Hi all,
For those who were not able to attend and/or also wondering about the quietness on IRC or the ML over the weekend, below is far from complete summary of the Libre Graphics Meeting held this past weekend in Lyon, France.
First, this was the first ever meet of all the Scribus devels in the same place with the exception of Franz who could not attend.
This meeting came about from the generous offer of Dave Neary from the GIMP team to bring in other graphics app developers such as Inkscape and it soon snowballed into a larger meet. Dave and the local Linux LUG group did a fantastic job organzing everything and a great time was had by all.
One of the first presentations was by Øyvind Kolås aka pippin from the GIMP team demoing working code using GEGL,babl and gggl , the next generation of image libraries for the GIMP and other applications. Most impressive is the way Øyvind used oxide and bauxite, which are built from these components.
For end users, GEGL, babl and gggl are a means to break the current limits in GIMP with 16bit and larger bit depths available, along with the ability to support other color spaces like CieLAB and CMYK. When can we see this in cvs ? The GIMP devs I spoke with said as soon as 2.4 is released.
Next up was Marti Maria from littlecms and now HP. He gave an excellent presentation connecting how we see as humans with the nature of digital color in computing. Suffice to say, Scribus is as good as any at demonstrating littlecms' capabilities. Little known is indeed littlecms is used in the color management firmware in a number of high end HP specialty printers. We're hoping we can have that presentation on the docs site as a primer for beginning with color management.
Gerald Friedland gave a demo of SIOX or Simple Interactive Object Extraction, which is in the current development version of GIMP. Simply put, SIOX is a clever new way of selecting objects in an image in a way which otherwise takes many manual steps. If you have a chance to get the latest GIMP beta, it is worth it just to see this in action. Who says open source folks do not innovate ?
Cedric Gemy, better know for his new book on GIMP 2.2 in French 'Gimp 2 efficace' gave a demo of Tuxpaint in French. If you can read French, his new book is probably the most comprehensive book on GIMP 2.2.x
Jon Phillips from Inkscape gave a talk on Create and how open source graphics applications are working to share things like brushes, color swatches and other image oriented media.
Xara has been open sourced - a very bold move for a commercial graphics application company. Xara is an illustration application which has tremendous rendering speed on the canvas among other assets. One of the principal reasons for open sourcing the "crown jewels" as they put it, is to port Xara to Linux and MacOSX.
It was obvious from the interaction with other teams and developers that not only the Xara folks were very much welcome there, but also they have taken the open source development model to heart.
The Blender folks had a number of small talks and demos, but owning to other meetings none of us had much time to participate.
One of the best parts of this meet was the time spent outside of the presentations to be able to meet and interact with other teams. Examples: Marti Maria from Littlecms gave us some hints on making Scribus more robust when handling corrupted icc profiles. We also had the chance to meet Carl Worth who developed Cairo.
Sunday afternoon was a chance to meet with the Inkscape team and we looked over our mutual future plans. Jon Cruz from Inkscape showed off a drag and drop debugging tool, which should help us with Scribus to make drag and drop work easier with a more diverse group of applications.
Similarly, we outlined how Scribus uses Ghostscript to import EPS and PS files with high fidelity. Adding this to Inkscape should be feasible without a major rewrite of Inkscape. The collaboration between Inkscape and Scribus teams has been good and should be even better in the future now we have met face to face. More to come later on.
If there was one area lacking was simply time to meet and exchange with everyone there. We had less time to meet with some of the GIMP team than hoped, but we did have some informal one to one chats and we are much more attuned to future plans and wishlists.
The GIMP team has been often unfairly criticized, in my opinion, for perceived shortcomings and unwillingness to address long standing feature requests. To the contrary, my sense is they are very well aware of these requests, but they are a small team indeed, not much larger than Scribus.
That said, what I saw and heard gives me confidence that the GIMP will see major additions to its feature list in the future. The plans they outlines for future versions are ambitious.
Other folks there included one of the Krita developers and folks from the Tango Project.
One great surprise was to meet Nicholas Spalinger and Victor Gaultney, creator of the award winning typeface Gentium, which has been re-released under their newly written Open Font License. A few of us over a dinner had a chance to learn a great deal about Gentium, typography and future plans for enhancements and additions.
The Open Font License has been carefully researched and written to maintain both openess and type creators desire for artistic integrity. This license avoids the kind of ambiguity discussed a few months ago on the list here about font embedding and the GPL.
Summing up, the meet exceeded everyone's expectations I suspect. The atmosphere was fun, collegial and less a show and tell, than a chance for lots of face to exchanges.
Attendance was roughly double the number anticipated. The simple fact this kind of event took place is a testament to the capabilities and maturity of open source graphics applications. Five years ago when Scribus was launched, one could hardly imagine an event like this.
Already, it was decided amongst the teams to meet again next year and work is underway already on a venue. Discussion and plans will take place on the Create list on freedesktop.
I'm sure I missed some important bits, but maybe we will see you there next year...
Peter