including it in Debian's squeeze), I decided to give it some tries, mainly Giuseppe Iuculano's version. I occasionally install Chromium from Fabien Tassin's daily builds.

And, to be honest, I have also contributed a good amount (about 400) of translated strings to the Brazilian Portuguese part of Chromium. As a matter of fact, I have even done some "activism" and incentivated other people to create their accounts on Launchpad and help with the projects.

But I always come back to Iceweasel/Firefox, especially with Mike Hommey's frequently updated repository.

What are my reasons for staying with Iceweasel, and not with Chromium?

I can disable full zoom in Iceweasel (i.e., I only want to zoom the text, not the images). According to Chromium's project BTS, it seems that this will be a WONTFIX bug, despite many people asking for it (and it having a lot of duplicates).
I can, in Iceweasel, set my preferred fonts without resorting to hacks on the system level, like say, having to lie with fontconfig or other stuff. And I really want Deja Vu Sans, not a serifed font.
In Iceweasel, a middle mouse click on "an inactive portion" of the page makes me go to the URL that is the system clipboard, just like pasting stuff in X, in general, works. I guess that there may be some way to enable this in Chromium, but, so far, I have not found it.
In Iceweasel, I have a way (without resorting to many extensions or hackish solutions) to use the equivalent of Firefox's "View > Page Style > No Style" (i.e., to ignore any CSS sheet that the document author may have specified on the page).
In Iceweasel, my personal data is encrypted before being synced.
In Iceweasel, I can press Ctrl+Q and make the damn browser quit, instead of me having to use the mouse/trackpad/pointing device. This is probably a lack of my understanding on how to associate key bindings to Chromium, but the problem still stands.
Similarly, when there is only one tab open, pressing Ctrl+W in Chromium does not close the tab (say, presenting me a blank tab or the list of most visited sites), nor it closes the application.

I would be satisfied if any of the above were fixed or better documented, but it seems that some of those are, at best, going to wait a long time.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 25 Feb 2011

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:44:51 +0000

dvips work for a change: hopefully fixed a bug that was causing nan in output with eepic figures (reported by Stefan Moser). Squaring a not-so-big int can easily give a negative number :). I guess it was somehow hidden before (bug was not in any version until 2010) by a final cast of the result to float -- switched to double to eliminate warnings, I guess. One thing always leads to another ...

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Today at OSP

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:06:52 +0000

Today OSP worked on a brand new super git-repository lay-out, added new fonts to OSP-foundry, advanced the DIN-project, made a start with the cover for Tot Later (a novel by Ana Claese) and in between celebrated that our application for the Libre Graphics Research Unit has been approved. Champagne!

Alexandre Prokoudine: Sixth sense gets to you

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:46:44 +0000

Since several years we [Audacity team] have a feedback email. People write to it to tell us that Audacity rocks or, equally common, that it sucks. Several mails a week tell us Audacity was rebranded and sold under a different name at eBay (we stopped worrying about that ever since the Luxuriosity thing all them years ago). Some people ask if Audacity could be redone as a web app (it can’t). Well, since today we also have our little share of pranksters. As pranks go, however, this one is a little disturbing:

have you considered developing a ghost phone with your software to alow the dead to call the living with voice dialing, i’ve done a little bit of research into it and its acheiveable, thomas dolby discovered that there are certian places on the earth where the dead can be heard with a tape recorder and with modern psionics it is posible to recreate these energy feilds to alow cross dimensional communication dead to living, are you down for a little occult scientist network administration, like honestly i live in the same house as my dead grandpa and it would be great if he could call his living relatives up, maybe you could throw the ideal around the office or something maybe even come up with a skype plugin or something

Now, the only thing I really hope is that it’s nothing but a prank. Otherwise someone is bound to have his/her head examined.

Jon Phillips: Libre Graphics Magazine is Cool.

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:10:48 +0000

I’m really proud of the Libre Graphics community and especially right now, the great work that Ginger Coons, Ana Carvalho, Ricardo Lafuente and friends have done on the Libre Graphics Magazine. Its one thing to keep making virtual software, iterating it forever, adding bells and whistles. It is totally another concern to make a high quality physical product that embodies the same principles. Hats off to everyone who is working on the project! Congrats on the accomplishment!

Issue 1 Now On Sale

The LGMag crew has cut the cost on getting the first edition of the magazine to make it that much easier to pick-up a copy:

If you’re in North America and want a copy of 1.1, today’s your lucky day. Using the handy button below, if you’re in Canada, you can get a copy for $4. If you’re in the U.S., it’s a very convenient $8, with all shipping charges built in.

Box Set for Schools

In order to promote the magazine and get more people involved, Ginger and crew are running some nice offers for schools and other organizations. For $100 you can get a box of the first edition of the magazines sent out to your school for spreading the news. Consider it for your school or for sponsorship of the project. From the blog:

For a very nominal fee (the majority of the price actually covers shipping, with the magazines coming at a cost of about $1 each), we’ll send a box of 50 copies of the current issue to the school/department of your choice. Of course, there’s slightly more to it than that (things like making contact with the school and making sure the magazines find a good home with their students, but we’ll do that), but it mainly comes down to selecting your region (only North America and Europe are eligible right now) and mentioning where you’d like them to go.

I had the chance to see and pick-up a few copies at FOSDEM in Brussels a couple of weeks ago while meeting with my colleagues about our upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal, May 10-13 (this year 2.0.11). It blew me away! They are very high-quality, printed on excellent paper in Montreal, and truly embody the principles of the Libre Graphics community.

Let’s call what they did a form of green design, or fair trade printing. Whatever they did to get it out, its worth it and shows that the people behind this mag have stepped up to a great challenge and put their money and time where their mind and mouths are. That’s important. While we hope they will use Aiki Framework in the future to automate some processes and so we can get a piece of the action from these cool guys , they did the right thing any entrepreneur (yes I used the E word) should do, reroute around all issues and execute the minimum viable product as soon as possible. The next important step in my opinion is to keep regular on a release cycle, and iterate, improve and iterate. With what we do, building community and getting people in to participate is so crucial at an early stage, and the longer it takes to get a project out that is used by people (essentially all projects , the more expensive the process becomes and the higher cost of releasing the product.

Get your copy of Libre Graphics Magazine today and lets watch as they grow this publication over the next few years.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 22 Feb 2011

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:43:21 +0000

TUG 2011 will be held in Kerala, India, from October 19–21, 2011, hosted by River Valley Technologies. More when we know more ...

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 21 Feb 2011

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:37:41 +0000

4 short (but promising) links

Discuss among yourselves...

