Photography on the free software desktop has come a long way in recent years. All of the major desktop environments support camera import and provide image management and editing applications, including the all-important raw file conversion. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users, optimized for point-and-shoot cameras and sharing photos online. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Rather than drop in a long, bulleted list of applications, though, let’s take a look at what the open source alternatives are, task-by-task, to get a better feel for how the pieces fit together into a normal photographic workflow.

by Nathan Willis

Color correction

At the lowest level, the open source community provides several tools useful for calibrating and profiling your displays and printers, which is an essential step in the basic color-correction and adjustment process. You can start by creating an ICC monitor profile using either Argyll or LPROF. Each of these tools supports a range of hardware colorimetry devices, but the lists of supported devices is different (you can see Argyll’s here, and LPROF’s in its documentation).

Argyll provides step-by-step instructions for adjusting your display and creating an ICC profile for your display, creating a scanner profile using an IT8.7/2 target, and creating an output device (either printer or film recorder) profile. Argyll is natively command-line only, but you can use the dispcalGUI for a nicer graphical interface if you so desire. LPROF has a graphical user interface, and can give excellent results, but the online documentation is not quite up-to-date, which can be a problem for new users.

“DispcalGUI and LPROF’s display profiling capabilities.”

The lion’s share of Linux and free software photo editors are already ICC-aware, so once you have your device profiles created, you can simply open up the preferences of the various applications, go to the color management section, and add the necessary profiles. This is true for GIMP, Krita, Digikam, UFRaw, and Raw Therapee.

The popular Rawstudio raw converter is also color-aware, but it takes a different approach with respect to the profiles of raw image files themselves, so you need to be aware of the differences. It uses DNG Color Profiles (DCP), which are specific to camera models, and the application includes more than 200 DCP profiles by default, covering all major brands and models, so it should not be any extra work for you. You can read background information about the color transformation process on the Rawstudio blog.

All of the open source photo editors worth their salt include support for soft proofing and embedding profiles into finished images.

Image and shoot management

The gPhoto2 function library sits underneath almost all desktop Linux environments, providing uniform access to downloading images directly from cameras or from memory cards. GNOME and KDE will usually pop up a window to enable you to offload your images as soon as a USB camera or card is connected — although you can configure both desktops not to do so, and offload the images from your image management application instead.

When it comes to image management application, no two photographers agree. The most popular choice at present is Digikam, which has robust and flexible IPTC/IIM and EXIF metadata management, tagging and categorization, and a flexible search system to help you keep track of your image library. In a multi-user environment, you might also want to check out ResourceSpace, which uses a web-app interface. ResourceSpace can be used to manage a collection remotely, and allows users to set up image collections and request sets based on the available library; it could be useful for interacting with clients.

“Digikam is a powerhouse at image management — shown here is the advanced search interface.”

For more workflow-oriented control, the application Darktable allows you to sort, filter, and batch-edit images by shoot. It also includes plenty of image-editing tools, and is extensible with plugins. The only serious drawback to Darktable is that the current release lacks ICC profile support, but it is schedule to appear in updates soon.

“The newer Darktable application combines workflow tools and raw conversion.”

If disaster strikes, in the form of an accidentally-erased memory card or a lost backup drive, you can install the open source file recovery tool PhotoRec to recover deleted images. Like all data recovery tools, PhotoRec can only recover files that have not been overwritten by newer content, but when possible, it can work wonders — scanning multi-gigabyte drives and cards in mere minutes and pulling out photo content you otherwise would have lost.

Raw editing

Most of the software already mentioned supports raw photo file formats, particularly UFRaw, Rawstudio, RawTherapee, Digikam, and Darktable. Of those, the first three are focused raw conversion tools, and offer the widest range of exposure controls, tone curve and other image adjustments, de-noising, and sharpening controls. You can save your adjusted images in a range of output formats, including 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF, as well as JPEG. Thanks to the LensFun library, most of the raw editors now include optical correction for barrel distortion, color aberration, and other lens artifacts. All are also lossless editors, so you do not have to worry about making destructive changes to your originals.

Choosing between the three raw editors is tricky; each offers its own unique set of features, but ultimately there is no reason not to have all three installed — as free software, the cost to you is the same.

“Editing a photo in UFRaw. The same photo is shown for comparison in Rawstudio and RawTherapee.”

“Editing a photo in Rawstudio. The same photo is shown for comparison in UFRaw and RawTherapee.”

“Editing a photo in RawTherapee. The same photo is shown for comparison in Rawstudio and UFRaw.”

Historically, all of the raw-supporting open source editors relied on a program called DCraw, written and maintained single-handedly by Dave Coffin, for raw decoding support. DCraw is great, and consistently updated as Canon, Nikon, and other manufacturers make changes to their file formats. The problem was that each project incorporated the DCraw code into its own editor independently. A recent change in this area is the development of LibRaw, a shared library that any program can connect to. This should help all of the editors maintain better compatibility, establish a common API, and let the programmers work on other important tasks without duplicating their efforts. LightZone and Bibble. Neither is open source, but if you are used to working with either on Windows or Mac OS X, it can simplify the transition knowing that you can move to Linux for all of your other needs and still have access to the software you are used to (and, in most cases, have already paid a license fee for).

Finally, if you are new to Linux as a platform, you may be surprised to see that there are several commercial raw editors available on Linux, including

Retouching

For retouching images, such as dust and blemish removal, you have several open source options. Krita, mentioned above, is a drawing and painting app that supports many photo editing features — cloning, healing, filters, layers, masking, and much, much more. Krita also has the advantages of letting you work on 16-bit native images, in the RGB, La*b*, or XYZ color spaces.

