Liebe LaborantInnen

das Libre Graphics Meeting ist vorbei – vier Zürcher waren in Wien dabei! und eine bereut es immer noch, dass sie nicht mitgefahren ist... – und ich habe wieder ein bisschen mehr Zeit für das lokale Engagement.

Lassen wir uns also vom Geist vom LGM inspirieren: am Sonntag 10. Juni ab 14 Uhr widmen wir uns den Gimp!

• In Wien haben wir die Gimp-Entwickler die ganze Nacht im lokale Hackspace (http://metalab.at : allein die Reise wert!) eingesperrt und das Resultat war, die Veröffentlichung von Gimp 2.8 (stimmt nicht ganz, aber hört sich gut...) Wir schauen also, wie das Programm nun aussieht und was es jetzt neu kann!
• die Gimpers waren echt fleissig: Gimp 2.10 könnte ziemlich bald (in Freie Software Zeiten...) erscheinen. Schauen wir was die Pläne da sind! Und probieren wir aus, was es schon kann...
• Im Metalab, hatten wir eine grosse Überraschung: wir sind auf Amir gestossen, der Autor vom – bis vor kurzem unveröffentlichten – Gimp Plugin, dass mit Bilder und Bildbearbeitung Musik spielt! Wer möchte mitmusizieren?
• Joao hat mir ein Gesellschaftsspiel aus Brasilien mitgebracht: alles mit Gimp gezeichnet! Falls wir noch Zeit haben, packen wir es aus und probieren die Regeln – klar, auf Brasilianisch – zu verstehen!

Ich wünsche euch eine wunderschöne Woche und ihr seid alle am Sonntag im Dock 18 willkommen.

Scribus has been accepted for the GSOC 2012 and several guys (girls where are you?) are popping up and ask about how to get confident with the Scribus code.

Here are some short facts to get you up and running.

Before doing this: you will have to make sure that:

• you have a working and modern Linux.
• you have to pull all the dependencies: if your on Debian you can run apt-get build-dep scribus, for other distributions you will have to read the Getting All the Things You Need chapter in the Scribus wiki
• you have a src/ and a bin/ directory in your home (which i will call "yourhome" in the rest of this article)

Some remarks:

• For your contributions you can also use Windows, OS X, or almost any other operating system; but for your first steps the easiest thing is Linux; believe me.
• The repositories on Sourceforge are not all up to date. For now you should use our SVN repository, but for the GSOC project itself you will be able to use what you prefer (git, hg, ...).

The second topic is: how to talk to "us"!

"We" are mostly in Europe and have a normal day job keeping us busy during day hours. Even if some of us keep an eye on the #scribus irc channel on Freenode for most of the CET day, the best time for a chat are CET evenings between 20:00 and 24:00.

If you have a proposal to submit or questions that didn't get answered in the irc channel, please register to the scribus-dev mailing list and post your question in there.

On the one side you will probably be curious, to know what it's like to write code for Scribus and on the other side seeing how you program, will help us to choose among the GSOC candidates. We have a bug tracker where we have lot open issues (and even more closed ones!). Skim through them: you will get an idea of what are the hot topics.

If you feel overwhelmed -- and it's likely that you feel that way after having had a look at the bug tracker -- here is a list of issues you could try to solve:

• Guides jumping around on mouse click (learning about the canvas)
• Keep insertion mode after inserting glyph (a bit harder)
• Some Edit Boxes trigger an action on every user keystroke (more Qt oriented)
• Horizontal scroll sometimes not there for main window (more GUI oriented)

And once you have some code to show:

and upload the diff file to the bug tracker!

P.S.: Ff you get a segmentation fault when launching Scribus, please install qt-config and change the theme used for the Qt apps.

... and as a challenge to our GSOC candidates: you may want to look for the cause of it, fix it or get Scribus to notice that there is a problem and gracefully quit (not before having shown an alert indicating what the user should do)

If the new year has brought us the shiny new Scribus 1.4 we all have been waiting for for so long, we shouldn't forget the bigger and smaller improvements we already had at the end of 2011 in Scribus 1.5.

Franz has built upon Jean's efforts and has checked that all palettes can be docked to the side of the window!

I'm still not 100% that this is a useful feature, but who cares: now, one can stack the palettes in docked tabs! Hurrah!

Now, we only have to wait that the code of the Properties palettes is ready for the long awaited redesign!

In the recent past, I've been involved – very little, I admit it – in the Get a Free PDF reader campaign and, on the other side, in the contest for a new icons set for Scribus.