Google web fonts: Google Web Fonts - New Stats, New Name

noreply@blogger.com (David Wurtz) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 19:43:47 +0000

Web fonts are taking off in a big way. Back in November, the Google Web Fonts team first published stats on the rapid adoption curve of the Google Font API. Then, Google was serving approximately 17 million daily font requests[1] to roughly 400,000 unique websites[2].

And today, less than 4 months later, we’re excited to announce that Google Web Fonts has since grown by another 290%. The Google Font API now serves roughly 50 million daily requests[1], across roughly 800,000 unique websites[2]. This equates to over 30% month over month growth. Amazingly, these stats don’t factor in caching, so the actual views of Google Web Fonts may far exceed these numbers.

Growth picked up considerably after Google Web Fonts announced over 20 new font families for the New Year. From these numbers, it’s clear that web fonts are quickly becoming part of the standard practice of web developers, game developers, and bloggers.

To make it easier for all, we’re also pleased to announce a re-branding of the “Google Font Directory” to “Google Web Fonts.” The service is now available via the simple, memorable URL: www.google.com/webfonts.

Web fonts are on their way to changing the very fabric of the web, and this is very exciting to Google.

Here’s to a beautiful web!

Posted by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Web Fonts

[1] A request is a single call to the Google Font API for one or more fonts.
[2] We count a unique website as unique domains, except that “www” subdomains are not counted. For example, www.myblog.com and myblog.com would count as one domain. However, sam.myblog.com and sally.myblog.com would count as two domains.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 20 Feb 2011

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 18:59:11 +0000

Discovered that the Texinfo command summary and reference card had been missing about a half-dozen commands for years. Amazing what automated checks against the actual implementation can turn up. Now if only we could get it together to do the same for the xetex, pdftex, latex manuals ...

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Developmental Cell Cover

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:08:58 +0000

This is a uncommon job in uncommon conditions, as usual. Maybe you heard about, but I ‘m currently under a chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment for leukemia. I’ve been hospitalized for few month for marrow transplant. The treatment, though long, heavy and painful, is going well so far. One of the luckiest thing I had during [...]

Alexandre Prokoudine: Why GIMP and Inkscape are not funded by Linux vendors

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 08:42:36 +0000

Martin wrote few days ago about why GIMP 2.8 is delayed. Apart from some annoying yet predictable mini-hatefests an interesting comment was provided by Alexander Hunziker:

One thing I wonder about is why none of the big Linux distributors steps forward and funds development. Both Gimp and also Inkscape I feel are very close to being useful also for professional designers, so just a handful of full-time developers could make a big difference. Surely, this would be an interesting market to enter into?

It’s a very valid question, and it is actually easy to answer. There are, in short, several reasons why it hasn’t happened yet.

1. Canonical already tried that back in 2004. The full story is here. TL;DR: money doesn’t magically solve everything.

2. The Linux vendors that have commercial interests (i.e. RedHat, Novell) make money on enterprise clients and governments, and their few attempts at non-enterprise desktop software (Banshee for Novell, GNOME Color Manager for RedHat) are rather personal hobbies of developers than paid projects. Entering a market means doing business with people. I’d love to see a business model around GIMP that would work for someone like RedHat.

The rest? Mandriva recently had a very instable finanical situation, followed by separation of the core team into a new project. As for Canonical, they still have problems making money and anyway they are now more focused on cloud computing which doesn’t have much place for heavy desktop apps such as GIMP and Inkscape. (As a matter of fact, three of the former active Inkscape developers work for Canonical.)

3. The teams themselves have diverse opinions on paid development. Inkscape committee is 3/4 (or 4/5?) dead against it. The GIMP team doesn’t seem to be sure: a year ago they didn’t mind, fairly recently they did mind (or so it seemed to me).

The way I see it, the future of these projects is in the hands of people who care about it so much that they are willing to work on it come hell or high water. So unless you can come up with a business model that doesn’t rely on donations, and the teams suddenly stop minding paid development, the state of affairs won’t change drastically.

Is it waving goodbye to GIMP and Inkscape? Not really. Relying on volunteers is what these projects have been doing for years, and despite the will of some people they are still around and about. A great many thanks for some of the new stuff (up to 50% in case of Inkscape) we see in the new releases of both of them goes to Google for its Google Summer of Code program.

Finally, can we get Linux vendors do at least something for the projects? Sure. They already do something actually: both RedHat and Novell are rather open about how their designers use free software: Mairin does Inkscape classes, and the whole Fedora design team uses both GIMP and Inkscape all around; Jimmac used almost complete free toolbox (GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Fontforge) in Novell which he now does for RedHat, and now Andy Fitzsimon is in his place at Novell doing the same. It’s much less so in case of Canonical for some reason or another. Also, both RedHat (Fedora) and Novell used to publish short tutorials on using free design tools, both don’t do it much these days, so maybe they could give the initiative another go.

The important thing to understand here is that since we do eat our own dog food, we shouldn’t be shy about it. After all, not using Adobe products isn’t a mortal sin. If we don’t share excitement of using free tools, then who will?

Alexandre Prokoudine: What’s up with darktable

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:42:50 +0000

In case you’ve been living under a rock for last several days, darktable 0.8 is out with some important changes. There’s quite a bit of work done on the next version already, including blending modes + opacity for every darkroom mode (currently in blendops branch) and an on-canvas vignetting editor:

It’s the second darkroom mode that goes on-canvas, the first one being crop/rotation. The next one hopefully will be graduated filter.

In other words, darktable development continues in its best traditions: providing a working UI for a new feature first to get people something to use, then improving it at the next stage.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 18 Feb 2011

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:36:43 +0000

Edited an article by Andrew Hwang (thanks Andy!) for the next TUGboat about use of LaTeX at Distributed Proofreaders (for Project Gutenberg). Neat. I tried to get involved with this a few years ago; happily, looks like the infrastructure has developed considerably since then.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Inkscape FAQ taken to extremes

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:42:22 +0000

The first FAQ-like article on Inkscape I did was back in May last year and explained how to create layer effects. It looks like I missed the demand for them all this time. This is now changing. Most recent two ones published within last two weeks explain in details:

Some GIMP related things are coming too. If you feel like you want some particular stuff explained, be it GIMP, Inkscape or Scribus related, just say the word

Máirín Duffy: Using Inkscape to Create Patch Artwork

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:33:25 +0000

My friend Shannon is involved in a Cub Scout pack and had asked me a while back if I had any interest in designing cub scout patches for their upcoming pinewood derby event (he is the event master) using Inkscape. I am always up for seeing what cool things can be made with Inkscape; Shannon and I have tested out Inkscape in other off-work projects including the jar labels for his honey business, Hughes Honey. (I especially like working on these side-projects with Shannon because he pays me in delicious honey ) I had some free time so I agreed to do it. Here’s what we came up with, using the Cub Scouts’ official blue & gold colors, the troop number, and of course an OFL-licensed font (Chunk Five)…

I created a new document in Inkscape that was 3″ x 3″, created a circle using the ellipse tool and centered it within the document using the Align & Distribute tool, and kept layering artwork into it. I got the artwork for the flags and the fleur de lis from Open Clip Art, and I drew the derby car using pinewood derby car photo references I found via search. I rotated the text around the circle using the “Put on Path” tool under Inkscape’s text menu. To keep creating circles within circles that are perfectly centered, the trick I used was to Ctrl+D the outermost circle and hold down shift while I scaled the circle down – this scales from the center of the circle rather than from the point you’re dragging the scale edge from.

