Ryan Lerch: Fedora 9 Released

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:25:46 +0000

Jon Phillips: Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:04:07 +0000

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

Ryan Lerch: Issue 1 of ?Code:Free? - an Art Magazine for FOSS artists

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:28:01 +0000

Ryan Lerch: inkscape wallpapers / desktop backgrounds

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:34:07 +0000

Jon Phillips: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:45:43 +0000

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 Wroc?aw, 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.

Ryan Lerch: Inkscape 0.46 Fully released.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:27:19 +0000

Jon Phillips: Inkscape 0.46 Released

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:56:11 +0000

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.

Nicu Buculei: On a scale of evil from 6660 to 6666

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:50:18 +0000

I know the real "evil" number is 666, but the 666-th upload to the Open Clip Art Library was long ago, so the best I can do is to try a surrogate, a replacement something looking close to it. So I uploaded another milestone:

I am not sure what is "more evil", 6660 or 6666 or if they are evil enough to count, so I uploaded both the image number 6660 and image 6666 (both were imports from the old website), hope this make me sort of evil:

As Johnny Automatic noted on the mailing list, about February 2008: "this month has seen more submissions than any month since we began tracking them", we were up to something this month and still have one more day to go:

What's next? I still have a lot of files from the old site to dump into ccHost, so I will continue my share of increasing the monthly uploads for a while. And I'll continue to be evil (or at least try to).

Nicu Buculei: Tons of clipart: openclipart.org daily snapshot

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:30:54 +0000

Quite late, a couple of years late, the 0.18 release of the Open Clip Art Library got packaged for Fedora and is expected to hit a Rawhide near you (thanks lkundrak for that).

But that release is ancient, in the meantime we changed the site infrastructure (and lost the ability to do formal releases), gathered thousands of new images from hundreds of new users. What to do, lots of people want the images, we have them but no easy way to bulk download?

I present you the daily SVG snapshot: a large tarball containing all the SVG and SVGZ files from our ccHost installation. Today's (the first) snapshot is 156 MB (tar.bz2, it extracts in about 600 MB) and contain over 8.000 images (all of them released as Public Domain).

As a downside, it does lack meaningful structure, the files are grouped in folders by authors, not by topics/keywords/tags and we don't have keywords metadata inside SVG, so searching is a daunting task. But this is the best I can do, provide at least the content.

Note that this does not replace the old 0.18 release, is complementary and contain mostly images submitted after that release (even if this is changing at a glacial speed as some of us re-upload by hand images from the old site to the new one).

I forgot something? Yes, the link to the tarball, of course, the most important thing :D Go to the Open Clip Art Library downloads page and get daily_SVG_snapshot.tar.bz2 (no direct link from my blog as I'm not sure if it's a good idea do for a 156 MB download).

So use the clipart, enjoy it and maybe contribute back!

Nicu Buculei: Pac-Man baddies with Inkscape: clipart, tutorial, screencast and challenge

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:17:54 +0000

My not so secret Pac-Man project is finished, the clipart images are available on my collection as well as on openclipart.org, the tutorial is on the tutorials page, a screencast too, so now is the time to talk about them.

Ladies and gentelmen, here are some Pac-Man bad buys and bad girls:

The idea started months ago, when I made a silly cartoon about Fedora Games and I quickly realized the potential: is easy and fun (at least I think so), anybody can create such graphics and a tutorial is obvious and quick enough to be covered also by a screencast.
It got stuck in my head for a long time, screaming to get out waiting for me to get in the right mood for that. And in the end I gave up.

I started by doing a screencast (as I said, is based on a concept I was already familiar with), sorry for the Flash abuse, it is made with Istanbul in Ogg Theora and I have the original, but until fedoratv gets usable, its temporary home will be on YouTube.


Then I made in Inkscape the base shape, taking at each step screenshots for a future tutorial.

