Planet Open Fonts

Alexandre Prokoudine: Graphics Planet updated

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:42:18 +0000

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 [...]

Alexandre Prokoudine: Omnitarian

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:46:09 +0000

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

Ben Weiner: Screen scraping joy

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Weiner) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:14:00 +0000

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.

OSP: Open Clip Art Library

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:39:23 +0000

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 [...]

Alexandre Prokoudine: Introducing Ramen

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:40:58 +0000

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 [...]

Jon Phillips: Open Clip Art Library 2.0 is Here!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:09:24 +0000

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.

OSP: Hop frogs on the map

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:24:57 +0000

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 [...]

OSP: Launching OSP-works

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:00:41 +0000

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

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 5 Mar 2010

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:48:14 +0000

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.

OSP: Contour book one

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:29:35 +0000

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 [...]

OSP: Thank You for Voting!

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:36:39 +0000

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. [...]

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 3 Mar 2010

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:25:17 +0000

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).

OSP: Biscoitos da Sorte

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:20:38 +0000

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

OSP: Governmental support for LGM

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:39:07 +0000

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 [...]

Simos Xenitellis: Επιλέξτε πρώτο το Firefox!

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:14:58 +0000

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.

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

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.

One comment

OSP: mybadge.png

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:00:27 +0000

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!

OSP: A beautiful compliment

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:00:19 +0000

“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

Alexandre Prokoudine: GIMP developers on loose

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:12:41 +0000

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 [...]

OSP: Dingbats in a monkey

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:33:22 +0000

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 [...]

OSP: Banners to match

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:03:57 +0000

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>

OSP: Support LGM2010!

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:00:48 +0000

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 [...]

OSP: To drip or not to drip

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:34:45 +0000

Vote Now!

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 17 Feb 2010

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:32:16 +0000

Firebug and webfonts

Good to see the re-designed Firebug website using the Titillium open font in its CSS.

Now what about getting these handy web developer tools (including Webkit Web Inspector, Dragonfly and even whatever the IE equivalent is) to give designers more control of the font-related CSS elements as we see increased usage of webfonts?

OSP: TeX, Fata Morgana et une promesse

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:10:38 +0000

Les organisateurs du Prix Fernand Baudin nous ont demandé de répondre à trois questions concernant le livre, en vue d’intégrer les réponses dans le catalogue en préparation actuellement. Nos réponses sous forme d’extraits traduits en français du texte publié à la fin du livre. (Full version in English) — Brèves explications du concept/déroulé du livre: “Making Of” [...]

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 13 Feb 2010

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:31:57 +0000

Open fonts for signage

After Andy fitzsimon's Road Stencil looks like another open font font for signage has been recently released by Matt McInerney: it's called Allerta, it looks really good and the release zip file even contains a vector file for the physical spraying kit! Follow the signs to your destination...

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 13 Feb 2010

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:01:28 +0000

The League of Moveable Type reformulates parts of the OFL FAQ

Good to see the League of Movable Type explaining some important aspects of using the Open Font License, the license they have chosen to standardize on as a community of designers: covering key subjects such as allowing modifications while retaining artistic integrity with the name change mechanism, how credits and acknowledgements are handled (although of course copyright statements and notices should never be removed), the choice of a font-specific community-recognized software license over a Creative Commons approach (see the explicit FAQ entry on this) and how authors always retain the full rights to re-release their creation under a different license including a more restricted one.

They also point to the OFL FAQ for further answers to questions designers may have as they use and release font sources under the OFL. The FAQ should be clear enough, with various practical tips and examples for open font designers. If you haven't already take a moment to read it. We will update it as needed.

OSP: Exhibition Prix Fernand Baudin

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:57:18 +0000

26 February – 10 March 2010 Exhibition in Brussels presenting the bookawards and nominations of the Fernand Baudin Prize 2009, the prize of the Most Beautiful Books in Brussels and Wallonia. BIP Rue Royale, 2-4 1000 Brussels Opening, award ceremony of the honorary diploma’s + release of the catalogue: 25th of February 2010 at 6 pm For it’s second edition 2009-2010, [...]

OSP: Cutting Edge

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:54:05 +0000

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010! Download flyers: cuttingedge.zip

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 6 Feb 2010

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:15:09 +0000

fontforge support for WOFF

At the request of Chris Lilley from W3C's font activity (among other things), the amazing George Williams has now implemented WOFF support in fontforge. It's available now in CVS but in a release near you probably soon. Thanks Chris and George for your efforts in this area!

