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!

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:

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

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

Do you want to draw a simple clipart-like eye with Inkscape?

First, let's see how the final result will look like:

The first step is quite simple: draw three ellipses, one black and two white ones

You will probably want to rotate at least some of the elipses: click twice with the "Select and transform" tool on the ellipse to enable the "rotation" arrows.

You can set the color of the ellipse by clicking on the color toolbar at the bottom of the window.

Put the small white ellipse on top of the black one, select both ellipses and combine them with Path > Difference to make one single shape out of them.

Put the irid / pupil on top of the big white ellipse ("the eye")...

Click on the white ellipse, duplicate it (Edit > Duplicate), add the irid to the selection by clicking on it while the shift and alt key are pressed (the shift key extends the selection and the alt one allows select an object below another one covering it).

If everything is correctly selected, Path > Intersection will remove the "overflowing" part of the irid, delete the duplicated big ellipse and let the original big ellipse show up again, below the irid). If you get a "wrong" result, you can use the undo function (ctrl+z) to go back to the previous shapes.

Finally, since you want two eyes, duplicate the result, mirror it (Object > Flip horizontal) and move it to the right with the right arrow key.

Ah, no, that was not my final goal... I wanted to draw a turtle!

Isn't it cute?

P.S.: if you prefer it as a video, here it is!

Many years ago, I used to layout a student magazine with Page Maker. One of the nastiest bugs I was experiencing at that time, was triggered by deleting in "a non carefully" way on of the several copy of copy of styles "automatically" created by the software: the application crashed and the file was not readable anymore! Yes, this means I had to restart the job from zero (or grab a backup: I've learned to do backups every two hours the hard way...)

It was funny to see Scribus developing the same illness and we were lucky that it didn't get to the point of corrupting my files (in the contrary, the Scribus file format being some sort of XML, it was easy to suppress them with a text editor... but that's another story).

I'll try to avoid to get sentimental, now.

Actually, I have a good news for you: you won't get any copy of copy any more!

Well, it may not be 100% correct: Jean has just fixed a corner case where styles with tabs would duplicate on copying a frame containing them (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=9979)! Crazy, isn't it? I'm still wondering if there is any other such hitch hiding somewhere in the Scribus code? We can't be sure, but it's really comforting to see these remaining bugs being fixed that fast!

I'm awaiting the times without copy of copy of nightmares and start dreaming of a sunny world with Scribus 1.4!