Color talk at linux.conf.au

I just got word today that the videos from linux.conf.au 2009 started showing up online, and mine was among the first set. The video is up in ogg, and should be nice and open, so grab it and check it out if you might have an interest. There's no interpretive dance, but there is juggling. The target for the talk was fairly broad, so as to be helpful to as large a group as possible.

Unfortunately, the other Inkscape presentations have not gone up yet, so we have to wait a little longer for the complete experience. Andy did a nice LPE talk, and Donna had a good intro class. I think the main problem with the latter was that there were more interested people than space for hands-on in the talk. Then again, that's usually a good problem to have, since it shows good interest.

You can download the video for "Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You". I did get them a copy of the slides (which include full notes), but those don't seem to be online quite yet and are now up. The abstract for the talk has been online, so that's a handy summary to check and see if the video might be of interest.

Once more finish getting posted, I'll try to get a summary of some of the more interesting and/or useful up. Then again, they are good resource and are worth checking out overall.

Read more!

SCALE and GNOME and Tux and cakes

Just got back from a busy weekend at SCALE 7X. There was quite a lot to take in, and despite the downturn in the economy (or perhaps because of it) there seemed to be even more going on this year. With all the changes in situations, I was the only person representing Inkscape this year, so camped out with the GNOME guys. Ted was there, but literally next door manning the Canonical booth. He came in last-minute to give an Ubuntu talk, and was very busy. I'll do some follow-ups with details, but had to at least get a quick note up, along with some info on that visitor to our booth there...

We whipped up this little cupcake guy to hang out in the booth and perhaps get a little more interest from people walking by. Unfortunately the table was so full of good monitors that he kinda had to hang out back a bit. He did garner a bit of interest, then and the end of day one he met his fate :-) . There was some good GNOME traffic and interest, but Inkscape managed to get quite a bit going on there too. It also probably helped that right next to our setup was the other booth running World of Goo.

OpenSUSE was just behind and around the corner from us. Aside from other things, they were notable for two main points of interest to Inkscapers. The first item was Joe Brockmeier's keynote on Sunday. I think the main takeaway there is that the main problems for FOSS projects are no longer technical (our stuff is solid and works well enough), but rather is in getting the word out about the project. The second reason of note is the openSUSE Build Service. It's part of the infrastructure they are building out, but all are welcome to use it, and it builds for all "major" distros. Additionally the architect who talked with me said that it could build Win32 targets (though no Mac as of yet). That struck me as potentially helpful to take the load off of our current overloaded guy.

Well... that's probably all I can pull together without a bit more rest and tought. So in the meantime I can say.... om nom nom nom!

Read more!

Linux conf au one

Well, here it is. Another conference has come to a close, and it is time again to try to make sense of all the amazing things that were seen and discussed. Overall LCA was a great meet-up, although there was one big negative: there were so many good sessions to hit that it was impossible to not run into at least some scheduling conflicts. Of course the good news there is that the volunteers are working to get slides and video up for as many of the sessions that they were cleared to. One things are up, I'm sure I'll find even more to ponder.

Probably the first thing to hit is the topic I came down to speak on: Color Management. My presentation went pretty well, and I had a few people talk to me about it later (and that was despite being scheduled right next door to the Linux powered clarinet playing robot). Additionally Carl Worth introduced me to someone who has started poking around in Cairo, seeing about hooking in color management. We also got a chance to go over what's needed to get things hooked into Cairo and get some nice CMYK PDF output. The next step is to collect up some representative use cases so we can figure out exactly what the API changes will have to be supported. I'm going to be pestering the Scribus guys to see what they know of, but if anyone out there has any experience or needs of going to print, send off an email or comment so that we can be sure to cover things well.

Next up is extended input. I attended a talk by Peter Hutterer (of MPX) that went over a bit of the state of things and then the new changes that have been going in. Over the course of the conference I had ended up chatting with him a few times, and verified that I am on track with where I'm working on taking the new extended input support (good support will need to leverage D-Bus and HAL). He also had poked around for a couple of weeks with Wii remotes, but had since moved on. That actually was a fairly common story, and it seems that it's up to me to address the GUI and application levels.

And to keep things short for now, there's one last point I want to cover: technical drawing. Of people I talked to who were not using Inkscape or not using as much as they could, the most common question seemed to be with technical drawing. We could probably pick up a good usability boost and garner another user segment if we just tune up things to make technical drawing and diagramming better. Most of what we need to do is probably already well known to us. However, we could benefit from a quick review and a little refocusing. I think one person's question really summed up the viewpoint we need to use when looking into this: “So, will Inkscape let me finally move off of Xfig now?” The people we could help with that are probably using Xfig or Dia (or nothing yet) for simple charts, diagramming, home layout and the like. Perhaps focusing down on some casual use-cases like that will help us sight some low-laying fruit and get a jump up in this area.

As usual, I'll send out more info as I digest things and get them settled out in my head. In the mean time, feel free to ask about any specifics you might care about. Perhaps Peter or Andy or some of the other Inkscapers who were there might chime in also.

Read more!