When done the next step was to create various derivatives, changing either the texture or the shape, there are many of them I like, for example the ninja-pirate duo (who would win in a fight?):

or the textured stripes and camouflage:

The original plan was to create 9 distinct images but the ideas came over and over so I jumped first at 16 and ended with 25 images (and still have a lot of ideas, but enough is enough).

Then I uploaded the images: both in a pacman gallery of my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (check the arcade tag).

After that, crop the screenshots, combine them, put together in a HTML, add some English text and the Pac-Man baddies Inkscape tutorial is made. Translate everything into Romanian language (yup, I write in English first), put everything online, including the screencast and I am almost done.

The last step is this: blog about them and throw a challenge: look at the gallery and find one baddie representing you. If you can't find one, read the tutorial and draw one yourself. Enjoy it. Show it to the entire world. Maybe upload it to the Open Clip Art Library.

And with that, enough for me with clipart for a while...

Ryan Lerch: Inkscape at SCaLE and Inkscape Stickers.

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:24:09 +0000

Nicu Buculei: How it's made: my map elements with Inkscape

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:00:19 +0000

I imagine such a preamble is not very inviting, but it is the preamble of the latest article from my tutorials website:

It's been a while since I wrote a tutorial (in fact quite a while, as "wrote" != "published") and that was for good reason: I was not able to come with a tutorial fitting the rest of my my tutorial site and did not want to break the tradition . So it was a hard decision to write this piece, which comes as a conclusion to my quest to create a RPG tileset of over 50 clipart images, a decision I made mostly because I already was asked about how I made the images and expect even more questions in the future.

It is not really a tutorial, more a "how it's made" for my map tileset (available also from the Open CLip Art Library), it describe the process I used in creating those images, a very short sketch of the workflow (described in more detail in the article) is like this:

[read more]

Of course, there is available as usual a Romanian translation.

And now I can really consider this topic closed.

Nicu Buculei: Quest complete: RPG map tileset

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:27:15 +0000

I can consider complete my quest for a RPG map tileset, 50 images are done (outline and full color), uploaded to my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (look at the cartography tag).

Now is the time to sit back, relax, upload some samples in various places (like here), annoy people with that and maybe think at the next step, which should be something different. Or should I do more pieces for the set, considering I have a long list with additional ideas? This is a good think to think about while sitting back.

I don't know how transparent is from those clipart images how much I miss the time when I used to fight orcs and be happy about that. I guess it's quite obvious (is a long time, about an year and a half).

PS: the samples above are JPEGs, the PNG version was to big in file size, so I had to use lossy compression (with high quality), but load the JPEG, change the extension and will get either PNG and SVG.

Nicu Buculei: Uploading to OCAL is killing me...

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:52:55 +0000

So the time has come: the set is done, it have to be uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library. Unfortunately by hand, one by one, the full color image, the outline and a PNG thumbnail.
Question again: what are the computers build for? By any chance to help us automate repetitive tasks? Anyone wonders why I hesitate re-uploading my images (some hundreds) from the old site? Look at the pretty screencast (2.8MB, Ogg Theora) and multiply the operation with 50 (the number of images I have to upload):

Php coders badly needed... anyone available?

Nicu Buculei: Coloring the map

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:24:23 +0000

The other day I talked about the outlines for my RPG map tileset, naturally I went to the next step: adding pretty colors (as planned) and it progress quite fast, it is the easy part.

I tried to get a balanced result: at the same time shiny enough but also simple enough, I could have added a lot more details but this is my current trade-off (feel free to start from the outlines and do your own colorization).

One decision I made will surely come back and bite me in the ass: I used gradients. They make the look prettier but after importing a few images with gradients Inkscape gets confused very fast (it is a known bug).

But enough for now, I spammed enough with this topic, will talk again about it when the set will be complete and uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library (hopefully next week considering the current speed). Until then I will quietly update my gallery, one by one.