A good way to use the new web native format and to view/handle the corresponding metadata.

Alexandre Prokoudine: CMYKTool unveiled

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:25:30 +0000

On January 23 Alastair M. Robinson silently released first public version of CMYKTool. That would go quite unnoticed if it wasn’t for someone liking to read all sorts of RSS feeds So the very next day linuxgraphics.ru community was already discussing the new tool, discovering bugs and requesting features. The thread was so [...]

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 3 Feb 2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:49:53 +0000

Hiring type designers

Ahem, IMHO the very talented folks at Weta should hire a few type designers to work on quality original fonts in tune with the style of a story and avoid being ridiculed by the interwebs for falling back to overused fonts (Papyrus-like AFAICT) for lettering and subtitles in multi-million-dollar productions...

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 3 Feb 2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:21:54 +0000

Awareness of font embedding issues

Good to see increased awareness of font embedding issues and the serious need to use fonts which explicitely allow it when you want to do it.

Fontforge offers an Embeddable dropdown and tick boxes in its font information panel to view the fsType - and modify it if you have the rights to branch the font - as well as an os2_fstype object accessible via python.

You always need to make sure to check the embeddability rights associated with the font you want to use. Of course when the designer has chosen a licensing model which explicitly allows embedding like the OFL then no need to worry.

But people wishing to use open fonts under the GPL need to do due diligence of checking what happens there... What with the experimental font exception and its problems...

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 3 Feb 2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:54:23 +0000

Libre alternatives to closed ebook platforms

Are the telescreens-like platforms really inevitable? Do we really want authors, publishers and readers to allow computer vendors to push everyone towards Farenheit 451-style book and content control? Do we want the electronic tools with which we read and learn to be stuck in some remotely controlled read-only mode?

Thankfully, there are existing alternatives to the various iWhatever sirens luring people into tinkering-hostile fully DRM-controlled platforms: FBreader to read and manage your ebooks, Calibre and Sigil or epub-tools to create them. All these you can install today on existing platforms. It's worth pointing out that the ePub open standard can also take advantage of the flexibility of @font-face.

Check out the ePub Zen Garden.

Let's not give up our ability to read what we want, keep it and/or share it even with complex writing systems the market does not care about for whatever shiny new device locked down to one single profit-oriented provider.

Simos Xenitellis: ΝΑΙ! Mozilla Firefox No1 στην Ελλάδα!

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:28:54 +0000

Μιλήσαμε πρόσφατα για τα στατιστικά χρήσης του Firefox στην Ελλάδα. Αυτή τη στιγμή έχουμε νέα στατιστικά που συμπεριλαμβάνουν και τον Ιανουάριο 2010.

Με βάση τα στατιστικά στοιχεία από την υπηρεσία statcounter.com, ο Firefox στην Ελλάδα έχει φθάσει για πρώτη φορά το 45% στο μερίδιο αγοράς λογισμικού περιήγησης του διαδικτύου, ξεπερνώντας τον Internet Explorer.

Είναι εξαιρετικό νέο, και συμβαδίζουμε με άλλες χώρες όπως τη Γερμανία με το να χρησιμοποιούμε ελεύθερο λογισμικό και Firefox.

7 comments

OSP: Collaborative Futures

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:47:43 +0000

“Collaboration can be so strong it forces hard boundaries. The boundaries can intentionally or unintentionally exclude the possibility to extend the collaboration. Potentially conflict can also occur at these borders” For this years’ Transmediale Festival, the F/LOSS Manuals project took up the challenge to write, edit and publish a collaborative publication in 5 days while test [...]

Ben Weiner: SERIAC 2010 in Chertsey

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Weiner) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:39:00 +0000

I’ve attended SERIAC (the South Eastern Region Industrial Archaeology Conference) for the last three years and enjoyed it every time. It’s also very good value at £12.50 for a day of talks that invariably span the whole field of industrial archaeology but remain understandable and interesting. This year it’s hosted by Surrey Industrial History Group at Chertsey Hall in Chertsey on Saturday 24 April. The programme is online; all the talks look genuinely interesting. Hope to see you there.

Alexandre Prokoudine: MyPaint reviewed

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:55:19 +0000

MyPaint developers released a much anticipated v0.8.0 on Friday, and one of them, Ilya Portnov, wrote a good introduction to MyPaint and a review of changes in this version. Read on! I can’t stop myself from quoting one of the users who commented on the Russian version of the review: “Yeah, great application! I’m painting again!!! [...]