“Krita, retouching a 16bit-per-pixel depth image.”

GIMP does not fully support as many file type options as of today; support for 16-bit images is being added in the development branch, so you can try it out if you are feeling a little brave. On the other hand, where GIMP excels is in its extensive tools, scripts, and plugins. If you can make your final image adjustments in UFRaw or Rawstudio, you can export the result to GIMP for retouching.

“GIMP, showcasing the configurable Wacom tablet support.”

There are several other apps useful for retouching and general image manipulation, including Fotoxx and Nathive. A special mention belongs to Cinepaint; this application diverged from a much older version of the GIMP, and was re-tooled to support 16-bit and higher images for working with cinematic film effects. Unfortunately, it has not been actively developed for quite some time; the project claims that a rewrite is in development, though, so it could help to keep one eye on the project.

All of the image editors mentioned support pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, from basic USB devices providing only pressure support all the way up to expensive options from Wacom like the Cintiq, which incorporates an LCD display directly into the tablet for on-screen editing, and supports multiple input devices, tilt-sensitivity, and other enhancements.

Effects

The raster image editors Krita and GIMP support endless options for special effects, including duotones, vignetting, and almost any kind of transformation. GIMP’s scriptability and plugin system mean there is an endless supply of effects options. Besides the purely creative, noteworthy are some powerful adjustment tools.

Liquid Rescale, which can “intelligently” re-size an image, preserving important features like people, and compressing background information. SIOX image extraction can pull a foreground element out of a picture by intelligently finding its borders with only a rough outline drawn by hand — far faster than you can trace out the element with selection tools. Resynthesizer and G’MIC can generate realistic-looking image fills to replace edited-out details, drawing automatically on the image’s contents. This makes it easy to remove a stray object without having to paint over the spot in question with the clone tool alone.

Hugin is an app designed to stitch and blend images together seamlessly, creating wide-screen or even 360-degree panoramas (in a variety of projections and file formats). On top of that, it can correct distortion and lens aberration, perform perspective corrections such as those needed for architectural projection, and combing multiple images into focus stacks — where one image with the foreground in focus is seamlessly merged with another where just the background is in focus.

 ”Hugin previewing a stitched-together wide-angle panorama.”

Luminance HDR is a tool you can use for tone mapping multiple exposures, either to capture a high-dynamic-range scene and map it into a regular TIFF or JPEG file, or to perform other exposure tricks. Although Luminance HDR is a stand-alone app, tone-mapping is beginning to make its way into other open source photography tools, and may some day be a common feature.

Publishing

Some of the open source image managers, such as Digikam, support direct export of files to online photo hosting sites like Flickr. For a custom web gallery, there are an array of open source options available, such as Gallery, Plogger, and Zenphoto.

Direct export to one of these packages is not usually available from within image managers or photo editors, but there are a few exceptions, such as Digikam’s Pwigo export, and direct export is sometimes possible through a plugin. Most of the web gallery packages are based on standard Apache packages like PHP and MySQL. They vary considerably in the feature set and ease of configurability, though. Some, like Flash Gallery, can create effects such as slide shows, while others are tuned more for sharing and online discussions.

By and large, they are designed with multi-user galleries in mind, not with creating a portfolio site for a single photographer, and none (at the moment) are written to facilitate photographer-client proofing or print ordering (although this may change). Consequently, features like content tagging and geotagging are widespread, but features like selective access control are not.

Your best bet at developing an online photo hosting site for your work is probably to contract out some customization work to a web developer — one of the nicest things about open source is that the code is available for anyone too work with, including yourself, but including a short-term contractor as well.

If you have your images professionally printed, of course, you have no need to worry about operating systems. You can upload files to online print bureaus via Firefox (or any other open source browser) just like anyone else; these days your only real concern is if your print bureau uses a Flash-based interface, and even that is doable on normal, 32-bit Linux systems, which have good official Flash support.

Direct printing in Linux covers inkjet, laser, dye-sublimation, and exotic printer and ink types, primarily through the Gutenprint project. There are a few special-purpose print tools like Photoprint and Krokus that offer fast multi-image-per-page printing, but for the most part, good printing support comes built-in. The ICC profiling tools mentioned at the beginning cover output devices, too, as long as you put in the work to characterize your device.

Crazy stuff

The preceding paragraphs cover most of the day-to-day photography tasks you are likely to juggle for a typical digital photo job, but open source software rarely stops at playing it safe. There are some hidden gems in the free software photography world that you might not have heard of.

For example, the gPhoto2 utility, mentioned earlier as the library that offloads images from cameras and memory cards, has a few other tricks up its sleeve for cameras attached via USB cable. You can use gPhoto2 as a tethered shooting system for dozens of Canon, Nikon, and Olympus cameras, from point-and-shoot compacts to high-end DSLRs. How much control over exposure configuration, zoom, and other features you have depends on the camera itself, so check the remote controlling cameras page in the gPhoto2 documentation to see what capture options are available. Tethered shooting allows you to more quickly assess images on your computer’s screen, show them to clients, and copy files directly to hard disk, removing flash card size limitations. But it also opens the door to scriptability and other computer-control options, as imagination allows.

Even better than tethering, there are several open source projects to build enhanced firmware for popular digital cameras, adding new features beyond the factory settings. Similar work has gone on for years with Linux-based routers and set-top boxes, with great success, so it should come as no surprise that cameras attract a similar hacker crowd. The two main projects are CHDK, which offers builds for Canon compact cameras using the Digic II and Digic III chips, and Magic Lantern, which targets the EOS 550D and 5D Mark II.