Nicu Buculei: Halfway to an empty pledge: a RPG map tileset

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:51:10 +0000

One of my many failures in 2007 was to get the people at the Open Clip Art Library into holding a "month of cartography", such a benign defeat is a good show of how bad I react at losing.

A few years ago I made a proof of concept about how Inkscape can be used to create RPG maps and a (small at the time) number of terrain SVG tiles. This showed to be one of the hottest topics on my blog, with important traffic, many reactions and follow-ups (I got many people contacting me offline about it). It can be considered a success.

Recently on the Inkscape users mailing list the topic of cartography came to attention so I got the idea about holding a "month of cartography" at OCAL, we used to have such things, but the (still unfinished) migration to ccHost shifted the focus. They are good for channeling energies, gaining momentum, generating buzz and potentially bringing new contributors and users.
My approach was to make a pledge: if at least two other people back me and will contribute, I pledged to contribute at least 50 new, original, images.

The idea didn't got enough traction, nobody backed me. So here is me bad at losing: once the idea was developed in my head, I continued working on it and created (at a slow pace, due to the low motivation) the above mentioned quantity of images. So today I am halfway to this pledge: I finished the outlines (this was the hardest part) for 50 images, they still nedd to be colored (that is the second half), see below a few highlights:

For now the images are available for download as part of my own clipart collection, after I add colors they will be uploaded (both as outline and full-color) to the Open CLip Art Library. The coloring process will follow at the same slow pace, probably I will make enough noise when ready.

The set is not consistent as style, scale, perspective or quality but, hey, I pledged 50 images, not 50 quality images... (could it still be labeled as a set?) see also a screenshot with the entire set:

When approaching the target number a motivational issue appeared and I got confused about what to do next: start coloring, as originally planned, draw more new shaped, as I have in my head a large list of items which could be drawn or just call all this thing off, freeze and upload as it is.
Most likely I will stick to the plan but he work speed may have to suffer, watch the tileset to monitor the progress.

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

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:49:43 +0000

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!!!

Jon Phillips: Today is Public Domain Day!

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:50:18 +0000

Open Clip Art Library is helping celebreate Public Domain Day!!! All content submitted to the Open Clip Art Library is dedicated into the public domain! Hooray!!! As a community, we need to look at Creative Commons new CC0 project and figure out how to migrate to this once released hopefully in mid-January. Here is more from the original post:

January 1st is Public Domain Day, as noted by copyrightwatch.ca:

Welcome to 2008, and let?s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it?s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs from the death of the author of a work until the end of the 50th, 70th, or some other year thereafter.

Read the whole post for some notable works falling into the public domain in some jurisdictions.

Everybody’s Libraries also has an informative post about Public Domain Day 2008.

A post from Lessig on Public Domain Day 2004.

The microformats community jumped the gun, announcing a transition of their wiki to the public domain a few days ago.

Creative Commons offers a public domain dedication and we’ve announced that we’ll be upgrading and extending that this year with the CC0 project.

Via Boing Boing.

Jon Phillips: Happy Anniversary! and Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:37:46 +0000

From a cold Beijing, that is amazingly cleaned up and metropolitan, merry xmas and happy holidays and happy new year!

Most importantly, happy 1 year anniversary to Lu for being married for one year (to me)! Its taken a massive amount of engineering to get here right now and to have some degrees of freedom for our lives, so pretty happy about that overall!

Now its time for me, my mom, dad, Lu and I to take 24 hour train to Guangzhou…geez, I miss my 14 hour battery now

Time to get sentimental and see some amazing country-side while my real imagination comes true. Time to hack on OpenMoko and Open Clip Art Library while on the train

BTW, while waiting for my parents at the Beijing International Airport, I decided to break from that activity to find the atm. While walking towards it, out from the domestic terminal came the the worlds tallest man!!!

I stopped dead in my track and like the other Chinese folks around me, pulled out my phone and took a picture!

Ryan Lerch: Inkscape About Screen Contest Announced.

