I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world

Originally from Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

We are trying to raise USD$ 20,000 in the next 16 days before Friday, April 18th in order to support the conference and travel from so many Free and Open Source software developers to attend the 3rd Annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) conference in Wrocław, Poland May 8 - 11 - the premiere event bringing together free and open source creative software application developers for a productive international conference (emphasis on productivity!).

This is really a big community drive for all you users, supporters, and companies to donate money so that all us free and open source developers may get together to have a productive face to face meeting. The last two LGM’s have been invaluable to coordinate, consolidate and create the future in a free and open source way.

For the next 16 days, we want all the supporting projects to put a note about this pledge drive right on their front page of their website! You can use the badge below as well to help us raise money!

You can also help by spreading the url to our pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/613

And, don’t forget to digg this story: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_the_Libre_Graphics_Meeting_2008

More from the Pledgie.com page:

What is the Libre Graphics Meeting?

The Libre Graphics Meeting brings together developers and users of free software graphics applications, such as the GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita, the Open Clipart Library and more.

In its third edition, the organization needs your help! You can support your favorite graphics application, and ensure that the travel costs of as many volunteer developers as possible are paid to ensure that this edition of the conference is more successful that its predecessors.

Where will the money go?

We have kept costs associated with infrastructure to a minimum. Over 80% of the conference budget will be spent on subsidizing travel and accommodation costs for developers.

A non-profit organization

All donations will be made to the conference organizers via the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax exempt US-based non-profit, so donations will be tax deductible for US taxpayers. We would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for their support.

Originally from Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland

Download the latest copy of your favorite editor everone!!!

More from Bryce’s post:

The Inkscape community today is announcing the release of the newest
version of its open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape 0.46 is a
major update that introduces native PDF support. The implementation of
PDF support in Inkscape provides an easy, open source solution to
editing PDF documents.

Tons of new features and performance improvements are included in this
release. Dialogs now have the ability to be docked to the editing
window. Gradients can be edited completely on-canvas. The new Paint
Bucket Tool fills bounded areas with color. A new 3D Box tool helps
create perspective-correct drawings. A new Tweak tool provides an
intuitive method for editing paths and painting objects. The new Live
Path Effects feature can create “brushes” and various organic effects on
paths. Improvements to color management include support for color spaces
other than sRGB. Most SVG filters are now implemented, and a new
powerful UI is provided for editing filter stacks.

Downloading Inkscape 0.46

Inkscape 0.46 is already included by default in Ubuntu Hardy so just
install it normally. Ubuntu Gutsy users can install by adding the
following to System : Admin : Software Sources : Third-Party Software:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main

Macintosh OS X users can download a Leopard Universal package from our
SourceForge site:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

Packages for Fedora, Debian, Windows, and other platforms should be
coming soon.

For more information

Complete Release Notes for 0.46:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes046

Community Contributed Screenshots:
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/

Here are the example screenshots demo’ing 0.46…its hot!

Version 0.46
	The path changing modes of the new Tweak tool allow you to push, shrink, grow, attract, repel, or roughen any path, easily and naturally sculpting exciting freeform shapes. This is a lot more convenient than the Node tool not only because you don’t need to think about nodes, but also because it can work on any number of selected paths at the same time.
	The color changing modes of the new Tweak tool, paint and jitter, are very similar to the way a soft brush works in a bitmap editor. If you have a number of separate objects, you can select them all and paint over them with any fill or stroke color.
	Inkscape 0.46 comes with a selection of stock patterns, accessible via the Fill and Stroke dialog. It is now much easier and faster than before to fill a path with stripes, checkerboard, or polka dots.
	The use of effects which previously required to manually installed some Python modules is now straightforward on Mac OS X: they all work out of the box. In addition, Inkscape’s interface was made more Mac- friendly by the use of a default theme. This theme reflects the changes made in OS X system preferences (Appearance panel) and works with Graphite (as demonstrated here) or Aqua variants. For advanced users already having a custom ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file, the theme is not enforced and their personal settings are respected.
	The Paint Bucket tool works just like the Paint Bucket tool in bitmap image editors — clicking in an area fills the area with the chosen color. Unlike other editors, the Inkscape tool features some additional fill methods to help you finish your work faster.
	With SVG Filters and Inkscape’s new Live Path Effects, the available options and ease of editability to accomplish various visual effects has been greatly enhanced. The picture in this screenshot utilizes a number of features such as Tiled Clones, SVG Filters, Live Path Effects, Clipping and Masking, Multi-stop Gradients and more. This screenshot shows the parameters used on a patch of hair created with the Stitch Sub-Curves Path Effect. Additionally, you can see how handy having docked dialogs is to un-clutter the workspace with the side benefit of increased productivity. To see the full version of this picture you can click here.
	The Path along Path effect can curve a path along another path. When this effect is applied to path A (called skeleton), another path B (called pattern) can then be passed as a parameter. The result is that path B is bent along path A. With the node edit tool, path A can be editted on-canvas and the result is updated live. This provides a direct equivalent of “vector brushes” or “skeletal strokes” features in other vector editors.
	This example shows how the new hatching techniques can be used to produce a traditional line engraving from a photo. Note also that thinning/thickening can be used not only for hatchings but for sculpting arbitrary paths - easy shape morphing without the Node tool!
	Several new features were added to the Calligraphic pen to make Inkscape capable of the ancient art of line engraving. This screenshot demonstrates tracking a guide path to hatch areas quickly and uniformly; tracing background to make your pen width reflect the lightness of the background in every point; and thinning/thickening that lets you change the darkness of your hatchings at any point, or even erase parts of the drawing.
	Now all guidelines are angled. The usual horizontal and vertical guidelines have become angled at 0/90 degrees. To change to a different angle, just double-click the guideline you want to change and enter the values. You can also create a guideline with an angle of 45 degrees by dragging the guideline from the ends of the rulers. You can also create an angled guideline from a straight line. Draw this line and press Shift+G.