One thing that bothers me is: do we really need, for each button related to a PDF document, a logo which is probably trademarked by the Adobe company?

A quick search for icons related to the "Pdf" term does not leave many doubts:

The red "A" is used as a synonym for PDF... even if it is probably meant to identify the "Acrobat" product by Adobe...

Even the Wikipedia authors – often very picky on this kind of issues &ndahs; couldn't find anything better:

Is there really no graphic artists who can come up with an original icons for this format? PDF is an open standard and deserves a vendor neutral icon!

By the way: I think that Google revealed what inspired that logo!

Many of you have probably noticed that the Scribus' icons set could need some care!

If you are skilled in icons design and want to do a substantial contribution to the Scribus project, you're kindly invited to get your hands dirty and create a new icon theme.

We ask you to submit a proposal with 10 to 30 icons in one single PNG file in the "Development > UI" board in the Scribus forums.
You will probably want to add a description of your work.

The deadline for submitting your proposal is October 31 2011.

Members of the Scribus team and of the Scribus UI group will then choose one proposal and ask its author to work on the full set.

Here some general considerations:

• The new icons will be for Scribus 1.5svn.
• You can get all the current icons by checking out the Scribus sources

from our subversion repository and going to the scribus/resources/icons/ directory.

• You should create icons in different states (on, off, hovered) and at

different sizes (16, 22, 32 pixel)

• In the spirit of free software, we also welcome designers who are

open to a cooperation with other participants of the contest and achieve a full set of icons for Scribus.

For questions and general comments, please ask in the Scribus mailing list or in this post in the Scribus forums.

Die Sommerferien sind vorbei und das Grafiklabor kommt zurück!

Am nächsten Sonntag treffen wir im Dock 18, und werden an unseres Bild arbeiten!
Die Werken werden dann am 11.11.11 im Dock 18 im Rahmen des Grand Prix des Selbstdarstellung gezeigt!

Wie üblich sind wir auch da für deine Frage um den freie Tools für Grafik!

Wenn das Wetter stimmt, findet das ganze Outdoor statt, und es fehlen bestimmt nicht ein paar leckere Sachen zum knabbern...

Ah, und hier ist das (sehr) kurzes Stop-Motion-Film, dass wir in Juli gedreht haben!

(:youtube gqAC9cluJCU:)

See you on Sunday!

Herbstprogramm 2011

2. oktober 2011
111 Selbstdarstellung
Wir arbeiten kollaborativ an unsere Selbstdarstellung!
Cliparts? Bildbearbeitung und Fotoediting? Oder digital ein Porträt Malen? Ein kleiner Stopmotion-Film? Bringe viel Fantasie mit, und wir helfen dir deine Idee mit Libre Graphics Software zu verwiklichen!
Alle die Werken werden am 11.11.2011 am Grand Prix des Selbstdarstellung im Dock18 gezeigt.

6. November 2011
Farbmanagement und Freie Software
ICC-Profile installieren, sich Farbprofile beschaffen und erstellen, Farbkonversion... und möglichst farbtreue Resultate: das ist auch mit Freier Software möglich!

4. Dezember 2011
Swiss Libre Graphics Developer Get-Together
Wir laden alle ein, die in die Libre Graphics Comunities mitwirken... oder Aktiv werden wollen! Programmierer, Dokumentatoren, Supporter aus der ganze Schweiz sind eingeladen den ganzen Sonntagnachmittag zu verbrigen und Ideen auszutauschen.

1. Januar 2012
Toonloop workshop
Im Ramen vom Public Domain Day, gehen wir im 'Kafi für dich' mit einem Stop-Motion Workshop. Lego, Playmobil, Knetteig und Webcam mitnehmen!

Jeden 1en Sonntag im Monat von 14 bis 18 Uhr trifft sich das Grafiklabor im Dock18, das Raum für Medienkultur der Welt in der Rote Fabrik

Today, I was looking for an icon for switching the page previews in the "arrange pages" dialog. An eye? A magnifying glass?

Well, it's not really about making the item visible. And it has not much to do with a magnifying glass... Yes, I know: the magnifying glass is THE icon for zooming, for previewing and for searching. Wait: is it not a bit too much?

Let's have closer look at how Scribus is using the magnifying glass:

May I give my opinion?

• I like the magnifier for the zoom buttons.
• We probably don't need an icon for the search and replace menu item.
• We should use the same symbol for both the print and the on canvas previews. Is the magnifier the right one?
• The same for the preflight verifier.