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:07:47 +0000

Jon Phillips: Kottke?s Silkscreen Font on Open Font Library

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:02:29 +0000

This week has been crazy! First, I have been working on a couple of huge announcements for projects I manage at Creative Commons for CC’s 5th Birthday Party tomorrow (SAT) in SF (its free and freer). And, Lu and I have rented out our new place we got in SF and are going to spend the next few months in China getting that part of our lives settled.

And, on the side, Alex sent me over this cool little piece posted on the web by mihmo saying Jason Kottke had licensed his ever-so-popular Silkscreen font under the Open Font License and even better, he uploaded it to the Open Font Library. Cool!

Here is Kottke’s description of the Silkscreen font:

Silkscreen is best used in places where extremely small graphical display type is needed (duh!). The primary use is for navigational items (nav bars, menus, etc.). However, you can also use it for image captions and the like…wherever small type is needed. Silkscreen also works very well at large point sizes if you’re looking for that chunky, old school computer look so popular with the kids today.

In order to preserve the proper spacing and letterforms, Silkscreen should be used at 8pt. multiples (8pt., 16pt., 24pt., etc.) with anti-aliasing turned off. For larger text (larger than 64pt.), you can use whatever size you want without too much of a problem.

Check it out and use the site! It is the Open Clip Art Library’s sister site…please use it! And, don’t forget to upload your fonts and/or help make better free and open fonts from the ones already posted.

Ryan Lerch: Clipart of the Week

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:45:26 +0000

Ryan Lerch: New version of DiscLabel for Mac OS X comes bundled with 1300 OCAL images.

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:55:58 +0000

Ryan Lerch: Clipart of the Week

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 02:15:08 +0000

Jon Phillips: Brilliant Submissions to Open Clip Art Library

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:13:03 +0000

I live in San Francisco and I try to keep up on the various metrics, searches, and so forth in my various involvements. I came across these beautiful vector graphics generated for San Francisco Arts Commission?s Art on Market Street Program by Steve Lambert.

In looking closer at these images, I noticed that Steve released them all into the public domain and uploaded ALL the assets to the Open Clip Art Library for ANYONE to use. Hats off to Steve and this is an open invitation for anyone to use these great images in your work!

This image is under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license by Steve Lambert.

Read more from Steve’s site:

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked architects, city planners, and transportation engineers, ?what would you do if you didn?t have to worry about budgets, beauracracy, politics, or physics?? Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed, and perhaps mildly exaggerated by Steve and Packard to create a series of 6 posters for the San Francisco Arts Commission?s Art on Market Street Program.

6 foot tall by 4 foot wide giclee prints (Don?t let the postcard name fool ya, these are big)
6 designs, each in edition of 4 (24 total)

Steve and Packard would like to thank:
Peter Albert SF Municipal Transportation Agency
Prof. Nezar AlSayaad, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Prof. Timothy P. Duane, Dept. of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Drew Howard, SF Muni Light Rail
John Peterson,, Public Architecture
Tom Radulovich, Livable City, BART
Seleta Reynolds, Fehr & Peeers

It looks like some great people worked on this project and it was also developed through the other great Creative Commons supporter, Eyebeam’s OpenLab.

UPDATE: Also, I should have noted that half of this work was done by Packard Jennings. A big thanks to him as a well and hopefully he will also release his parts to the Open Clip Art Library and into the public domain. CHeers!

Jon Phillips: Open Clip Art Library Import/Export in Inkscape!

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:14:22 +0000

Yes, this is true…let the floodgates open! Andy had some nice screengrabs of the future This new functionality, developed by Google Summer of Code student, Bruno Dilly, will be in the upcoming Inkscape 0.46 release…bring it on sooner rather than later! Let your favorite Inkscape developers know you want 0.46 out sooner rather than later

Let the flood of remixing begin!

Now, I start to question why even store anything on your hard drive?

Hopefully though, this will bring on many new levels of users and developers to Open Clip Art Library. We need many developers to help with the system, which is now running on the rock-solid OSUOSL.org infrastructure. Bring on the content!