CHDK can enable features from raw file output and full manual exposure to video zooming and motion detection. Nightly builds are available for a wide range of camera models. Not all features are possible on every camera, of course, and some cameras have more stress-tested firmware than others, so it is a good idea to consult the project’s wiki to see what is currently available.

Magic Lantern focuses on enhancing the video shooting capabilities of the high-end Canon DSLRs, including manual gain control, custom focus and bracketing, and improved audio monitoring. Magic Lantern is newer, and thus far does not support as many camera models, but several more are on the way. Best of all, because CHDK and Magic Lantern do not override the camera’s original firmware, they are both safe to use without risk of damage. You load the firmware image onto the camera’s memory card and power-cycle the camera while holding down a special key; to return to the stock firmware, just power-cycle the camera like normal.

Finally, there is an enthusiastic community of open source coders working on extending the features offered by the popular Eye-Fi brand SD cards, which add WiFi connectivity to inexpensive digital cameras. Eye-Fi hacks include direct upload (as opposed to funneling photos to a user account managed by Eye-Fi) and a host of other tricks; there is even work to integrate Eye-Fi usage with CHDK.

Photography is a fast-moving sector in the Linux and open source software world; perhaps because it sits at the nexus of so many left-brained and right-brained tasks it attracts a very enthusiastic user- and developer-base. Adobe and Apple may ingore the open source photographer crowd, but the fact is that the crowd basically doesn’t need them.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs like gLabels and capable desktop publishing apps like Scribus, most general office users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor of the office suite they feel the most comfortable in, like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is certainly a good choice, too; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful.

by Nathan Willis

Basic design

To create a basic label or business card document, simply choose File -> New -> Labels or File -> New -> Business Cards. A configuration window will pop up, with several tabs for specifying things like page dimensions, label dimensions, text formats, and so on.

The Labels dialog has just three tabs: “Labels,” “Format,” and “Options.” In the bottom of the Labels tab is the template selector, so you can simply choose from among the dozens of pre-configured label sheets that Writer supports — including all of the standard Avery options, plus several other brands. If you so desire, you can choose [User] as your label type; this will require you to specify the size and placement of the labels manually in the Format tab.

 ”The New Label creation dialog, where you can enter standard text to be reproduced on every label, and choose from dozens of pre-configured label types.”

If you need to print a page of identical labels (such as return addresses), you can simply enter the text in the “Label text” field of the Labels tab. Last but not least, the Options tab allows you to create an entire page, or just a single label, placed anywhere on the template you desire. When you have your settings chosen, click New Document.

The Business Cards dialog is significantly more complicated. The “Medium” tab allows you to select existing templates, whereas the content of the cards is created on three separate tabs, named “Business Cards,” “Private,” and “Business.” The Business Cards tab holds several information templates, such as “Modern, with Name” or “Elegant, with Name, without Slogan.” These pre-sets create the sheet of business cards by pulling the specified information off of whatever you enter in the “Private” and “Business” tabs.

 ”The Business Cards dialog, which splits up personal and business data.  The actual card layout is defined by templates chosen in the ‘Medium’ tab.”

You do need to be sure that you select a business card template in the Medium tab, however — the Business Cards tab appears to have a drop-down selection box for creating business cards, but this only creates the pre-filled lines of information, it does not correctly lay out a sheet of cards. The Format and Options tabs offer the same choices as they do when creating label sheets.

“Writer’s business card layout — the basic design is pretty bare-bones, so you will probably want to customize it.  Note, also, the floating ‘Synchronize Labels’ window, which you can use for adjusting for blank lines.”

In either case, the new document that Writer creates is fully editable; using the wizards this way allows you to create a non-mail-merge document. You may still want to perform heavy customization of the page once it is generated. For this, you have all of the power of OpenOffice’s design tools, including embedding images and control over text, line, and background colors.

If you plan to make modifications to the text itself, however, you need to do so not by highlighting text and changing its font characteristics directly, but by using Writer’s Paragraph Styles. Right-click on any word on the page and choose “Edit Paragraph Style…” In the dialog box that pops up, you can fix any attribute of the text, from its font, to its spacing and indentation, to drop-caps, text flow and special effects. You will need to edit each card or label element’s paragraph style in this way; the styles tend to apply only to the particular field (e.g., Name). But by editing the paragraph style, you instantly change all of the cards and labels, without running the risk or overlooking one accidentally.

Finally, you may print your work directly or save it to a file. But if you plan to reuse the design, consider saving it as a template file instead of a regular document; this is especially important with labels, but could save you considerable work matching subsequent print jobs of any type.

Mail merge

The section above dealt only with all-of-one-kind document designs. By using OpenOffice’s built-in mail merge functionality, though, you can create and print merged label sheets with very little extra work. OpenOffice’s mail merge feature starts with the idea of “data sources,” which are general-purpose links to external data such as a MySQL database, a CSV file, or an address book application.

 ”OpenOffice.org’s data source functions allow you to tie in databases, address books, or spreadsheets — not just for mail merges, but for any purpose.”

The first step in printing a page of mail-merged labels, then, is to set up your address list as a data source. Open File -> Wizards -> Address Data Source; the dialog presents several options for the type of data source you are configuring (e.g., LDAP, Outlook address book, etc.). For a spreadsheet or a CSV file, choose “Other external data source” and click Next. You’ll be asked to specify the file to use and to further refine your source type (in CSV files, for instance, to mark which fields correspond to name, address, ZIP code, and so on). Finally, you assign a name to the data source; this name can be anything, and will be the name the source is listed as when you are performing the merge.

