Re: [Inkscape-user] [Inkscape-devel] In praise of Inkscape
Some more praise:
We use Inkscape to make posters for scientific meetings. The ease with which we can create beautiful, unintrusive text boxes and flow charts is unparalleled. And of course cartoons of all sorts. I can't hardly believe we used to bring in PowerPoint for the task! those nightmarish days are over. Plus, Inkscape intergrates very well with the host OS, i.e. dragging and dropping images and text just works.
In this regard, I must mention that exporting to PDF is a big deal. Figuring out the exact dimensions of the poster relative to the final print is some sort of obscure magic for us, simple mortal users. With PDFs, printers (or their drivers) have zero problems to scale on the fly and thus generate perfect maximized print outs of our gigantic posters.
What surpises me, though, is that exporting to PDF seems to leave images uncompressed, resulting in 300+ Mb posters.
In short: congratulations! And keep at it! We take time to tell our visitors (at the poster, during the conference) how the poster was made, since they usually comment on how beautiful it looks (no kidding). Inkscape, Blender and ImageJ are always mentioned.
Albert
--
Albert Cardona Molecular Cell Developmental Biology University of California Los Angeles Tel +1 310 2067376 Programming: http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/trakem2.html http://www.pensament.net/java/ Research: http://www.mcdb.ucla.edu/Research/Hartenstein/
On 2007-April-28 , at 06:27 , Albert Cardona wrote:
We use Inkscape to make posters for scientific meetings. The ease with which we can create beautiful, unintrusive text boxes and flow charts is unparalleled. And of course cartoons of all sorts. I can't hardly believe we used to bring in PowerPoint for the task! those nightmarish days are over. Plus, Inkscape intergrates very well with the host OS, i.e. dragging and dropping images and text just works.
In this regard, I must mention that exporting to PDF is a big deal. Figuring out the exact dimensions of the poster relative to the final print is some sort of obscure magic for us, simple mortal users. With PDFs, printers (or their drivers) have zero problems to scale on the fly and thus generate perfect maximized print outs of our gigantic posters.
That's very nice to know! I also use Inkscape to do scientific posters and as I don't want to bother with scaling computations I usually design it directly at final size. Inkscape deals as easily with a 1m*1m page than with an A4 one and it allows me to specify sizes (including font sizes) in cm and get a better feeling of how big things will actually be. In addition, raster images (jpeg, png, tiff and the like) are often imported among the scalable objects and having them included at their final size allows me to know how pixelized they will appear in print.
What surpises me, though, is that exporting to PDF seems to leave images uncompressed, resulting in 300+ Mb posters.
I don't know which pdf exporter you used (regular PDF or Cairo PDF) but at some point these exporters "rasterize" some elements (another reason why designing the poster at final size in interesting: these elements still look sharp and crisp). Transparent areas or gradients for example are converted from scalable entities to a bunch of pixels. Given how big posters usually are it implies creating a large number of pixels hence the size. Nevertheless I never experienced such large sizes!
In short: congratulations! And keep at it! We take time to tell our visitors (at the poster, during the conference) how the poster was made, since they usually comment on how beautiful it looks (no kidding). Inkscape, Blender and ImageJ are always mentioned.
I usually include inkscape logo in a corner of the poster, together with the website address, to give credit to the Inkscape team for their work. Inkscape logo is so nice and original that it can even attract readers!