Ryan Lerch: Upcoming Inkscape Features

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:12:04 +0000

Ryan Lerch: Clipart of the Week

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 23:29:21 +0000

Ryan Lerch: Clipart of the week

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:01:06 +0000

Jon Phillips: ?please get a newer Subversion client? one-liner

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 05:31:58 +0000

Heya, this is a sign-post for google and anyone looking to get around updating their checked out repos that are used with a higher versioned subversion (svn) and then you have to migrate that content where the svn client is an older version. If you do svn up on with the older client, you will get this: “please get a newer Subversion client.”

The trick, provided by OSUOSL’s own, emsearcy, is to checkout a fresh copy (we’ll call it the source) to sit besides your old checked out copy. Then run this one-liner:

rsync -r --progress --include='*/' --include '.svn/**' --exclude '*' \
SOURCE/ DESTINATION/

You will then be able to use svn once more! There might be some pitfalls like needed to do -av rather than -rv if you want read-only files to not be touched. Big ups to emsearcy!

NOTE: I’ve been working on openclipart.org and openfontlibrary.org migration and we’re almost there…thanks for hanging tough like NKOTB.

Jon Phillips: LGM 2007

Sun, 06 May 2007 15:01:00 +0000

Whoa, LGM 2007 (Libre Graphics Meeting 2 in Montreal) has been going off the chain for the past couple of days. I’m giving the last presentation of the day on the concepts of the Open Content Library, of which Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library are examples.

Here is my presentation if you are at all curious (or not): The Open Content Library at LGM 2007 PDF.

I’ll be back in SF tonite for some important meeting tomorrow and then back to hacking on some one cool TBA project and my various other projects.

I think I’m finally not burnt out from blogging too much, so I’ll hop on and right more now

Ryan Lerch: Clipart of the week

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:05:56 +0000

Ryan Lerch: Great Work JohnnyAutomatic!

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:09:44 +0000

Jon Phillips: Other Sites Like Open Clip Art Library (aka, Open Content Libraries)

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:09:44 +0000

I’m promoting the idea of open content libraries this year much. Thus, I put up a wiki to try and collect other sites that are already accomplishing similar tasks like Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library. It is called Open Content Library.

Right now this site is a wiki so that anyone can add their site. The idea though is that this could develop into a way to search many different sites’ open content.

For now, if you know of any general media/content categories, please add them to this wiki page so that we can get a better picture of what is out there. I’m specifically interested in what exists in the video and 3d model space, as I haven’t looked into it much.

NOTE: The Open Font Library logo competition is growing quickly. We hit 40 total submissions so far, this weekend. Please submit and join in the fun

Jon Phillips: Open Font Library Logo Competition Launched

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 03:24:39 +0000

OMG, I forgot to blog that we launched the Open Font Library Logo Competition yesterday. Blog it! Digg it! See the announcement below:

The Open Font Library (OFL.o, www.openfontlibrary.org) is proud to
announce the commencement of the Open Font Library Logo competition
today, February 26, 2007. Artists and designers of all ranges are
invited to make a logo to help identify the project. Judging will take
place by contributors to the project, Alex Roberts (bovinity),
Liftarn, and Zeimusu, who will select the winning logo. The last
chance to submit submissions is March 14, 2007 at 11:59 PM PST. After
that, the judges will select a logo within five days from the
submission closing date.

Other guidelines on the contest include that all submissions must be
dedicated to the public domain in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
format which may be edited in all major drawing application, like the
free SVG editor Inkscape (www.inkscape.org). Also, contributors may
upload as many submissions as they would like and optionally submit
bitmap graphics showing how their logo might look on the site. The
project is not wed to the current green color on the site, so please
feel free to think of how the site should be colored around your
submission.