The label generation process starts the same for mail merges: choose File -> New -> Labels. However, in the Labels tab, you choose the data source you just configured, from the “Database” drop-down selector. Depending on the data source, you may also need to select a “Table” in the selector below. The available fields will be displayed in the “Database field” selector; simply choose each field in turn and click on the arrow button to add it to the Label text box in the proper order, adding line breaks or punctuation where needed. Also, be sure to select the “Synchronize contents” box in the Options tab.

“When defining an address data source for a merge, the most important step is assigning the fields correctly.”

When you click New Document, Writer will pull the data from the data source and create your sheet of labels. In the Print dialog, you can choose whether to print the entire sheet, or portions of it, on a label-by-label basis.

So far, there is no built-in functionality to assist in printing a mail-merged set of business cards, such as a full office might require, but you can do essentially the same thing by following the instructions for a label mail merge, set to a business card label template in the Labels tab, and importing your employees’ names and contact information.

Troubleshooting

The most common problem when creating mail-merged documents is stray blank lines, which are annoying in form letters, but can ruin a sheet of labels by messing with the alignment. Writer provides a technique for fixing blank line troubles, though it takes a few steps.

The key is to use paragraph delimiters between lines, not simple line breaks. The Label wizard treats line breaks as literal characters, but separate paragraphs as something that can be automatically removed. It is a distinction that isn’t made clear during normal editing, so in order to fix it, choose View -> Nonprinting Characters from Writer’s main menu. You’ll then be able to see which lines in your design end with a paragraph character: ¶.

Next, select View -> Field Names to toggle visibility of the fields in your document. They look something like <MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Firstname> or <MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Country>. For each field line that ends with a newline character and not a paragraph, click the cursor at the end of the line, then hit Delete, followed by Return. You should see the paragraph character appear, denoting the change. You only need to make these changes to the first label on the sheet; we can propagate it to the rest later.

When all the paragraph characters are in place, click at the end of each line, then choose Insert -> Fields -> Other. In the pop-up dialog, go to the Functions tab and choose Hidden Paragraph. In the Condition box, enter the name of the database field, but with an exclamation point at the beginning, such as ![MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Firstname]. Now click Insert. This conditional test will hide the paragraph whenever the specified field is blank.

“The process for fixing blank lines is several steps, but can be done quickly.  In the front is the hidden paragraph function insert dialog; in the background you can see where the paragraphs are denoted by toggling Nonprinting Characters in the View menu.”

You do have to repeat this process for each field you need to suppress — though it probably won’t be all; most likely candidates for missing lines are the optional “Address Line 2″ or “Country” which are not necessarily present in every address. But whenever you’ve finished setting up your conditions, click on the “Synchronize Labels” button that floats in its own window, and your changes will be propagated to the entire document.

If you have trouble with this process, consult the OpenOffice users’ manual. It is a bit tedious, and hopefully will become a built-in feature in some future release, but it is easy enough to fix for now.

A considerably faster alternative to this process, however, is to use the custom-built label and business card templates provided at the Worldlabel Web site. The Worldlabel templates are built using OpenOffice Writer tables, and as a result do not suffere from the blank-line-suppression problem that the built-in wizard’s label sheets introduce. The files are OpenOffice Template (.OTT) format, and are cross-referenced by the Avery code number they fit. They are public domain, so they are free to use for any purpose. Read this howto on using these and customizing these templates.

Conclusion

The mail merge functionality built in to Writer is particularly nice due to the wide variety of database sources it supports. It can automatically tie in to address books like Thunderbird’s, KDE’s, or an office-wide LDAP directory, which saves you the trouble of manually updating the addresses. For repeat label sets, it is a good idea to save your work as an OpenOffice Template file, rather than as a saved document. This allows you to update the label information from the database automatically each time you make a new document.

Finally, if you are of the more right-brained persuasion, you may still prefer to work in Inkscape or Scribus to due the visual design work on your label or business card. But don’t overlook the time that OpenOffice can save you on the heavy listing: pulling address information in automatically. It is all free software, so you can do both. OpenOffice’s label printing features make a good time-saving complement to the other apps in a busy office environment.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Resources:

Openoffice templates

FastMailMerge extention

Mail Merge and Openoffice.org tutorial by Solveig Haugland

Create Labels with Openoffice howto at Tutorials for Openoffice.org

Are you ever overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community? Even when looking at just a subset — such as graphics applications — if you are not already familiar with the options, the volume can make it hard to track down the application that fits your needs. The major categories tend to break down the same way, however — just a few major players; the large projects often catering to slightly different design goals, and a second set of smaller projects each of which has a smaller team and a more narrow focus.

Let’s examine each design field in turn. We’ll start by describing the leading program or programs in each, followed by the smaller or younger projects, and end with the special-purpose tools.

by Nathan Willis 

Drawing, Painting, and Illustration

Vector-based editors

• Inkscape is the dominant player here, a full-featured SVG editor with wide support for object manipulation, styling, text rendering, scriptability and SVG image filters. Inkscape supports the largest set of drawing primitives and effects.
• sK1 is an up-and-coming vector editor also aiming to be a complete illustration program. It is a fork of an older vector editor called Skencil that is no longer in development. One of sK1’s biggest claims to fame is import support for a large set of third-party file formats.
• Xara LX was a commercial vector editor that was released in a mostly-open source version for Linux in 2006. The company did not continue to develop it, though, so it may be a risky choice.
• OpenOffice Draw is part of the OpenOffice.org office suite, geared more towards crafting business-style illustrations suitable for embedding in other office documents than it is towards providing a complete suite of drawing tools.
• Even more limited in scope are the Dia and Kivio editors, both of which are designed for the purpose of building structured diagrams, from flowcharts to business diagrams. Dia is a GNOME application, and Kivio is a KDE application.
• Finally, the Ipe editor is a specialty tool designed for creating figures to be embedded in PDF or PostScript documents. Alchemy is an experimental vector editor that focuses on out-of-the-box drawing techniques including voice control and randomization. Neither are general-purpose editors, but may be useful if you fit their particular niche.

