Libre Graphics Meeting 2011

The call just opened for for all artists and developers in the open source graphics to submit presentation ideas for this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM)  in Montreal from May 10th  to 13th. To submit a talk proposal, add you idea to the page on the create wiki, or if presenting isn’t your thing, help the conference to remain free for participants by donating to the conference. Interested about what goes on at an LGM? check out all the videos from LGM 2010.

About LGM:

The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Since 2006, this annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library who are gathered to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common interchange formats.

Fedora 16 Codename Proposal

My Codename Proposal is:

SHEEPY SHENANNIGANS

Rationale:

Jack Lovelock was an Athlete from New Zealand. They have a lot of sheep there.

This may or may not be a direct response to http://beefymiracle.org/

how to crop an image with inkscape

The inkscape tutorials weblog has a great little tutorial on cropping / clipping images with inkscape. It uses a great little clipart from the open clipart library too!

http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/inkscape-faq-how-do-i-crop-in-inkscape/

Libre Graphics Day 2011

The Libre Graphics Day miniconf at linux.conf.au is going ahead again in 2011!

The call for papers, and further information about this miniconf is available at:
http://libregraphicsday.org/

Update on the fedora branding fonts

Further to the previous post on the new fedora branding fonts trial, a new contender has emerged for the body text font. Cantarell is a contemporary Humanist sans serif that was designed with on-screen reading in mind.

Cantarell was designed by Dave Crossland using free and open source software (including fontforge). Dave also did a presentation on the development of the Cantarell fontface and the tools he used at the  LGM 2010 conference.

Cantarell sample

Fedora Branding Fonts trial

The fedora-design team is currently trialling new branding fonts.

Touchpad Click and Edge Scrolling broken in Fedora 11?

In Fedora 11, default mouse settings (with regards to laptop and notebook touchpads) have been slightly changed. In previous versions of Fedora, tapping the touchpad to “click” and scrolling using the edge of touchpads was enabled by default. In Fedora 11, these options are now disabled by default. To re-enable these options:

1. Open the Mouse Preferences dialog either by choosing  System > Preferences > Mouse from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-mouse-properties

2. In the Mouse Preferences dialog, choose the Touchpad tab, and enable the options you desire.

Mouse Preferences Dialog

Control+Alt+Backspace shortcut does not restart the X server in Fedora 11

Note: This post documents a change that was introduced in Fedora 11 (F11). Special thanks to who-t for his help on this one

Previously, pressing the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Backspace forced the X.org server (the open source implementation of X11) to instantly restart, returning the user to the login screen. This functionality is useful on unstable systems where the X server frequently hangs, however, if the shortcut is inadvertently invoked, the user will lose anything not saved to disk.   In the version of X.org shipped in Fedora 11, the decision was made in upstream to make the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut disabled by default. To re-enable this option (on the Gnome Desktop):

1.  Open the Keyboard Preferences dialog either by choosing  System > Preferences > Keyboard from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-keyboard-properties

2.  In the Keyboard Preferences dialog, choose the Layouts tab (labeled 1 in the screenshot below) and press the Layout Options button (labeled 2 in the screenshot below) to bring up the Keyboard Layout Options dialog.

Keyboard Preferences dialog

3.  In the Keyboard Layout Options dialog, unfold the tree item “Key sequence to kill the X server” (labeled 3 in the screenshot below), and mark the checkbox “Control + Alt + Backspace” (labeled 4 in the screenshot below)

Keyboard Layout Options dialog

Update: X input hacker, who-t (Peter Hutterer) on the differences between Ubuntu and Fedora on this change:

The Ubuntu “dontzap” command has no effect on Fedora.

There are two parts to zapping: one is the permission in the server (Option DontZap) and one is the trigger (the Terminate_Server XKB symbol). To zap, you have to invoke the trigger and you must be allowed to zap the server.

In Ubuntu, the server by default does not allow zapping, but the trigger is in the default keymaps. Thus, to enable zapping it needs to be enabled in the configuration file (and the server requires a restart).

In Fedora, the server by default allows zapping, but the trigger is not in the default keymaps. Thus, to enable zapping it needs to be enabled in the keymap. This can be done at runtime.

Doing the equivalent to “dontzap -disable” in Fedora explicitly enables an option that’s enabled by default anyway, so it has no effect.

10 inkscape tutorials

shameless crosspost from inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com =)

With the readership of the inkscape tutorials weblog steadily increasing over the past year, there are many great tutorials deep in the blog archives that newer readers may not have discovered yet. Therefore to celebrate the forthcoming milestone of 1.5 million page views of this site, we have decided to list the top 10 inkscape tutorials that have been featured on the inkscape tutorials blog to date.

Text and Simple Styling An awesome tutorial from Troy Sobotka detailing how to create a colourful outset text effect.

Creating a Business Card Template and Basic Business Card with Inkscape Create a business card template using inkscape, and learn how to populate it with a simple business card design.

Shattered, Smashed and Grungy Text in Inkscape A step by step on creating a smashed and grungy text effect using inkscape..

Create a Lightbulb Icon that follows the tango! guidelines. This tutorial provides a detailed how-to on creating a lightbulb icon that uses the tango! icon set guidelines.

Create an impressive stick man cartoon character / avatar A super detailed guide to creating a stick man cartoon character using inkscape.

Draw A Realistic Vector Guitar in Inkscape In this tutorial, Nick Roberts demonstrates in detail how to illustrate a “Fender Stratocaster” type guitar. The final result is stunning, and the author has detailed the steps superbly with many super useful screen shots.

Creating a Coffee Cup using inkscape Another detailed and impressive tutorial from the vectortuts website. This tutorial demonstrates how to draw a coffee cup using inkscape.

How to make RPG map elements with inkscape. This is a great tutorial on creating RPG map symbols using inkscape. The tutorial outlines a workflow for creating a simple jailhouse RPG element.

chrome text effect From the same author as the “Text and Simple Styling tutorial”, Here is a another that demonstrates how to create chrome text effect using inkscape.

sticker with a folded / dog ear edge here is a cool tutorial for creating a simple sticker / decal with a folded down edge.

Digg this! | reddit

twitterverse: a diagram

twitterverse is a neat little diagram that lists and categorises major twitter apps and services.

[twitterverse] via beth’s blog