OSP: Valentine scripting

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:09:10 +0000

Poster and flyer designed and produced in OpenOffice This week and next, colleague and friend An Mertens (a.k.a. Ana Foor) works out of the Elsene local library Sans Souci. She’ll be listening to your account of meeting a loved one for the first time, those habits that keep your relationship alive or which imaginary place [...]

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 29 Jan 2010

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:55:44 +0000

@font-face in Firefox 3.6 firstrun page

After the Firefox 3.5 release notes with only a small mention of all the work done on supporting webfonts, it's good to see the Firefox 3.6 firstrun page actually making use of webfonts via @font-face: in this case a non-modifiable font family from FontShop in the web-native WOFF format which enjoys support from many foundries, IOW peace has broken out. (see the related utilities.)

Webfonts are certainly one more step forward for the open web! While many may well prefer fully libre/open fonts instead of freeware fonts you cannot modify to suit your needs, it's already incredibly useful to be able to go beyond the old basic "web-safe" set. Go ahead, spice up your website with some quality webfonts!

OSP: Tools for conviviality

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:35:39 +0000

In the train back from Stuttgart, I read Tools for Conviviality, a pamphlet by social philosopher Ivan Ilich (1973). A ‘convivial society’, he argues, is a society in which everyone can act autonomously, and this can be achieved through the design and use of ‘convivial tools’: People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to [...]

Alexandre Prokoudine: Drawing volumetric objects in Inkscape

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:59:06 +0000

Yuri Apostol wrote a great tutorial on drawing volumetric objects* in Inkscape: The tutorial covers things like smart use of gradients, blur, clipping paths and simulating the missing conical gradient fill. * the text says “…and my little scarf!”

Ben Weiner: Subsections in Textpattern

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Weiner) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:57:00 +0000

One provocative omission from the excellent Textpattern CMS is subsections. I don’t know why it was omitted (probably just because it was out of scope when Dean Allen sat down to write TXP). Now that there’s a codebase, fitting in subsections is slightly tricky. There’s a need to adjust the way that URL rewriting works and there’s also a need to rework the section admin form. I could really do with having this sorted and I have started to scope it out. If somebody would like to sponsor the work let me know ’cos I haven’t got time to do any more for nothing.

Yes, I have investigated what’s out there. It is not good enough, I’m afraid: for one thing, it is susceptable to break with every minor point release. Something better is needed.

Ben Weiner: Web fonts talk online

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Weiner) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:08:00 +0000

The text and the slides for the talk I gave last night at London Web Standards are online.

In the talk I gave suggestions about how to get started with web fonts which are still a bit of a mess. I’ve also cited a lot of very helpful information on the net so you can get much more detail on the topics I covered. I’ve also stuck the html, css and js test files I used on there. Comments and corrections most welcome.

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 18 Jan 2010

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:57:21 +0000

Libre Graphics Day(s) - Libre Graphics Meeting

The first Libre Graphics Day kicks off today in Wellington, Australia if you happen to be on this side of the world right now. And if Australia is a bit too far then not to worry the larger Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels, Belgium is only a few months away...

Come join the discussions and all the libre graphics-related creativity in our community.

OSP: nY-web, literary blogging

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:56:54 +0000

Alexandre Leray and Lauren Grusenmeyer just finished an intense collaboration for the website of the literary platform nY— website en tijdschrift voor literatuur, kritiek & amusement, voorheen yang & freespace Nieuwzuid. nY-web exists indepently next to the paper edition with it's own editorial staff, writers categories and settings. While nY is a magazine with a profound literary history it confirms it's existence as an independent web platform, that is to say — it uses full virtues of publishing online.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Calf is awesome

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:02:00 +0000

I’ve been using Calf pack of DSSI/LV2 audio plug-ins and instruments for a while now (vintage delay is my fav), so since I’m used to bleeding edge software I decided to clone its git repo and see what they’ve been cooking for the next release. After so many years of geeky interfaces native effects on Linux [...]

Raph Levien (advogato diary): 17 Jan 2010

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:05:10 +0000

Nock, Io

Via Wes Felter, I came across a fun puzzle language by my old friend C Guy Yarvin. I think of Nock as being in a family of languages with certain things in common: tiny number of primitives, definition can fit on a t-shirt, not quite practical, but powerful and expressive enough that you can imagine writing real programs in it. If this sort of thing appeals to you, I recommend checking it out. I took up his challenge to write an interpreter and sample program, and the core Python interpreter is 38 lines of Python.

