Andy

Open source graphics

all the tools have improved out of sight recently.

Walking through the workflow process of creating an open source based
document, with colour matching and such. Then typography maybe.

Inkscape

SVG based format, XML based, stores fonts, objects, opacity, all manner of
other informational bits
A collapsable document
Will talk about possibilities of extending the capabilities of our software
due to having open file formats, can add internationalisation and different
tool sets can be applied to the files

Inkscape is for creating a graphic
Scribus is the pdf utput with desktop publishing, can incorporate inkscape
images
Gimp, all familiar with it, raster image manipulation application. The
photoshop equivalent, can do more things than photoshop can, open file
formats, can claim better power with the application, more input methods.

FontForge, andy suggests it is the ugliest application he has ever seen,
however it gives fill control for creating fonts (though its unicode support
is lacking so it is somewhat limited to iso8859 languages).

Inskcape is a reall good app for handling vector daa, it can subset objects
properly, for example fonts, it can slit up lines of text and manipulate the
vector data for individal letters properly.

Pessing the space bar while dragging an object, creatres a clone of the
object in place, possibly not documented. Very useful.

The suggestion is made to make illustrations and images you use in inkscape
and keep them there as you have leveragew ith the vector format images. Import
them into gimp when you need to use them.

PgUp and PgDn to manipulate levels with grouped objects around each other. It
can manipulate the levels of only objects near each other and does nto mess
with others that are not near the grouped objects you are changing.

There are bounties on both sides of the inkscape <-> scribus bridge to try to
import data into each application and be able to print things correctly with
out lossyness with postscript problem, Andy can describe that better I
suspect, he requested anyone who is keen to work on getting through the
poscript handling problems.

Inkscape has a lot of formats it can save to, with variying levels of
completeness. He suggests eps and ps should only be used for line art or
something. Some of the other formats may be needed to keep more information.

This guy can create some incredibly good looking artwork in these applications
very fast.

Scribus can sample down to the required dpi when creating documents, so you
may use really large dpi whn exporting image data to raster in order to keep
as much information as wanted.

Andy loves how customisable the gimp is, he said it is the most workspace
customisable application he has ever used. You can rearrange any menu or
buttons or anything into all manner of different dialogs so commonly used
features can all be made readily available in the places you want them.

In scribus when importing media do not open a new document, import the
original and it ill keep all the original sizing and all that can later be
incorporated into pages you create in the application.

For text editing Andy suggess using styles rather than applying specific
bold/font/whatever to individual blocks of text. This gets applied to the xml
and means any changes to the text keep the correct styles.

In inkscape Duplicates are made with the pressing space thing, if you want
properties maintained between different objects you can clone objects ather
than duplicate them.

Alt d or in the edit menu to do a clone (control d for duplicate or space)

you can move any objects into any layer in inkscape, create new layers with ew
names, move objects you want ot work with into a givrn layyer, move layers up
and down and combine them all at the end.

Andy mentions some new applications that have recently (or will soon be)
released open source, Zara LX and SyneFig (I think) which according to Andy
will blow everyone's minds with their capabilities.

Andy is andrew@fitzsimon.com.au and brisgeek@jabber.org (he is on jabber a
lot)

Andy points out dithering is evil, it is good for print, however not any good
for any screen application, turn dithering off and all will be better.