Anyway, after a few iterations we got to the mockup above and sent it over to the patch makers, Stadri Emblems. They took our Inkscape-produced artwork and created this proof:

I thought it came out pretty awesome so I figured I’d post it. So now you see Inkscape is not just awesome for Girl Scouts, but for Cub Scouts too!

Filed under: artwork, Inkscape

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 16 Feb 2011

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:05:23 +0000

Made TUGboat 30:3, the EuroTeX'09 proceedings, publicly available online, the year having duly passed. Printed copies are available through the TUG store.

Ben Weiner: Can't log in to Ubuntu 10.04 on a 2006 Shuttle XPC?

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:37:00 +0000

This is just on the offchance that somebody does what I’ve just done and upgraded from a desktop Ubuntu 9.04 installation on a Shuttle XPC (this one is a 2006 AMD64 model with motherboard graphics only) that has a 1600 x 1200dpi monitor attached.

After the upgrade you may find you cannot log in using the standard GNOME graphical interface. When you do so, the monitor blanks for a few seconds and then you are returned to the login screen. But at the bottom of the screen is a small menu allowing you to choose whether to log in with regular GNOME, an xterm, or failsafe GNOME. Try failsafe GNOME, and if you can log in successfully use system > preferences > monitors to reduce the screen resolution, then try the regular GNOME login again.

Update I think that I have an i386 install of Ubuntu (not entirely sure why). That might explain why the video driver, which I believe is OpenChrome, won’t load. The integrated chipset in the machine (Shuttle SK21G) is entirely geared to the AMD Sempron, a 64-bit chip. Falling back to the failsafe video driver gets around the problem, but this is obviously far from a good solution :-(

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 16 Feb 2011

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:26:32 +0000

LibreOffice and fonts

After the various mentions of LibreOffice's new font-related features in version 3.3 new feature highlights : embedding, the new Narrow weight for Liberation and the whole Libertine G and Biolinum G smart open fonts, it's interesting to see the improvements to the font menu.

Anyone fancy picking up some easy hacks in the area: most recently used list tweaks or adding the Stix fonts?

OSP (Open Source Publishing): It’s possible?

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:14:58 +0000

The following question was posted by Pascal Lapalme on the Scribus mailinglist: “I will animate a conf to explain how to use Scribus, Gimp and Inkscape in a classroom with studient to make a news paper (look here : Atelier 108 – Des outils libres pour la création d’un journal http://colloque.aquops.qc.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/colloque.woa/wo/0.1.29.1.0.7.0.8). In my conf, I [...]

Alexandre Prokoudine: Contributing to free software projects

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:04:11 +0000

If you keep an eye on this blog, you definitely noticed that I’m quite concerned about community involvement into free software projects. Having circled around the monster I started working on in January long enough I’m so sick of polishing it here and there that it’s finally out: “Contributing to free software projects”.

The ultimate goal is to both answer the question “How can I help a free software project, if I don’t code” I keep seeing asked, and help teams to understand how to improve their work with communities. Yes, it’s also a shameless plug for several major projects. If you like to yell — I’m all ears

Now that it’s out, I’m unpausing other projects I had to put on hold. The GSoC guide is likely to be next. Stay tuned

Alexandre Prokoudine: Listening to users and drawing conclusions

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:49:02 +0000

This posting somehow complements the previous one where I quoted a couple of Audacity’s users both having diametrically opposed opninions on the tool’s usability.

Several days ago Harrison Consoles released new version of Mixbus — their Ardour-based digital audio workstation. The thread at Create Digital Music progressed quite a bit since I looked at it first, and I’ve just discovered that Paul Davis, Ardour’s lead developer, joined in and, probably not realizing it, provided the best explanation why software projects need design architects who listen to all opinions, but think about big picture first:

“Background: in the 10 years I’ve worked on Ardour, it has been my experience that listening too carefully to any one person’s experience with a given piece of technology always tends to be misleading. We have heard from people who tried Ardour and found it mostly unusable. We have others who have had years of experience with Logic or PT who find Ardour much more functional for them. Both these points of view are right, and its taken me a long time to realize that once a tool becomes even remotely complex (possibly at the point where there is any user choice at all), there’s no way to make that tool be the choice of all possible users. So these days, while I try to listen very carefully to the reports I get from people who have issues when using the software, I’ve learnt to not take anyone’s verdict (e.g. “its much harder to use than Logic”, “its ugly”, “its not mature yet”) as a comment about their specific working style and the way that Ardour fits into it rather than anything more general.”

If you take any big free software project, especially one that you bend your production workflow around, you’ll immediately stumble into X vs. Y battles. This is inevitable, but one needs to understand that any software developer who tries to please everyone usually ends up pleasing nobody, because complex software is always about vision, and visions are never shared by all of the human race, HIG or no HIG.

Alexandre Prokoudine: On intuition and habits

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:38:00 +0000

One of the most amusing misconceptions about software is that it can be intuitive or non-intutitive, with gradations between them. Being part of Audacity team, I’ve been receiving all sorts of feedback to our feedback email adress that we share for years. The nonsense of intuition as a notion regarding software can be easily illustrated with these two mails received with a gap of just an hour:

“Forward: Audacity is AWESOME! Absolutely love how intuitive it is and the price tag!”

“I tried the program and need to say that it is very un-intuitive. So I do not use it. Even simple tasks, like splitting a large file into several small ones (with lost cue sheet) is impossible to figure.”

C’mon people, software isn’t about intuition, software is about habits And speaking of habits here is another (translated) quote I can share:

“I use Inkscape. The migration from Corel [DRAW] was long and painful, I sat at nights and yelled. A month later I was thinking “OK, I think it’s usable after all, but Corel is still much better”. Two months after that I was thinking in the lines of “Yeah, it’s usable, but Corel is still better”. Then half a year later: “Well, Corel is a good vector graphics editor too.”