There is section on the website dedicated to use cases of Inkscape in "real life". What about adding a part explaining the design of scientific posters? I had prepared a few screenshots some time ago and I re-wrote accompanying texts (see below - please correct my english where necessary). What do people think? Is it good enough for the website? BTW Bryce or anyone, it seems I can't connect to inkscape.org currently (I get a 104 error: "Connection reset by peer" from osuosl)
-------------------------- A scientific poster has to be precisely organized, full of information, yet visually attracting to gather a large audience. Furthermore it should be printable at different sizes (final size poster and handouts). Inkscape gives us scalability and an unparalleled ease of use which allow to meet these goals elegantly. It make you forget the nightmarish days when you used PowerPoint for the task! The poster below was designed entirely in Inkscape for presentation on a 4-foot-high by 8-foot-wide poster board (1.2m x 2.4m). The page size was set up to be the final printing size because Inkscape deals with it as well as with an A4 page. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/ poster_publish_ghostscript.pdf [WARNING: big file. 7.5 Mb]
Temporarily masking layers and using the outline mode allowed to work on this complicated file (> 5000 paths, large amount of text) while keeping things responsive enough even on a mid level laptop. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_outline.png
The gradients and scripts from the "Effects" menu helped to create an attractive look [note: this was pre 0.45 so blur was not current yet]. The bitmap tracing feature and Open Clipart Library provided scale independent eye candy for some illustrations. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_eye_candy.png
The text was flowed into custom shaped frames so that it had a "clever" position with respect to the graphics. It was edited though the Text Tool palette which was easier on the eye and helped to focus on content rather than on layout for a while. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_text.png
All scientific plots were produced in scalable formats and converted to SVG. They were therefore completely editable within the poster which allowed to have a unified look (for the fonts, line width, colors etc.). The "Apply style" command (SHIFT+CTRL+V), the styles bar and the swatches panel, helped to work with styles quickly and easily. http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_style1.png http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/poster_inkscape_style2.png
Finally the SVG file was exported to EPS or PDF for print. The text was converted to shapes to avoid font problems when bringing the file to the printing company. The PDF scaled down nicely to fit an A4 and hence serve as handouts. --------------------------
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
Hi Jiho,
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
Sharing my posters is not a problem either, but they are *big*. 100 Mb is about the smallest -they're heavy on high-resolution images (I can, of course, make low-res jpegs if them, since they are uncompressed tiffs in most cases). Images are usually way bigger than their actual printing size in the poster (like, close to 12000 x 30000 pixels in one instance), that is why I don't care about automatic on-the-fly rescaling of the PDFs that Inkscape generates.
Before 0.45, I had to create an encapsulated postcript and then use eps2pdf to create pdfs -but then transparencies were gone (AFAIK postscript doesn't support them, or for some reason they didn't make it to the .eps file). Otherwise printers take the postcript and never rescale it to fit in the 43 inch paper roll -which is, honestly, a pain I should not spend time worrying about. And noone else for that matter. There is a measure of "good enough" where any work has reached a very presentable state while managing to avoid almost all annoying, voraciously-time-consuming details.
Albert
Albert Cardona Molecular Cell Developmental Biology University of California Los Angeles Tel +1 310 2067376 Programming: http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/trakem2.html http://www.pensament.net/java/ Research: http://www.mcdb.ucla.edu/Research/Hartenstein/
On 2007-April-28 , at 09:35 , Albert Cardona wrote:
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
I don't know if it is really the intend of the showcase section to explain the design part of the poster, in particular because there are already numerous resources about this on the web (I guess you may know this one: http://www.tos.org/pdfs/sci_speaking.pdf). In my opinion it is more a showcase for Inkscape *features* i.e. explaining what makes it easier to work with Inkscape than with other software, how to achieve some effects with Inkscape etc. However if you write such an article I will surely be interested in it!
Sharing my posters is not a problem either, but they are *big*. 100 Mb is about the smallest -they're heavy on high-resolution images (I can, of course, make low-res jpegs if them, since they are uncompressed tiffs in most cases). Images are usually way bigger than their actual printing size in the poster (like, close to 12000 x 30000 pixels in one instance), that is why I don't care about automatic on-the-fly rescaling of the PDFs that Inkscape generates.
OK that's probably the explanation for the large size of your posters. It is true that high resolution uncompressed TIFFs are the best way to get nice results once printed, especially if you scale them up, but it is possible to achieve smaller sizes without sacrificing quality. I usually resize my images to their final physical size using a good quality scaling algorithm (Cubic or Lanczos interpolation in Gimp), use a resolution of 150dpi, and save them in PNG. 150dpi is smaller than the printer's resolution but I find it good enough for a poster, given that they are meant to be viewed from a distance. PNG compression does not affect image quality (as opposed to JPEG compression). This results in 1300*1750 pixels for a A4 size picture for example, which weights 2Mb in PNG versus 6.5Mb in TIFF. The only cumbersome part is that Inkscape does not currently honor resolution settings of imported image and rescales them to obtain a 90dpi resolution so I have to manually resize them in the toolbar after importing them but, well, I need to do it only once for each image.