Raster-based editors

• Gimp is the long-dominant FOSS raster image editor. It supports multi-layered documents, with multiple color models, a full set of adjustable image-editing tools for photo and painting work, filters, channel operations, text and path tools, masks, editable brushes and palettes. It is fully scriptable, and has a large selection of third-party plugins that extend its functionality.
• Krita is another powerful raster image editor. Like Gimp, it supports tools and operations for both photo-adjustment and painting, layered documents, and filters. Krita, however, puts more emphasis on painting and drawing, by supporting multiple “brush engines” that simulate different media, some natural-media-simulation tools, and color models designed to better model painting. There is less emphasis on scriptability and plugins.
• MyPaint is a newer project that focuses exclusively on painting with pressure-sensitive pen drawing tablets. It boasts a massive array of brush options, all of which have completely adjustable behavior. However, it intentionally does not incorporate selection and image manipulation tools, preferring to leave that task for other editors.
• Nathive is a newer image editor designed for ease-of-use and extensibility with Python. It does not have a feature-set as complete as Gimp or Krita, but it is supposed to score high marks on usability with a smooth learning curve.
• Other general-purpose raster editors include Gogh, which is designed to simulate natural-media sketching and painting, Pinta, which is designed to be simple-to-use, and Tux Paint, which is designed for easy use by kids.
• A full list of the special-purpose raster editors would be prohibitively long, but there are actively-developed tools for creating all sorts of raster-based images, such as photomosaics (e.g., Pixelize), fractals (e.g., Mandelbulber or Fractal Miner) or 3-D stereoscopic pictures (StereoPhoto Maker). Many more special-purpose image tools have been adapted from stand-alone programs into Gimp plugins for ease-of-use, such as the G’MIC image manipulator, Resynthesizer texture simulator, or Liquid Rescale “content-aware resizer.”

Photography

Photo editing

• Although you can edit TIFF or JPEG photos in Gimp or Krita, for direct-from-the-camera professional quality work, you need a raw image converter. The most well-known raw converter in the open source suite is UFRaw, which is available as a stand-alone app or as a Gimp importer for the supported raw image formats (.CR2, .NEF, etc.). it supports multiple demosaicing algorithms, exposure and white balance control, denoising, and batch processing.
• Rawstudio is a virtually equally-capable raw converter, also with support for demosaicing, denoising, sharpening, exposure- and color-correction. The differences are that UFRaw typically includes more options for functions such as demosaicing, where there are multiple mathematical methods available. Rawstudio, however, includes more image browsing and cataloging features.
• RawTherapee is a newer entrant into the open source raw conversion world. It used to be a closed-source program, but was released as open source last year. It offers most of the same feature set as UFRaw and Rawstudio.

Workflow

• Free software does not have a dominant player in the photo-workflow application space. Many users prefer Digikam for photo management tasks; it supports EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata, geotagging, and is fully searchable. It also handles importing images from digital cameras.
• Two newer projects making big strides in this area are Darktable and Bluemarine. They have similar aims, enabling photographers to manage assignments and jobs, particularly to speed up processing of photos from a single shoot. Both are worth looking at, although at the moment Darktable is the more actively-developed.

Specialty

• Hugin is an important photography correction tool. Although it is often classified as a “panorama creator,” that is just one of its features. It can indeed align, stitch, and blend multiple photos into a seamless extremely-wide-angle or even 360-degree panorama, but it can also perform perspective correction, correct chromatic aberration and lens distortion, perform architectural projections, and combine multiple images in a “focus stack.”
• Luminance HDR (which was formerly named Qtpfsgui) is a tool designed to perform “tone-mapping” — compositing multiple exposures of one high-dynamic-range (HDR) scene into a seamless single image. Luminance HDR permits the user to select from multiple tone-mapping algorithms as adjust all of the algorithmic parameters for a variety of effects.
• Phatch is a rapid photo-manipulation batch processor. With Phatch, you create formulas by dragging and dropping operations (resize, perspective, shadow, rotate, etc.) into a stack, then execute it on a folder full of images all at once. The result is a much faster technique for performing multiple editing tasks than any interactive editor.

Design and Typography

Desktop publishing (DTP)

• Scribus is far and away the leader in open source DTP. It produces print-ready output, including the pre-press PDF/X standards, color management, font embedding and subsetting, and supports almost every type of image content imaginable. The page-layout system supports master pages, scripting, plugins, and embedding of content rendered by other programs, such as TeX or EPS.
• LyX is often referred to as a DTP application, but it is perhaps better described as a document preparation system. It uses the TeX typesetting system, but with an interactive GUI front-end more familiar to word processor users. Still, it enables the creation of complex documents like only Tex, LaTeX, and BibTeX can.
• PDFedit is a tool designed for editing what would normally be a read-only file type, finished PDFs. PDFedit has a considerable learning curve, but can be very useful for working with legacy documents when nothing else will do.
• gLabels is a specialty application built specifically for laying out and printing sheets of labels, business cards, and other small-sized designs that typically rely on multiple-copies-per-page templates. It can be used to generate sheets of identical content, or to “mail merge” content from external documents.
• Laidout is a design tool created by an independent comic book publisher to handle placing and rearranging multiple pages on to large sheets of printer paper, even reordering pages and with support for folding-and-cutting requirements. The interface can be hard to learn, however, as the project tends to reflect the individual developer’s needs.