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 12 Feb 2011

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 12:06:07 +0000

Mozilla thinking about commissioning an open font

Interesting to see the good folks at Mozilla, more specifically the Websites Task Force, looking at commissionning an open font for their various websites: "still in the process of selecting a font foundry for this project" ... "After picking a foundry the design process will start and could be done as soon as Q2." .

Ben Weiner: A first impression of Drupal 7

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 22:07:00 +0000

I’ve been hearing from coworkers that Drupal 7 is a leap ahead in several respects, one being its user interface. I’ve used Drupal only once before, back at version 5, and found that the combination of a complex UI and entirely unfamiliar terminology was quite daunting. Although I also learned that it had a very friendly and active community, that wasn’t enough to make me stick around.

I’ve just stuck a Drupal 7 install onto my machine and I am truly struck by the clarity that better typography and a less cluttered interface design can bring. It does however make the very idiosyncratic terminology and approach stand out in sharp relief. I hope the other changes have made it easier to pick up than it was a few years back; it is very brave to offer so much flexibility through an in-browser interface aimed at non-specialists.

Edit: added link (duh). Drupal is somewhere between a website-in-a-box and a full coding framework, by the way.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 11 Feb 2011

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 01:57:19 +0000

Rebuilt and updated the online glibc manual for the latest release (2.13). Hope it still works.

Máirín Duffy: On Ownership

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:18:56 +0000

Filed under: Uncategorized

OSP (Open Source Publishing): acsr

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:13:27 +0000

acsr (atelier de création sonore radiophonique) website is now online! We are celebrating tomorrow listening to 2 radiophonic pieces and sharing a meal at La CompilOthèQue, 50 quai des Péniches, Brussels. Website and identity in collaboration with Jérôme Degive (Pica Pica) and WordPress. Featuring Univers Else!

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 9 Feb 2011

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:50:40 +0000

After too many years and one failed attempt, I committed a new version of texinfo.tex to Texinfo CVS which allows breaking within @uref. Hopefully this time it will work.

Our (Oleg and me) previous attempt used \scantokens to make active the special characters at which we want to allow breaks (/&#....). The problem is, \scantokens swallows a following (catcode 5) newline, but does not swallow a catcode 13 (or other) newline. As a result, behavior differed in @example and other environments where newlines have to be active.

This makes the e-TeX \scantokens rather unhelpful in general, unfortunately. Apparently the LuaTeX version eliminates this side effect, though I haven't tried it.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): FOSDEM 2011

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:25:22 +0000

Gaffer-tape galore at the ULB-campus again, it is that time of year. As always it takes a deep breath before I push the battered swing doors of the main location and dive under in the fluorescent-lit hallways filled with thousands of developers. The yearly Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting gathers participants to [...]

OSP (Open Source Publishing): the Univers Else is yours

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:54:54 +0000

Fresh new display case for Univers Else font, with original Crickx vinyl lettering. Check out Speculoos and OSP’s dead drop and get Univers Else.

Simos Xenitellis: Στα περίπτερα το ελληνικό περιοδικό Linux Inside, τεύχος 1.

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:01:10 +0000

Πριν λίγες μέρες κυκλοφόρησε το νέο ελληνικό περιοδικό LinuxInside, για το Linux και το ελεύθερο λογισμικό, και είναι το μόνο ελληνικό έντυπο περιοδικό για Linux.

LINUX inside Τεύχος 1

Το πρώτο τεύχος περιλαμβάνει άρθρο μου για το Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), το υποσύστημα ήχου του πυρήνα Linux. Όταν εγκαθιστάτε μια διανομή Linux, ο ήχος είναι ένα από πράγματα που μπορεί να μη δουλεύει στην εντέλεια. Για παράδειγμα, όταν βάζετε τα ακουστικά, είναι πιθανό να μην απομονώνεται ο ήχος από τα ηχεία. Τέτοια ζητήματα έχουν σχετικά απλές λύσεις, οπότε αν σάς τύχει πρόβλημα ήχου, δείτε το ως μια καταπληκτική ευκαιρία να επιλύσετε το πρόβλημα οι ίδιοι. Τη δε διόρθωση, τυπικά μια με δυο γραμμές, μπορείτε να την προωθήσετε στον πυρήνα Linux και με αυτόν τον εύκολο τρόπο να γίνετε συντελεστής του πυρήνα.

Αναζητήστε στο περίπτερό σας το LinuxInside ή ακόμα καλύτερα γίνετε συνδρομητές στο LinuxInside!

Ελληνικό λεξικό Magenta για Linux Η Magenta άρχισε να διαθέτει έκδοση για Linux του αγγλο-ελληνικού...
Περισσότερη ορολογία πληροφορικής στα ελληνικά Λαμβάνω κάθε δύο μήνες το ηλεκτρονικό περιοδικό της ΕΛΕΤΟ, της...
OpenOffice πρόβλημα στα ελληνικά Διαβάζοντας διάφορα φόρα βλέπει κανείς συχνά προβλήματα που έχουν σχέση...

OSP (Open Source Publishing): POLSKU UPDATE

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:37:22 +0000

Thanks to Paulo Silva aka nitrofurano, Polsku has now a Latin 1 diacritics and ligatures set. The new version is available for download on OSP Foundry.

Karl Berry (advogato diary): 4 Feb 2011

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:40:53 +0000

First small update to plain TeX macros for TUGboat in years, thanks to Paul Isambert. (Putting the article title in the footers, as we've been doing for other articles for a couple years now.)

OSP (Open Source Publishing): + 4

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:29:37 +0000

Last night, we piped 4 Mac into Dual-Boot Mac OSX and Ubuntu. To follow the steps is now quite a routine which can be combined with cheap beers and pizza. 1 install rEfit; 2 create a new partition using Disk Utility; 3 reboot on a Ubuntu 10.10 dvd. - → 3 Wins – 1 failure [...]

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Lower cases

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 21:22:25 +0000

Hello this is Antoine, new intern at OSP. Glad to meet you. OSP-DIN is now ready to go through meta pleins et délies experimentations.

Google web fonts: Interview with Astigmatic

noreply@blogger.com (David Wurtz) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 23:12:29 +0000

We recently got a hold of Brian Bonislawsky, founder of the Astigmatic One Eye Typographic Institute, to describe his design process and motivations.