Before 0.45, I had to create an encapsulated postcript and then use eps2pdf to create pdfs -but then transparencies were gone (AFAIK postscript doesn't support them, or for some reason they didn't make it to the .eps file).
You are right postscript does not support transparency.
Otherwise printers take the postcript and never rescale it to fit in the 43 inch paper roll -which is, honestly, a pain I should not spend time worrying about. And noone else for that matter. There is a measure of "good enough" where any work has reached a very presentable state while managing to avoid almost all annoying, voraciously-time-consuming details.
Another reason why I use final size from the start. I really don't want to worry about the scaling issues with the printer, about how my images will look once scaled etc. Working at final size throughout the production phase prevents you from bad surprises at the end (and given that there is always a rush to get those poster printed before boarding the plane for the meeting it is really valuable to know that everything will go smoothly!)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On 2007-April-28 , at 10:21 , jiho wrote:
On 2007-April-28 , at 09:35 , Albert Cardona wrote:
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
I don't know if it is really the intend of the showcase section to explain the design part of the poster, in particular because there are already numerous resources about this on the web (I guess you may know this one: http://www.tos.org/pdfs/sci_speaking.pdf). In my opinion it is more a showcase for Inkscape *features* i.e. explaining what makes it easier to work with Inkscape than with other software, how to achieve some effects with Inkscape etc. However if you write such an article I will surely be interested in it!
Just some additional thoughts on this: if you wish to write an article explaining how to catch the eye, how to choose good colors etc. but focusing on how Inkscape helps you achieve these goals (e.g. the color swatches which help you keep a unified color palette) I think it would be well suited for the showcase section. Maybe that's what you meant by the "tip-boxes".
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 02:41:53PM +0200, jiho wrote:
On 2007-April-28 , at 10:21 , jiho wrote:
On 2007-April-28 , at 09:35 , Albert Cardona wrote:
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
I don't know if it is really the intend of the showcase section to explain the design part of the poster, in particular because there are already numerous resources about this on the web (I guess you may know this one: http://www.tos.org/pdfs/sci_speaking.pdf). In my opinion it is more a showcase for Inkscape *features* i.e. explaining what makes it easier to work with Inkscape than with other software, how to achieve some effects with Inkscape etc. However if you write such an article I will surely be interested in it!
Just some additional thoughts on this: if you wish to write an article explaining how to catch the eye, how to choose good colors etc. but focusing on how Inkscape helps you achieve these goals (e.g. the color swatches which help you keep a unified color palette) I think it would be well suited for the showcase section. Maybe that's what you meant by the "tip-boxes".
I think this is an *excellent* idea - things like this would really help get the word out.
It would be great to see more articles published beyond our usual Linux-focused publications, to get the word pushed out beyond just the FOSS circles. So if you know of any science/education type publications, they might be great to focus on.
Bryce
Hi Albert,
On 4/28/07, Albert Cardona <cardona@...2196...> wrote:
I have no problem in writing a short article on how to compose posters for scientific conferences. I will put though a lot more attention to the poster itself -the art of catching the eye, balancing color contents, and doing whatever possible to attract attention, while delivering minimal but memorable information. Then, inserted, I'd put in tip-boxes on how to accomplish a given feature of the poster using Inkscape.
What about this. Are you still ready to write a short article about using Inkscape to create nice posters? I'll be glad to see this on the website and to add my experience to it also, if you need it. Bryce was also talking about publishing this in a non Linux-oriented magazine. I don't know to which extent this could be feasible though.
Cheers,
participants (3)
-
Albert Cardona -
Bryce Harrington -
jiho