Web design

• Bluefish is the most common web design tool in the free software community, but even it offers less in the way of WYSIWYG visual layout tools than commercial products like Dreamweaver. However, if coding straight HTML is not for you, Bluefish can make the process easier, and keep better track of CSS and JavaScript functions than a web-based content management system can.
• Kompozer is an older web design tool with its roots in the Mozilla project — the code originated as an HTML editor in the Mozilla Suite before Firefox and Thunderbird were split off into separate projects. Like Bluefish, it is a mixed bag of design tools and code editing, and it does not receive as frequent updates as Bluefish.
• More and more web design tools are migrating into Firefox extensions. Web Developer marks up browser content (including HTML entities and CSS) and allows manipulating elements “live” in the page. Firebug helps edit and debug CSS and JavaScript. Pencil is a rapid prototyping tool for creating designs in the browser. There are many more; searching for lists compiled by developer site is the best way to find current information.

Typography

• Fontmatrix is the leading font inspector and manager. It allows you to activate and deactivate fonts from your running system, search for specific glyphs, render sample text, and manage your font collection by type and by user-defined tags.
• FontForge is the leading font design and editing program. It can create TrueType, OpenType, and Type 1 fonts, with full control over features like kerning, hinting, and diacritics. You can edit existing fonts with FontForge, or create new fonts from scratch.
• Fonty Python is an older font manager than Fontmatrix, and although it does not seem to be as actively maintained, it is still a good tool, particularly if you have trouble with some of Fontmatrix’s bleeding-edge features.
• There are several special-purpose tools to assist the font designer, such as Glyphtracer, which simplifies converting raster images to the outline curves needed by FontForge, and Xgridfit, which helps create TrueType hints. Specimen is a lightweight tool for inspecting fonts with user-defined sample text.
• Finally, although it is not an app itself, the Open Font Library deserves mention in this category, because it is a large resource of fonts available under open licenses — meaning you have the legal right to alter and extend them, which is not the case with most commercially-purchased fonts.

Modeling and Animation

3-D modeling

• Blender is the dominant 3-D modeling tool in open source, consisting of a full toolchain for producing professional-quality photo-realistic scenes. On the modeling side, it permits meshes, subdivision surface modelings, Bezier and NURBS, and 3-D sculpting and texturing (including UV unwrapping). It scriptable with Python, and for output can use a variety of shaders and renderers, complete with ray-tracing, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and radiosity.
• FreeCAD is the most well-known 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) app in open source. It is designed with mechanical engineering in mind.
• Archimedes is a simpler CAD program that specializes in architectural modeling. The QCad program does not directly do 3-D, but its 2-D design tools can be used to create blueprints useful in other, 3-D capable CAD tools.
• Several other open source 3-D modeling programs are under active development, including Art of Illusion and Wings3D. Neither has as large of a development team or user community as Blender, but since they do not try to incorporate Blender’s animation tools (see below) and video editing workflow, they may be easier to learn.
• There are also several special-purpose tools that come from the Blender community designed to assist with specific tasks, such as MakeHuman, which is optimized for the tricky task of creating realistic models of human beings.

Animation

• In addition to its static modeling and scene rendering, Blender is also a 3-D animation program, supporting rigging, skinning, armature deformation, forward and inverse kinematics, motion curve and key-frame editing, and more. Recent versions also support particle and fluid physics, soft body solvers, hair and cloth, and other special effects. A timeline based video editor and compositor are built-in.
• Synfig is a vector-based 2-D animation studio that supports many of the same features Blender does, but for 2-D animation. Characters, backgrounds, and other scene elements are composed of vector graphic primitives which are drawn or adjusted in key frames, and automatically “tweened” to create smooth animation frames.
• Pencil (not to be confused with the Firefox add-on mentioned above) is a more traditional “cell-based” animation tool; each individual frame is drawn on the canvas, which can be overlayed with translucency (called onion-skinning) to assist the artist.

Utilities and system support

Scanning

• Xsane is the leading scanning tool for open source systems. It fully supports flatbed, transparency, and film strip scanners, offering complete image controls and previewing, automatic or manual calibration, and color management complete with ICC input profiles.
• Kooka is a scanning utility written for the KDE desktop environment. It uses the same driver backend as Xsane, but attempts to put a more easily-understood front end on the tools, and integrates with other KDE-based applications.
• Due to the complexity of Xsane and Kooka, several “simple” scan tool projects exist as well, notably Scan Tailor and Simple Scan. None of them add functionality over the more complex offerings; they focus instead on a quick-use interface.

Printing

• CUPS is the printer management project used by almost all open source graphics systems, supporting inkjet, laser, and other less-common printer types. CUPS handles scheduling jobs, spooling and network-printer sharing. Support is usually provided by the operating system, so you do not need to worry about installing or configuring it separately.
• Gutenprint is a high-quality printer driver project; it provides the printer control layer directly below CUPS, and provides drivers for a vast array of printers. Normally you would never need to update or configure Gutenprint directly, but if you have trouble with a specific printer, it is the project to look towards for updates.
• Though CUPS and Gutenprint provide a solid printing system, there are several specialized projects that target specific tasks. Photoprint is designed to create professional-looking photo layouts, complete with borderless multiple-image-per-page layout options. CMYKTool from the same developers allows greater control over CMYK color separations than most individual printer drivers provide. The aforementioned Laidout can be used to create complex print layouts, including splitting large images up into arbitrarily-arranged multipage mosaics.