Q: When did you design your first font? What font was it?
My very first font was called ChickenScratch. I designed it in the summer of 1996 as the first freeware font for my website to test the waters to see if I was able to make a usable font for the public. I still see it out there a lot today, and seeing all the different design intentions for it has only helped inspire me in my design process since then.

Q: How do you go about creating a new font? Where do the concepts come from?
Making a new font starts with the idea, and luckily...font inspiration is everywhere. It can come from seeing advertisements and signs, to vintage advertising, to movies and music, to the surprise of seeing how fonts are used in projects outside of how you ever intended them to be used.

I'm still a bit old school when it comes to making new fonts, by starting out with sketches on paper. I like to work on creating consistency across all of my characters while also imaging possible variation to the lettering before taking it into a digital form. This stage of creation is the most appealing to me, before it gets into the technical side of point placements, spacing, kerning, and other features. It is the artistic period of the font.

Q: What is your favorite font you've designed?
That's difficult to answer, only because I have so many fonts I've designed, and at one time or another, they've each been my favorite font. I am usually driven to create what appeals to me, and by that, I find the latest fonts of mine to be my favorites. I really love offbeat and comic styles of fonts though, because they remind me of watching Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid. With that said, right now, my favorite font of mine is Luckiest Guy.

Q: What is your favorite font from another designer? Why?
Besides offbeat comic fonts, I've always been drawn to historical lettering and typestyles, and while it isn't a single font from another designer, my favorite fonts from another designer are the Bluemlien Collection from Sudtipos. They encompass such a variety of handwritten styles, in a variety of refinements. I could just look at specimens of these for hours at a time.

Q: What is your favorite part of the type design process, and why?
All my early schooling was driven predominantly by fine arts training, so I definitely find the sketch development process is my favorite part of the type design process. I've done a lot of freelance for other designers on the technical side of font development, and while there is a degree of enjoyment I get out of it, it definitely feels more mechanical in nature. The sketch and idea phase of a typeface is the chance to free or restrain yourself depending on the type of font you are creating, and reminds me the most of how I used to express myself through other mixed medias. It's the time most open to experimentation.

Q: What do you think could be improved about the type design process?
Perhaps the main thing that could be improved is schooling. When I started, there weren't any schools for this, it was all picked up as I went along, and not many people wanted to share how they did things. I got lucky enough to get paired up with Bitstream and some other designers through TypeCon, a yearly type conference, and through those connections I expanded my skill set.

There are plenty of schools and courses for Graphic Design out there, but I haven't seen a lot of courses for type design itself. I've seen a number of designers with creative ideas come and go because they've been intimidated by the type design process, and that's a shame. It can seem like an overwhelming task when you start making fonts, but once you learn the ropes, it can become second nature like anything else. I'd like to encourage more font designers to come forth, as I think, like any other art field, the infusion of new blood and fresh ideas not only helps type design evolve as an art form, but it also spawns developers to create even more fluid production tools to enable us in new and better ways.

Máirín Duffy: FUDcon Tempe Day 2

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Clint’s Fedora through-and-through, from head to toe!

Spot pitches his ideas for a Fedora RPG.

J5 explains his vision for Fedora Community

A large crew of us had lunch at a nearby Greek place.

The lightning talks were given in front of a standing-room only packed room.

Smooge pulls out his wallet.

Back at the hotel, Mel continues her hackfest coverage with interviews.

Ryan cooks up some beefy wonder.

Game night was very popular

More games!

Settlers of Catan

Mike & Ricky

I learned a lot of good photography tips from Tatica!

Fedora infrastructure folks hack on stuff

Filed under: Fedora, FUDcon

Máirín Duffy: FUDcon Tempe Day 1

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:04:49 +0000

Max and the Iowa State mascot. (Paying penance!)

So many people…. this picture doesn’t even cover it. So many people at this FUDcon!

PULP!

Barcamp talk proposals during the kickoff session.

Diana’s anthropology report on Fedora.

Sebastian and Mel during the Education session.

Chris’ talk on cloud management.

Dennis and Greg smile for the camera!

Justin, Peter, Kyle, and Dave at the hotel lobby

Will during the meet the Anaconda team talk.

Filed under: Fedora, FUDcon, Uncategorized

Máirín Duffy: Fedora FUDcon Tempe: Meet the Anaconda Team

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:53:31 +0000

Here’s my notes from the ‘Meet the Anaconda Team’ session at FUDcon Tempe today. Note that these are notes and not really polished (I apologize, I figured it’s better to post this sooner than wait for perfection lol.)

David Cantrell and Chris Lumens started the session by going around the room and introducing everyone on the team. They talked a bit about their storage testing framework (Chris did a separate session on this), and how Anaconda is pretty hard to get started with as a contributor, but the testing framework is an easy way to get involved – submit test. This can be even more helpful than submitting code patches and the test system is easy to contribute to. I didn’t catch how exactly / where to submit tests though; I didn’t catch Chris’ session on that.

David also pointed out the Anaconda features page on the wiki:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features

This page is how the team organizes their work. They are open to entertaining ideas for additional features to work on. You can see the UX redesign on the list – this is something I’ve been working on with Luya.

After pointing that out, various members of the team talked a bit about the stuff they’ve been working on lately:

Will Woods talked about how pygtk is going to go away in general. pygi is coming and with it gobject introspection, which makes API generation automagical. It’s almost exactly the same as using pygtk. If you just change the imports for a given piece of code, it may just work. But theres some knottiness so he is going through all of the UI code to figure out how this migration will work. We have custom widgets that won’t port cleanly, so maybe look at glue and UI code. Different implementation of bindings should use less memory in theory. There will be no pygtk for gtk3, no pygtk for python 3, so we need to do this anyway. For the most part, it’s trivial, except for the difficult pieces. Since we have the UI redesign going on too we’ll get some housekeeping done here and a new UI. When we build out new/different screens, we’ll need to use more glade, too. Procedurally-built UIs suck.

Martin Gracik talked about he is working to solve another problem with anaconda – tree compose (anything involving the tools that generate initial ramdisk and install image / install script)s today – called buildinstall is pretty hacky and involved the creation and maintenance of two manually-maintained static lists- one of packages needed and the list of dependencies (calculated manually – yuck!), then a static list of files that needed to be included in the buildroot. If anything moved (for example, rm moving from /bin/rm to /usr/bin/rm or something like that), the image created wouldn’t work. So Martin Gracik has been heading up lorax, a replacement for buildinstall.
Right now, lorax is a separate python project – which is a big improvement. When we need to change how install images are generated, we can do that independent of a given anaconda release. Lorax is a transparent change but a big step – Fedora 15 will likely be composed using it and it will save a lot of manual maintenance worl – Lorax will make tree composition nicer.