I still don't have an icon for the "arrange pages" dialog (no, I really don't think that a magnifying glass is a good idea...), but I'm open to your suggestions!

But, really: does anybody – still – use magnifying glasses for looking at her DTP work?

Despite some big efforts Scribus still does not support Arabic text... this could change soon, but -- as it often happens -- it will be there when it's ready... whatever that means.

But, if you need to put some Arabic text into Scribus, there is a workaround: use a "render frame" and Latex.
This won't allow you to create full books, since you can't link render frames, but it could help in some cases!

First you will have to get the necessary packages. On a Debian system you will need to install:

• Scribus 1.4RC5
• texlive and textlive-lang-arabic

Now, you can follow this thread in the Q&A site for TeX and Latex:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8476/scribus-arabic

The steps are quite easy:

First add the support for Arabic text to the document embedded by typing the following command in the Fonts/Headers tab

\usepackage{arabtex}
\usepackage{utf8}

Then put the Arabic text in the "Code" field. Since i have no -- really no! -- knowledge of Arabic, I took a post from another thread about this same topic (I checked with an automatic translator: it should be something related to this topic!):

\begin{arabtex}
\setcode{utf8}
\setarab
\RL{ ... put your text here ... }
\end{arabtex}

And this is what it will look like:

I can only hope that the result is somehow correct... and i hope that the space at the top right corner is an indent and not a rendering error!

You will have a hard time to convince me that drop shadows are a good idea. but -- since so many people see to be wanting them -- let's find out how to them with Scribus.

First a bad news: Scribus does not have transparent drop shadows, yet! (and -- generally speaking -- text transparencies are not well supported by Scribus).

But, with a bit of work you can achieve this:

Scribus-translucent-drop-shadows-for-text-01.png

There is one big constraint: you will have to wait and create the drop shadow after having finished to edit and layout your text, since it won't be editable any more.

Let's go!

First, type your text in a text frame and set it to the correct size and color (You will probably also want to have a picture or a solid color in the background... otherwise the transparency does not make much sense).

Scribus-translucent-drop-shadows-for-text-02.png

Then, set an outline of a few percents for the whole frame:

Scribus-translucent-drop-shadows-for-text-03.png

Make a copy of the frame and remove the outline effect.

Now we have two frames with the same content and at the same place, one with the outline effect in the behind and one without in the front.

Click on the one behind by holding down the "ctrl" key while clicking on the area where the frames are (clicking with the "ctrl" key pressed will cycle through the items below the cursor: try it out!) and convert it to outlines ("Item > Convert to... > Outlines").

Select the group of outlines, ungroup it and without deselecting the items combine them ("Item > Combine polygons"; again, you have to press the "ctrl" key to reach the item in the background). Now you can select the combined shape, go to the Properties palette > Colors and set the opacity for the shadow's line color! (and, eventually, a different opacity for the text frame).

Scribus-translucent-drop-shadows-for-text-04.png

I wonder if all those steps can be recorded in a script...

Toonloop
Drehe deinen eigenen Stop-Motion Film!
Sonntag, 3. Juli 2011, Dock 18, Rote Fabrik, Zürich

Alexandre Quessy -- Künstler und Programmierer aus Montreal -- hat sein Masterstudium noch nicht abgeschlossen, doch der praktische Teil seine Masterarbeit findet sich bereits in den Ubuntu-Repositories: Toonloop!

Toonloop ist ein minimalistisches und doch äusserst mächtiges Programm, das Stop-Motion Videos "dreht".

Sein Fokus liegt dabei auf der Live-Verarbeitung von Tanz-Aufführungen:

(:youtube Wt27C4dAAMA:)

In unserem Workshop werden wir uns darauf begrenzen, kleine Gegenstände vor einer Webcam zum Leben zu erwecken:

(:vimeo 8691969:)

Lego und Playmobil sind vorhanden, eigene Ideen und Objekte sind aber äussert willkommen! (Knetteig, Stoff, Papier-Farben-und-Schere oder Smarties...)

Ein Computer mit Webcam und Toonloop ist vorhanden (am bestens läuft Toonloop unter Ubuntu!) aber bringe auch deinen eigenen Laptop.

Jeden 1en Sonntag im Monat von 14 bis 18 Uhr trifft sich das Grafiklabor im Dock18, das Raum für Medienkultur der Welt in der Rote Fabrik