System calibration and profiling

• LPROF is the most widely-known ICC profile creation tool in open source, largely because it is currently the only tool with a graphical user interface. It was written by the creator of LittleCMS, the color management library used by most of the graphics applications mentioned above. LRPOF can create profiles for monitors, scanners, and digital cameras. Several hardware devices like X-Rite’s DP92 are supported.
• Argyll is a color management system (CMS) that includes several command-line tools. Included are utilities to create device profiles, calibrate displays, link profiles, and transform raster images to different color spaces. A GUI project called dispcalGUI also exists, maintained by different developers.
• Oyranos is another CMS, one that notably includes tools to configure and assign ICC color profiles to X displays. The ICC Examin tool is an offshoot of this project; it is the only dedicated color profile previewer for open source graphics pros.

Other tools

• Apart from the main applications, there are several important utility programs that act more as functional assistants than as content creation tools. Leading the charge is Agave, a color scheme chooser. The interface is lightweight, but the program lets users build color schemes based on complements, split-complements, triads, and other scheme types, with adjustable palettes and brightness/saturation controls.
• Swatchbooker is a newer “swatch” tool, which can read color swatches from a wide variety of programs, including the Adobe creative suite, all major open source programs, web sites, and many proprietary products. You can then convert and save swatch files for use with other applications.
• Open source support for pressure-sensitive graphics tablets is robust, but the historic need to edit the configuration of the devices in text files led to the creation of Wacom Control Panel. It is a graphical tool that lets the user tweak and adjust the settings and sensitivity of these devices on-the-fly.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Are you moving soon and need help with organizing all your cartons and boxes? Do you need printable moving or storage labels to help you to identify all your valuables? Or, maybe you need to keep everything in storage for a while and — in this case — you really do have to have everything labeled. No worries!  We’re offering a free fillable Moving Label Kit for you to download. It is a PDF  template and the printable labels are in US letter size sheets.

Included in the Moving Label Kit: master list, fragile labels, this side up labels, customize tags for each room, To and From, beware glass, shipping label size and more……..

Label sizes to use:

• For fragile labels use our Shipping Labels size 3.5 x 5″
• Shipping Label Autofill Template use Shipping labels size 4 x 3.33
• For To and From label Autofill Template use our Shipping Labels size 4 x 3.33
• For the Tags use our Shipping Labels size 4 x 1″
• For Handle with Care Glass use our Half Sheet Label 8.5″ x 5.5″
• Or your can just print it out on paper, cut and use tape to stick -:)

Specs: This Moving Label Kit  in PDF is  cross-platform and application independent. They will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues among different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download for free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) for the To and From and Shipping Labels, select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text properties. Select “More” in the font properties toolbar for paragraph alignment and more.

Tips:

• Make sure the Highlight Tab is on
• Use the Scroll Downs to choose room or custom enter your info

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE MOVING LABEL KIT

“Choose which room using the scroll down or custom enter”

“Use our Wl-5100 size, keep track of all your fragile items from each room”

“Use the scroll down to choose which room and the tag the carton. You can also customize an entry”

RESOURCES

Moving Blog @About

Moving tips

Start to finish guide at Lifehacker

“Autofill PDF label Template”

Need a label template for Openoffice.org 

Try our PDF Autofill Labels for formating your basic text labels in an instant.

Our CD Label Templates allways come in handy.

Inkscape 0.47 by Nathan Willis – Totally solid release with lots of new cool tools and functions

The free open source vector graphics editor Inkscape has released an update packing several new features, new tools, effects, and improved SVG compliance. Version 0.47 is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, as well as source code. Ubuntu users can also add the Inkscape Testers package archive to automatically upgrade.

Insckape ScreenShot

TOOLS

Inkscape users will immediately notice one new tool added to the toolbox: an eraser. The eraser can do two things: delete entire objects (paths, shapes, etc.), or erase parts of objects by cutting through them with a Boolean “subtract” operation, slicing the paths it encounters.

The Pen and Pencil tools have gained some new features, including a polyline mode to draw multiple line segments together, a paraxial mode to draw lines restricted to the coordinate axes, a sketch mode that averages multiple strokes together, and support for vector-based “stroke shapes” to enable the user to draw tapered, natural-looking lines.

Inkscape’s new Eraser tool slices through paths with a boolean subtract operation

The Tweak tool has been expanded, so that it can now “sculpt” whole objects in addition to nodes on a path — pushing them around like a brush, attracting or repelling them around the mouse cursor, and applying jitter, rotation, and blur.

The Text tool sports several editing improvements. The first is a built-in spell checker, sure to be a lifesaver to many. The second is support for common text-editor keystrokes like page-up and page-down, which will make editing text-heavy documents easier.

Finally, the Node tool can now be used to edit masks and clipping paths, in addition to regular paths. A new type of node, “auto-smooth” allows you to create shapes that automatically smooth out as they are edited.

EFFECTS

Several new path effects add more creative options. “Sketch” transforms an object into the appearance of hand-drawn lines. “Hatches” simulates shading with hatching marks. “Von Kotch” creates fractals. “Knot” turns a simple curve into simulated knotwork by hiding curve intersections. “Construct Grid” creates a grid system based on three nodes (origin point, x- and y-axis markers). “Envelope Deformation” allows you to deform an object by directly manipulating the sides of its bounding box. “Ruler” draws regular, ruler-like marks onto a path. “Interpolate Subpaths” automatically creates a series of paths morphing between a start shape and an end shape.

Demonstration of Inkscape’s new “sketch” and “hatches” path effects; both are highly configurable: the settings for “hatches” are shown

The most talked-about new effect, though is Spiro Splines. Based on mathematical work by Raph Levien, splines are a new type of path that behave like springy metal rods, automatically smoothing to minimum curvature between their nodes. There are no control point “handles” as with Bezier curves. Spiro Splines can be created with a path effect, or with a new spiro spline mode for the Pen and Pencil tools.