Bdale Makes the Cut

This year's linux.conf.au charity auction was going to help the "Save the Tasmanian devil" organization. Things started to get crazier and crazier, with strange attempts to get Linus to do something resulted in a change of the mascot for one release from Tux to Tuz.

As the crowd grew more frenetic, someone jumped in with a demand for Bdale's beard. Despite starting the whole thing off with a beautiful print of his wife's award winning photograph, he began to reconsider under the pressure. Arjen Lentz (who at the conference promoted http://bluehackers.org/) stepped up and offered the hair on his head if Bdale went through with it. Bdale did say if over $10,000 was donated then he would (although I'm not sure if he believed it was possible; I was very pessimistic on that myself). Matching challenges were also tossed out and taken up, and the final result was a total somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000 (au) being raised.

So come Friday around lunch, a huge spectacle unfolded as Bdale, Linus and Arjen prepared for their ordeal. Arjen went first, to allow for a little practice before the more difficult (and anticipated) task of Bdale's.

The event went off well, with much amusement, live tweeting, and even local television coverage. Once Linus had completed his arduous task with clippers (having foregone the hedge clippers he was first looking at) there was just a bit left for an actual razor. Being the wise man that he is, Bdale decided that he himself would do that close work. However, in the pause before that I caught a great shot that to me conveyed his great temperament and sense of humor about the whole thing, as he endured the temporary pain and embarrassment in order to be able to do his part in helping preserve one of God's great creatures here on earth.

Read more!

Greetings from Tas and Tuz

Greetings from Tasmania!

Just dropping a quick note while I'm sitting here waiting for day 2 of the linux.conf.au miniconfs to kick off.

I'm just hanging out, and spent time already with my new friend Tuz. He helped me get the artwork for my slides tweaked up, and has taken over my room.

Things are going good here so far, and lot's of great people. I'll have more details come up, but in the meantime will try to get bits up on identica and twitter.

Read more!

SVG Chicken and the CMYK Egg

For some time now SVG has suffered from a fair bit of chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to CMYK. Not much of the software out there handling SVG supports CMYK because not too many people use SVG for CMYK work. And not too many people use SVG for CMYK work because not much software supports it. Unfortunately this cycle has persisted for quite some time.

CMYK for vector work mainly matters to a segment of the users out there who are preparing artwork for printing. Some doing print work might find wide gamut RGB to be a better solution (photographic work, for example), since it is rare that an artist is actually working in the exact CMYK output colorspace for the specific printer that will be used for the final output. But still there are those who find the lack of CMYK as a blocking issue. There is also a factor that the types of artwork that can benefit more from working directly in CMYK are more the non-photographic types that are less appropriate to work on in GIMP or Photoshop.

Since the beginning, Inkscape has allowed users to select colors using CMYK values, but those were not truly selecting CMYK. Instead it would use a simplistic approach to split RGB into some sort of CMYK numbers (but not profile-matched accurate ones), and then convert the user's selection back into RGB numbers for storage in the SVG. So although there was a CMYK color picker, Inkscape did not really "handle CMYK."

Starting with version 0.46, however, work has started that will begin to break the negative cycle of lack of CMYK support both in Inkscape and in other software. Leveraging the icc-color support in the SVG 1.1 spec, it is possible to use a CMYK color profile to store and work with proper CMYK values. Although no UI was added to allow a simple means to reference an ICC profile, once a SVG file that contains a reference to an ICC profile is opened, a new "CMS" color picker is enabled that can be used to choose colors using accurate values in proper CMYK.

What this does is allow for initial work with proper CMYK to be started. Users who are aware can start creating files with CMYK values with just a little manual tweaking. More importantly, however, is that people working on other programs can now start getting CMYK SVG files that are standard-compliant and thus can start adding support on their side. One such project is Scribus, who's developers have been coordinating with the Inkscape team, and who are looking at supporting such ICC profile SVG files in their next version.

That still leaves Inkscape with several areas to work on, but these are mainly independent now that the core work is in, and can be attacked independently of each other:

• Add a basic UI for linking to ICC Profile files.
• Integrate ICC profile support into the existing color selectors, including out-of-gamut selection warning.
• Scan existing codebase for areas that limit themselves to RGB or RGBA values and thus can strip out full icc colors.
• Improved style and/or CSS support to manage paint types, palettes, etc.
• Basic support for "registration" color/style.
• Coordinate with Cairo team on extending API beyond RGB
• CMYK PDF export

Read more!

Inkscape 'shell' patch

I'm not sure why, but you can now launch Inkscape in a mode with a simple interactive shell. Someone submitted a patch a few weeks back that presented a "server" mode so they could run multiple Inkscape commands without actually relaunching the application.

I wasn't sure myself of where this would be most useful, but a few of our guys said it could help in some cases. I finally had time to clean up the bits of the implementation (though there still might be some lingering Windows issues) and get it submitted. There's a warning that pops up when exiting, but otherwise it seems ready to start using. We probably need to give a little thought to tweaks like the character or string for the prompt, etc. A bit more refinement is probably good.

It takes the same command format as the command-line interface that has been in Inkscape for some time. We might need to add a bit more, but finding out how people use it and what they run up against will probably shake all that out.

Read more!