The Open Font Library encourages all participants to join the Open
Font Library mailing list to discuss this competition and to
participate in the project. Also, for the time being, discussion about
this project is happening on channel #openclipart on irc.freenode.net
for any interested parties. While this competition is about creating a
great logo, the project hopes to interest hopeful font designers and
software developers in building up this project.

Join Mailing List

http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary

About Open Font Library

The Open Font Library’s (www.openfontlibrary.org) major goal is to
create an archive of freely usable fonts for anyone to download. If
this sounds familiar, its because it is newborn sister project to the
Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org). While the OFL.o’s site is
fresh, with few fonts, the goal is to build it up so that it can be
useful to the free and open source communities (and world).

For More Information:

Please see http://openfontlibrary.org/?ccm=/OFLBLogo for details
about this contest. It closes March 14 at 11:59 PM PST.

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Jon Phillips: eXMPi, XMP and Embedding Metadata

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:09:02 +0000

This is my comment to Hubert Figuiere, who is launching a library, eXMPi, for operating on XMP metadata in the Open Source world:

Yes, I think this is a great move Hubert! Unfortunately, Inkscape uses standard RDF, which can be formatted easily into XMP. Also, the Open Clip Art library reads SVGs which use this RDF.

Hubert, please point us to the code! Creative Commons is fully promoting XMP as the way to go for embedding metadata and the major freedesktop.org indexers are supporting it as well.

We should all push on adobe to get them to open source (GPL) their XMP toolkit which they are clutching. They can only gain from doing this sooner rather than later, especially now that Microsoft’s Vista Photo Gallery supports XMP.

How can we best accelerate this standard in open source? Linksvayer and I have looked at many standards and whatnot and the space is completely clogged up with the minions of metadata all over the web. So, between the complexity of systems for embedding and standardization of fields, XMP solves this nasty problem the best. The only area where metadata has somewhat standardized is in the music space with id3 with mp3s. Still, it would be good to have XMP support in the audio space to have uniformity.

Jon Phillips: The Key to FLOSS Success

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:54:37 +0000

Bryce wrote up a great blog post about how to compete with others in working in and around the free desktop. He wrote a memorable paragraph:

No, the key to success with FLOSS is its core attribute - it’s openness to community-scale collaboration. Focus on energizing a strong community and empowering new users to bring their new ideas and energy in. Give them lots of room to experiment, and assist them with paving a good foundation for them to build atop. Give them invitations rather than rules, and infrastructure rather than bureaucracy. Make it easier for people with little technical skill to participate, and treat them as first class citizens when they do.

Upcoming Inkscape Features

Friday, 27 Jul 2007 02:00 GMT

As Inkscape is constantly being developed and improved, there is always new features and improvements being implemented. Three of the cooler improvements are: On canvas gradient editing, selection by touch, and the new flood fill tool. Each of these new features can be read about in the Inkscape Wiki or you can install a development version of inkscape, or you can view the following screencasts that briefly demonstrate the new improvements.

       

Clipart of the Week

Monday, 23 Jul 2007 02:00 GMT

Pirates Boat by yeKcim

Clipart of the Week

Thursday, 19 Jul 2007 05:30 GMT

Cordless Phone
by Darth_Gimp

Clipart of the Week

Monday, 30 Apr 2007 01:01 GMT

Sword
by Chrisdesign

Great Work JohnnyAutomatic!

Wednesday, 18 Apr 2007 22:29 GMT

Recently, the open clip art library's biggest contributor of artwork,JohnnyAutomatic reached his 500th clipart upload on the new site. At the time of writing, JohnnyAutomatic had uploaded 519 pieces of clipart. (view the stats page). An example of JohnnyAutomatic's work (the Toy Robot) can be seen to the left.

The majority of JohnnyAutomatic's Uploads are taken from external archives of public domain clipart (like the US Patents Image Archive). He manually searches through these vast online archives, converts them to SVG and tweaks them sometimes to make them more usable.

If you are interested in helping the open clip art library by uploading images from external sources, there is a page on the wiki that lists some places to start, and some places where we have already started this process.