Radek Vykydal is working on network changes for future Fedora releases. Anaconda now uses NetworkManager to handle all of the networking during installation now. Before that, anacondaused libdhcp. We won’t talk about that. Before that it used punk, and we won’t talk about that either. NetworkManager has allowed us to not have to have our own network knowledge, but has introduced some complications. We get wireless support for free using NetworkManager… only for stage II. for stage I, if you don’t want to use NetworkManager’s UI, there’s only basic support. The initial loader – it asks where do you want to install fedora from, what network interface… we have to communicate with NetworkManager behind the scenes and produce our own interface to make that happen. We might move some steps from loader to stage II. A change this work has introduced that a lot of people don’t like – we no longer have the forced configure-your-network screen during installation. You do a network install, and anaconda used to ask you how do you want to set up your network devices. We do that now… nm-connection-editor… but we don’t do it by default. By default, if you used the network during installation, that’s enabled on the target system. So this causes an issue: if you install from optical media, when you boot the desktop it won’t connect to the network by default. This is a call made in favor of server installs where automatically connecting to a network isn’t always a smart thing to do. Radek added back the ability to configure the interfaces, but the default is to mirror the settings used during installation – if you’re using optical media, you’re not using network (unless you configure additional repos which is a way around the issue) so you’re not using network during installation and that is mirrored in the default system configuration. People on servers don’t want to enable all network interfaces on machine by default.

Dave Lehman did a lot of the storage rewrite work that was first available in Fedora 10. Now he is working on enabling install to a disk image file… you can use dd or create a raw file using qemu-image… can pass –image=path/to/that/file… run anaconda from command line and end up with installation sitting in your image file. Working on figuring out how to get that image to work for live cd compose. James Antill asked how is hardware detection / emulation handled, for KVM to be able to boot the imgae. It turns out that eEvery piece of hardware that Fedora supports is in the init.rd and will be detected at boot up. GRUB is on the beginning of the image file – point KVM at it and it should be off and running. Overall we want to make Anaconda as flexible as possible.

Brian Lane has taken over the Live CD pieces for Fedora. The current live cd support we have… is whipped together. His goal is to build on the storage rewrite and Dave’s image install stuff, to try to consolidate install paths to use anaconda to do live media image creation. right know live image installs uses live-image-create, a thin layer on top of pykickstart. It works and is implemented fine, but is sadly a different path so we end up with different installs with different bugs than we would get if anaconda was used. A single code path would be easier to maintain. If we use anaconda to do dvds and live cds and virt, installs will be more reliable / consistent and there will be less problems. The existing livecd install just dd’s the image it booted on, dd is added to target disk, uses resize to fs to grow filesystem. We may not be able to get around that cuz it’s fast and everybody wants fast. Packages makes things slower. Eric Sandeen investigated how this works and found we have two resizes happening: when we create the images to make the isos AND when we are putting it down on the final disk image.

Ales Kozumplik is working on having anaconda run in multiple threads, so anaconda’s UI won’t block anymore while performing various operations. (Yay!)

We finished the session with a group photo! Woo! And those are my notes. Hope they are helpful!

Filed under: Fedora, FUDcon

Máirín Duffy: Hotdog Love

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:01:10 +0000

Filed under: Fedora

Ben Weiner: Thoughts about The Design of Understanding conference

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:47:00 +0000

It was a real privilege to have Max Gadney curate the Design of Understanding conference which took place yesterday at St Bride Library. I think we were very lucky to catch him at the right moment: well-informed, well-connected and a clear thinker, at the point we invited him he happened to be mid-leap from the BBC to private enterprise.

At that point he also had some recent design teaching experience fresh in his mind. This experience, as he explained at the time, makes him feel that design students aren’t getting exposure to the kinds of design work that are perhaps the most significant at the moment and that they don’t get a chance to work with the data that characteristically lies behind such work. They don’t have a chance to gain an insight into the business processes or bureaucracy from which the data comes, or to learn the importance of understanding those things to some degree before attempting to pass the information on to others in a polished visual form.

This is also my reading of the short piece he wrote for Eye 78 (on page 100) which was published serendipitously at the start of the week. Eye 78 is a treasure. It focuses on information design and it offers a pleasing set of contributions which I think student readers will find helpful in understanding some of the ingredients. To have it appear at the start of the week brought an extra dash of anticipation to the conference itself.

I was very pleased with the outcome of the day. Treating the event very much as if a test of his new design curriculum, Max chose speakers who work to a greater or lesser extent outside the realm of visual design. It was good to have people who could talk intelligently about visualisation of data without the superfluous embellishments of design orthodoxy. Whatever the qualities of the finished work, they were interested in the success of that work as a whole rather than as an aesthetic expression alone. It was also good to hear authoritative statements about how contemporary exhibition designers are concerned with the communicative capacity of what they create rather than with the media in which they communicate.

The talks showed that our speakers believe that rather than parcelling up information from other people and presenting it in a novel way, the purpose of the design work is to increase the chances of engagement and understanding for the users of the end product. Designers working in such a way can expect to have an influence on their collaborators because they show that they understand the nature and purpose of the information with which they work.

Postscript

This conference’s tenor was set by dissatisfaction with the way information design is approached, and a belief that this can be fixed by changing the kind of work that students of design carry out. There were 29 concessionary tickets (for students or those over 60) in our audience of around 150. As an event organiser for the Friends of St Bride Library I have argued with little opposition for the cost of concessionary tickets to remain at a generously discounted price. We believe the standard of our events is high and opportunities for students to enhance their understanding of the field, their knowledge of the wider design community and their contacts with practitioners are considerable.

With the last year’s events almost all sellouts, and with its overall budget severely constrained, St Bride Foundation will have to think carefully about future event pricing. I would urge students and other concessionary ticket buyers to share their experiences and opinions about our conferences so that we can make a well-informed decision. Email: events@stbride.org.

Máirín Duffy: Girl Scouts’ Digital Media Course Materials

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:41:07 +0000

So you might remember this past October I started teaching a weekly digital media course to middle-school aged Girl Scout troop using Gimp and Inkscape on Fedora live USB sticks. We held 2-hour sessions in a community center computer lab on Friday nights, assisted by volunteer teaching assistants and Kim who was the Girl Scouts’ class facilitator. I wasn’t really as good about blogging the class as I hoped to be – I wanted to blog each session, but was a bit over-ambitious about being able to do that during the holiday season (plus, the classes were Friday nights so there wasn’t really any time after class to take care of it.)