Other languages in this vein include SKI combinators, pure lambda calculus, pure LISP, universal turing machines, and Brainfuck. No doubt my readers can come up with several more examples.

All this reminded me of my own Io, which I designed, oh, about 22 years ago. Io is basically a language in which the only primitive is continuations. Because it encompasses the power of simple lambda calculus, you can implement arithmetic and data structures using Church numerals. Probably the best introduction to Io is the chapter out of Raphael Finkel's book, and there's some more good description in notes by Kragen Sitaker.

I only wrote up half of my ideas in the SIGPLAN Notices article (PDF). The other half was primitives for parallelism. In addition to the pure language, "par k1 k2" fires off continuations k1 and k2 in parallel. Then "join k" invokes k with two new continuations, call them "alpha" and "beta". If one thread calls "alpha f" and another "beta x", then the two threads join at that point and invoke "f x". With this primitive, you can easily implement the full range of concurrency operations, including cells with state, input and output (hence the name of the language), etc.

I used to think it would be a good idea to build real systems in Io, but now I guess I've grown up a little. For one, while I think it's important for any serious student of languages to understand CPS, I'm no longer a huge fan of actually using it. Plus, it's much harder to implement things like Io efficiently than I originally thought.

But these languages sure are fun to play with!

Simos Xenitellis: OpenType support in OpenOffice 3.2 (Greek)

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:52:40 +0000

The new version 3.2 of OpenOffice.org is being developed and you can currently download the release candidate for your testing purposes.

A big enhancement in OpenOffice.org 3.2 is the support for OpenType fonts. A typical Linux user is able to do most of the tasks with TrueType fonts, however any new exciting fonts available are mostly OpenType fonts. So, OpenOffice.org 3.2 (to be released this month) has OpenType support and most likely Ubuntu 10.04 is going to have OpenOffice.org 3.2.

You can install OpenOffice 3.2 RC (or final, in a few weeks) on your Ubuntu by downloading the relevant archive from download the release candidate. Extract the files and enter the DEBS/ subdirectory. Then, run sudo dpkg -i *.deb in order to install the development version of OpenOffice 3.2. The installed files are located in /opt/ooo-dev3/program/ and you run now run swriter (for Writer). It is quite possible there is already a relevant PPA repository; tell me in the comments and I’ll update here.

We test with the Greek Font Society OpenType fonts, which are distributed with the OpenFont License. The Debian/Ubuntu repositories already have the GFS fonts packaged for you. You can either install the fonts with your package manager (open synaptic package manager, search for ttf-gfs), or run from the command line

sudo apt-get install ttf-gfs-artemisia ttf-gfs-baskerville ttf-gfs-bodoni-classic ttf-gfs-complutum ttf-gfs-didot-classic ttf-gfs-gazis ttf-gfs-neohellenic ttf-gfs-solomos ttf-gfs-theokritos

Here is a screenshot of the PDF file of GFS Fonts Sample. With OpenOffice.org 3.1 or earlier these fonts would not appear in Writer and would be replaced with the default OpenOffice.org font. In addition, if you tried to export to PDF, you would get the default font (that is, the OpenType fonts do not get embedded in the PDF file either).

Here is the .odf file of the GFS Fonts Sample. If you load it in OpenOffice.org 3.1, you will notice that the default OpenOffice.org font will appear for each line in the sample file. If you load the sample .odt file in OpenOffice.org 3.2, you need to have the GFS OpenType fonts installed beforehand.

The GFS fonts support Greek, Greek Polytonic and several ancient Greek characters. See How to type Greek, Greek Polytonic in Linux for instructions on how to configure and use the Greek keyboard layout in Linux. Note that to type Greek Polytonic, you do not need anymore to select the Polytonic layout; the default «Greek» keyboard layout has been updated so that you can type Greek, Greek Polytonic and Ancient Greek characters. Ergo, άᾷᾂϡϖϝ€ϕͼϾʹ͵ϐϛ.

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OSP: O S P double

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:26:11 +0000

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OSP: Bienvenue to Hadopi logo

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:22:22 +0000

The Hadopi is a big thing in France. At its origin, a piece of legislation that implements the three strikes model for illegal downloads. You receive three warnings and then you are ‘banned’ from the internet. The authority who is in charge of applying the sanction is the Hadopi. A new logo has been created [...]