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Originally from Inkscape 0.46 Released

Man, Nathan got me thinking about the whole lack of a killer presentation app in Open Source. I used to use purely Inkscape’s viewing app, Inkview for all my presentation needs, but that becomes cumbersome when you give a talk nearly 3-5 times a week Hard to pull together a talk in a cab with that option too. The graphics though aren’t full of jaggies, and it demonstrates a much better app IMO, Inkscape, duh!

So I started using OpenOffice.org Impress, which I’m still using to this day. But, I got pissed off yesterday in watching Lessig present, a young Korean kid asked me which app Lessig and Wilbanks used, and I shamefully said, “Keynote.”

So, to the lazyweb first: Am I missing something? Is there a good up and coming free and open source Presentation Application that doesn’t suck? My definition of doesn’t suck includes:

• Handles all media types! - I need to be able to play any video, any audio file, mp3s, etc…
• Is fast! Graphically!
• Has 3D badazzzz effects like Compiz, but primarily professional video style effects
• I even want it to be as cinematic as Ken Burns style zooming effects over an entire presentation
• Simple UI
• All of Nathan’s reasons

So here are some final questions:

Would clutter-based system be good for this? And/or, what file type would be best for this slide format: ODF?

I have come to the end of my minimalist style of presentations now here in Seoul Korea at the 1st International CC Korea conference. I have done tons of them. I want some action.

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Originally from Do we have to creat it ourselves? An Open Source Presentation App

Asheesh blogged about the super-cool liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC metadata - Creative Commons. The thing I would add for all you out there in licensing land is that this generalized to support all free and open content licensing as long as it uses the great RDF developed by CC to express a license:

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using.

For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server side software you write. The biggest reason to choose liblicense rather than handling CC metadata yourself is that we (huge thanks to Jason and Hubert) have written handlers for many file formats. We use Hubert’s Exempi library that is derived from Adobe’s Free/Open Source XMP library.

The two major driving factors on this release were making it crash less and providing a stable interface (API and ABI) for others to build upon. Earlier versions of liblicense would crash on invalid files. Also, crucially, this release has metadata inside the library, called “shared object versioning,” indicating what features the library supports.

As always, you can reuse this under the terms of the GNU LGPL. It’s interoperable with our metadata panel for Adobe applications, supports embedding into files ranging from JPEG to MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, and is available from SourceForge.net. It is written in C and comes with bindings for Python and Ruby. Finally, thanks to Venkatesh Srinivas for his tireless help.

I haven’t had as much time to blog about this project. I’m super proud of the work done by Scott, Jason, Asheesh, Nathan Y., Hubert, Peter Miller and many others! Thanks guys.

Now, onto the big business! Let’s get this library added to KDE 4.1, the Gnome desktop, and some other example apps like Eye of Gnome (EOG), Rhythmbox, Inkscape, etc. Is anyone interested in this? We need to get it plugged-in. Currently, KDE folks are planning on including in KDE 4.1, so I’d like to talk more with other about getting it into Gnome apps, and more specific apps to drive usage and development of this app. Also, we want to get liblicense integrated into OpenMoko, as liblicense creation happened in order to enable content license read/write on al our devices…ebooks, mp3s, etc, that have their licenses inside.

BTW, liblicense comes with an awesome command-line program called license. All it does is allow for getting and setting of license information on files on your desktop!!! It handles content right now, but there is no reason it can’t handle other things…like source code, etc…just need developers!!!

Originally from liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC and licensing metadata - Creative Commons

Hello, I posted over at Open Clip Art Library’s website, but I wanted to get maximize readership:

Hello, our new engine, ccHost, now accepts SVG files thanks to the great work by Roan! Everyone should +10 thank him! Please see the great functioning test site: http://www.openclipart.org/cchostSo, please help us best by uploading test SVG files to this installation. We hope to move to it very shortly (hopefully within the week). There are still a few tasks in the migration we need help with such as:

1. export of our content from the old system to the new one
2. SVG thumbnails
3. writing metadata to SVG files in getid3
4. migration of old web content from old site to the new one

The tasks are listed on the ccHost Migration page on the wiki. Please e-mail the mailing list or hop onto our chat channel, #openclipart on irc.freenode.net if you want to help out. We are very close now to switching to this new infrastructure. If you are having any problems uploading to the present site, please try the new one at http://www.openclipart.org/cchost. Thanks!

I have been committing patches to Inkscape left and right. Today I added one for pig latin. Looks like I had to do some pioneering to get pig latin to work in Linux. I wrote about it on the pig latin page in wikipedia in case others want to add fun languages to their list of translations.

Basically, to add your own language that is not from some country locale, you really should base it on some locale. For example, if I wanted to add an black vernacular english translation, I would create this in the file en_US@bve.po. Similarly, if I wanted to create a translation for midwest English, I’d create en_US@midwest.po.

Anyway, to test out pig latin in Inkscape, run from the commandline:

LANG=en_US@piglatin inkscape