That being said, the class ended right before Christmas. Over the course of the class, I developed various lesson booklets based on the girls’ progress and interests. Some of the material took two class sessions to cover, so some weeks we didn’t have fresh material; the material on holiday cards and journals was created after three of the girls asked if we could do a class on how to do those things. The final two classes focused on creating T-shirt designs for T-shirts the students could keep – they could select a design they had done earlier in the class and format it for a shirt, or create a completely new design. I sent those to EmbroidMe Chelmsford last week and I’ll be picking them up likely sometime in the next couple of weeks to distribute to the girls.

I’ll be giving a talk about how the class went at FUDCon Tempe in hopes of inspiring and preparing other folks who have thought about volunteering for similar projects. Since I’m in the process of finishing my slides for that talk, I thought it would be useful to present all of the materials developed for the course here.

The Materials

Please feel free to modify and/or distribute these materials under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license! (Attribution to Máirín Duffy and Red Hat, Inc. appreciated.)

Fun with Photos, Part 1

Download Fun With Photos Part 1 PDF(10 page, 2.5 MB PDF)
Question of the Day: If you could visit anywhere in the world (or even in space!), where would you
want to go?
Project: Use Gimp’s layer masks to compose a photo of yourself at your dream destination.

Fun with Photos, Part 2

Download Fun With Photos Part 2 PDF (2 page document that folds into a 4-page booklet. Please print duplex. 2.4 MB PDF)
Question of the Day: If a Hollywood makeup artist offered to do your look for Halloween, what face paint, makeup, and/or hair dye would youask for?
Project: Combine Gimp’s layer masks and blending modes to create virtual Halloween makeup on a photo of yourself.

Creating A Personal Logo

Download Creating A Personal Logo PDF (2 page document that folds into a 4-page booklet. Please print duplex. 1.7 MB PDF)
Question of the Day: If you were a solo musical artist, what kind of style would your brand have? Would it be fun? Serious? Dark? Happy and bright? Retro? Futuristic? Tropical? Urban? Think about it!
Project: Using Inkscape, choose a font, colors, and effects to create your own personal logo.

Your First Album Cover

Download Your First Album Cover PDF (2 page document that folds into a 3-page booklet. Please print duplex. 629 KB PDF)
Question of the Day: If you could do an album with any musician today, who would it be? What would your album title be, and what kind of music would you create?
Project: Using Inkscape and your personal logo, create a album cover for a musical collaboration between you and your favorite artist(s). You may use Gimp to create a photo of you together with your selected artist(s).

Cards and Journals

Download Cards and Journals PDF (2 page document that folds into a 4-page booklet. Please print duplex. 629 KB PDF)
Question of the Day: What are your favorite types of holiday greeting cards?
Project: Using Inkscape and the Open Clip Art Library feature built into Inkscape, create a holiday card or a personal print-out journal.

Using These Materials

Again, please feel free to modify and/or distribute these materials under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license! (Attribution to Máirín Duffy and Red Hat, Inc. appreciated.) All of the sources for these course materials are available here: http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/blog/girlscouts/course materials/sources As a note, the first course packet was created using OpenOffice.org. All of the others were created using Inkscape.

If you would like information on how to create the live USB sticks used in this course, I wrote up a HOWTO on the LibrePlanet wiki.

Thanks

Shout-out to the FSF’s Womens’ Caucus for the project idea, organization, and assistance; teaching assistant volunteers Martin Owens, Asheesh Laroia, and Deb Nicholson; Rachael Tepperman and Kim Schroff from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts for making the class possible; and most especially Marina Zhurakhinskaya for going above and beyond in helping instruct the class and assisting the girls and rallying volunteers.

Course Materials

This course is sponsored by:

Filed under: Girl Scouts Class

Máirín Duffy: Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Crimson Text

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 23:05:19 +0000

Hey, it can be the unpackaged open font of the week, and some weeks just don’t have fonts, right?

Crimson Text is a traditional, Garamond-inspired serif font family meant for use, as upstream terms it, a “workhorse” font that could be used generally, including flourishes, small caps, symbols, etc. The font is a lovely example of an in-progress international open font project, as it’s being creating by a team of folks:

Sebastian Kosch, a 21-year old German student studying in Toronto;
Hector Haralambous, who is from Greece;
Georg Duffner, who is from Vienna

Crimson Text is licensed under the Open Font License.

Note that as the upstream homepage indicates, the font is under heavy development and in particular the kerning is a little dicey. While you may not want to lay out documents using this font in its current state, the typeface is certainly suitable for custom type designs for logos and the like if you’re up for adjusting the kerning manually. This is definitely an interesting project to follow.

Oh! And as far as coverage… it’s already better than some of the other fonts we’ve featured here, although the creators will have you know it’s far from complete. Here’s a screenshot of some of the character map under Latin:

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Aldus_Leaf_Crimson_Text_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://aldusleaf.org/

So, you want to package Crimson Text?

Hot doggin’! You’re groovy! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last week’s font

We didn’t have a font last week. It’s been a while! Maybe I should do a blog post summarizing the state of all the previously-blogged fonts and check in on them. What do you think?

Filed under: Uncategorized, Unpackaged Font of the Week

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 25 Jan 2011

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:52:55 +0000

Experience the many shapes of language: an open font exhibition in London

It's great to see the continued efforts to raise awareness about the wide variety of glyphs and writing systems the world needs to be able to read and write properly!

Letters are relatively small but truly crucial building blocks of our languages, both containers and interfaces of knowledge, identity and life.

It's exciting to see that, for example, the work around the Ubuntu open font will be featured as part of the Shape my Language installation at the London Museum of Design by DaltonMaag and Canonical's design team. A similar exhibition took place in Vienna last year albeit with a focus on other more restricted fonts...

And even if "dozens of different scripts" may not entirely reflect all the variety of writing systems out there, it's certainly an excellent step forward to have such a prominent exhibition focus on the subject. What a great opportunity to bring the values of linguistic diversity, collaborative typography and open font design to a wider audience and allow visitors to experience and react to thousands of beautiful glyphs. Hopefully many visitors will also discover what the spirit of Ubuntu brings to the world of type design and how unrestricted software - including fonts - can help.

Congratulations to everyone involved!

Alexandre Prokoudine: Parsing and viewing OLE containers

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:42:25 +0000

Our new reverse-engineering project, started end of last year, is progressing. We already know quite a bit about Microsoft Publisher file format, and to make this useful for Scribus team to get cracking with PUB importer, we’ll start writing the spec soon.

For ransacking .pub files Valek wrote a small tool called oletoy which is, simply put, a specialized HEX viewer with tabbed UI that reads OLE container based files and simplifies browsing chunks:

I’ve just pushed to Git an update from Valek that merges bits of his old(er) vsdviewer app. So oletoy is now a more universal reader of the OLE container. Right now we are not planning to work on reverse-egnineering VSD and VSS much, possible improvements are currently a middle-term goal. OTOH we do see a way to make oletoy a generalized parsing and visualization tool suited not just for OLE containers.

If you happen to have .pub files of any version (2000, 2003 and 2007 preferably) that have really crazy use of various eldritch features, we’d love to have them. Send them to alexandre.prokoudine-WE-LOVE-SPAMMERS-gmail.com.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Catching up on reading

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:45:11 +0000

Packt Publishing released three libre graphics related books in a row in December: “Inkscape 0.48 Essentials for Web Designers” by Bethany Hiitola, “Scribus 1.3.5 beginner’s guide” by Cedric Gemy and “Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering” by Aaron W. Powell. I had the first one almost immediately after release (but utterly lacked time to read) and got the second just now. Since all Cedric’s previous books were in French which I don’t speak, I’m really curious what Cedric came up with, so the Scribus book gets priority

Now, one question is how many GIMP books we’ll see this year. I know just one so far.

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 15 Jan 2011

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:01:21 +0000

CSS (moz-)font-feature-settings

Interesting to see that the release notes of the Firefox 4 beta 9 mention the progress done on (moz-)font-feature-settings, IOW all the CSS goodies showing that in practice the web platform is bound to offer more advanced typographic capabilities than some of the currently used print systems...

Yeah, for increased support of typographic finesse and complex script support :-)

Google web fonts: New Fonts for the New Year

noreply@blogger.com (David Wurtz) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:12:00 +0000

Ubuntu

Mountains of Christmas

Khaled Hosny: Dynamic dots at work

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:09:02 +0000

When designing the OpenType layout of Amiri font I opted for a more complex dot separation model, where dots are treated as diacritical marks instead if being hard coded into base glyphs.

This paid off by lowering the total number of final glyphs as well as less substitution rules. Font size is critical for web-fonts, for example, and the current uncompressed TTF file is below 100 KB which is a significant achievement given how many contextual forms Amiri has and the almost pan-Arabic Unicode coverage.

But another major advantage of this approach is the dynamicity of dot positioning now the dots are just another kind of marks to be positioned. The image below is the default dot position, note how it clashes with the glyph to the right of it:

Now after contextually repositioning the dots:

And this is done with 0 new glyphs (in the old way, one had to duplicate all the affected dotted glyphs and move the dots of each one, which can mean 90 new glyphs at least).

Khaled Hosny: پښتو

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:00:51 +0000

In the development version of Amiri, Pashto have been fully covered. The paragraphs above from the page on Pasho language from Pashto wikipedia. I can't read it, unfortunately, but it looks nice nevertheless :).

Google web fonts: Introducing the Ubuntu Font Family to the web

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Crossland) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:21:51 +0000

Google and the Ubuntu project have today released the Ubuntu Font Family to the world through the Google Font Directory. The new Ubuntu Font Family debuted in the current Ubuntu 10.10 release of the Ubuntu operating system and is also available for download from font.ubuntu.com.

The main www.ubuntu.com site features the Ubuntu Font Family in-use from today (screenshot below). Through the magic of the Google Font API any web designer can now pick Ubuntu from the Google Font Directory and bring the beauty and legibility of the Ubuntu fonts to their websites too.

The Ubuntu Website using the Ubuntu Font Family

The Ubuntu typeface family is a set of new fonts in development throughout 2010–2011. The development is being funded by Canonical Ltd on behalf the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project, with the skilled font work being undertaken by Dalton Maag. Like everything else in Ubuntu, the fonts are free to use and legal to share, sell, bundle and build upon. The included “source code” allows remixing, improvement and expansion by anyone with the skills or an interest. This release includes Latin, Cyrillic and Greek support, and future versions will be automatically rolled out to everyone using the Google Font API.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, commented: "Our focus on design and usability in Ubuntu led us to create a font which is at once beautiful and readable. We're delighted to share the Ubuntu Font Family with web designers around the world who want their websites to be stylish and readable in as many languages and browsers as possible. The publication of the Ubuntu font on the global Google Font Directory is an appropriate treat for the festive season, and we wish all those who contribute to, and enjoy the benefits of, free software and open content a very happy and healthy solstice and New Year."

Bruno Maag of the Dalton Maag type foundry, who have been working with Canonical on the design and technical implementation of the typeface commented, “It is unique in our company’s history to work on such a comprehensive high-quality font and to have it given to the World to use for free. The creativity and expertise that is available in the open source world, in particular the insight into language and script requirements, ensures that the fonts are a useful tool for everyone. The right font used correctly can increase accessibility to information and increase productivity. With today’s gift, we expect to see widespread adoption of the Ubuntu fonts from today, as it combines design at its best with simple distribution through the Google Font API.”

Google is excited to be providing such a high quality font to the world, with all of the benefits of web fonts including amazing searchability and accessibility. Web fonts demonstrate the true power of the web, as web pages can be translated and still preserve a rich visual presentation - something not possible with any other technology, especially baking text into images. The Canonical Design blog has a history of the fonts’ development and as the language coverage increases throughout 2011, users will automatically get those improvements along with the performance and reliability they can expect from Google. I hope that people have fun over the holidays adding the Ubuntu web fonts to their sites!

Posted by Raph Levien, Google Fonts

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Board Blog

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:47:22 +0000

The Fedora Board now has a blog of its own. I had been doing some Board meeting summaries here in my own blog, but that’s not a good long-term solution so with the help of Sijis & Fedora Infrastructure, the Fedora Board now has a shared blog.

That being said, I goofed when I originally added the blog to Planet Fedora, so you may have missed the first post. Here it is, and hopefully the next one will just work when it comes to appearing on Planet Fedora:

Fedora Board Meeting, 13 December 2010

(The meeting consisted mostly of discussions about proposed future goals for Fedora to help us achieve our vision, so it’s definitely worth a read.)

Filed under: Fedora Board

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 15 Dec 2010

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:42:31 +0000

Insert > WebFonts in your web editor menu.

It's promising to see initial integration between a web editor and open font directories. Such a nice graphical front-end will make it easier for more people to enjoy the benefits of unrestricted webfonts.

Of course the UI could tastefully show authorship and licensing info as well...

Ben Weiner: Fill in Rails date and time selects with Capybara

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:32:00 +0000

https://gist.github.com/558786 lets you fill in date and time select groups created by Rails helpers. Many thanks to its author, @szimek.