Also, an important change system-wide is that all path effects can now be applied to groups, not just to individual paths, and to individual faces in 3-D boxes. Multiple path effects can be assigned to objects, and path effects now work with the Pen and Pencil tools (i.e., the effect is still applied as you continue to add to the drawing).

EXTENTIONS

“Extensions” is a new menu item holding Inkscape plug-ins written in Python — in previous releases, these extensions resided in the “Effects” menu, which provided some confusion with path effects.

New extensions include utilities to generate 3D polyhedra, Cartesian and Polar Coordinate grids, horizontal and vertical guides dividing the canvas into segments, blank calendar pages, and even paper-box foldouts.

Some other interesting additions include the “Alphabet soup” extension, which creates randomized letter-like glyphs resembling unusual alphabets, “Convert to Braille,” which generates dot patterns (2D images only; not raised Braille) from text, and “Draw from Triangle,” which creates geometric objects and performs geometry calculations based on triangles.

Some of Inkscape’s new extensions and drawing modes, including “Alphabet Soup,” “Convert to Braille,” “Polar Coordinates,” and “Foldable Box.” On the left are paths created with the Pen tool’s paraxial mode and spiro spline mode

Other extension utilities add path extrusion, path scattering, interpolation of object attributes, and complex re-stacking. A JavaScript extension allows you to embed JavaScript attributes in a drawing, which will be useful for SVGs exported to the Web. Inkscape does not contain a JavaScript interpreting engine, however; it only preserves the JavaScript for export.

SVG SUPPORT

Several improvements were made to Inkscape’s ongoing implementation of the full SVG specification. First is file-size reduction by optimizing the CSS properties and path data written to file — for example, if an object has the “stroke:none” property specified, Inkscape can skip the inclusion of numerous stroke property settings that would take up needless space.

Inkscape also preserves the (script) tag, although as with JavaScript, the application itself does not yet implement SVG scripting. Inkscape also supports the W3C’s official SVG Test Suite, so you can run compliance checks for any SVG features you are curious about.

This release also adds support for reading and rendering SVG Fonts, so that font designers can use Inkscape as a font design tool. This feature was added by a student working with Inkscape as part of Google’s Summer Of Code internship program.

EDITING

Many new changes involve the user interface and enhancements to the editing behavior — starting with a new timed auto-save feature that prevents work loss by automatically saving documents in the background.

Improvements to working with grouped objects include changes to the “Combine” and “Convert Text to Path” operations. Combine now works on groups of paths as well as on individuals. “Convert Text to Path” now generates a group of paths (one created from each letter), instead of the previous behavior — a single path composed of all of the letters. Cloning objects is also improved; it is now possible to re-link clones that had previously been de-linked from their originals. A new visualization highlights cloned objects when the original is selected.

Snapping behavior has seen a major overhaul. The UI displays a small “cross” visualization when a snap is about to occur (giving the user warning), there is an option delay setting to require a hover time before snapping (to avert accidental snaps), and Inkscape can be configured to only snap at the node nearest to the mouse pointer (to simplify snapping drawings that include a large number of nodes). Snapping can also take place not just to path nodes and guides, but to masks, clipping paths, intersections, page borders, midpoints, handle points, and other locations. The new snapping behavior is configurable through a new snapping toolbar.

Inkscape’s rewritten snapping feature includes visual indicators, adjustable delay, and a snapping toolbar from which individual snap points can be activated or deactivated

In addition to those changes, there are numerous small enhancements for general editing, such as use of the system-wide clipboard, a shell mode that enables Inkscape to be called from scripts, more configurable guide-lines, the ability to edit linked-in bitmap images in an external editor, and completely themable icons, thanks to the adoption of the freedesktop.org icon theme standard.

All in all, 0.47 marks yet another solid release from the cross-platform, free vector editor.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Other Resources:

Inkscape Tutorials

Plugins, Scripts and templates

Inkscape Wiki – documentation, about and more.

Planet Inkscape - what the Inkscape community is blogging about

Inkscape Wikipedia Page

Openclipart.org excellent free Clip Art in SVG. (Worldlabel sponsors Clip art of the Month)

Our Worldlabel howto on designing  Business cards with Inkscape

Pixel2Life Inkscape Tutorials

35 Great Inkscape Howtos

If you want to keep tabs on your deadlines, you don’t need a fancy project management application — often, a simple spreadsheet can do the job. To see how, let’s create a spreadsheet that tracks task deadlines, shows the current status of each task, and highlights scheduling conflicts. In the process we’ll learn a few useful Calc techniques.

To keep things simple, we’ll create a separate sheet for each month, with three columns: Task, Deadline, Days left, Status, and Conflict. The Status column might hold values such as “In Progress” or “Completed.” Depending on the current status, the cells in the Days left column will display either the number of days to the deadline or “OK.” If the deadline for the task has passed but the article’s status is not “Completed,” the Days left column will display “OVERDUE,” making it easier to quickly locate unfinished and overdue tasks. Finally, we’ll use the Conflict column to identify scheduling conflicts: if two tasks have the same deadline date, the Conflict cell of the offending task will display a “CONFLICT” warning (ideally, the spreadsheet should mark both conflicting tasks, but I’m still working on how this can be done).

The key elements of what we’ve described are two formulas in the cells of the Days left and Status columns. Let’s take a look at the Days left formula first:

IF(DAY(B2)-DAY(TODAY())<0 AND (D2<>”Completed”);”OVERDUE”;IF(D2=”Completed”;”OK”;DAY(B2)-DAY(TODAY())))

To better understand how that works, let’s break it into several logical parts. The formula itself is based on the IF function, which uses the following format:

IF(Test; The_value; Otherwise_value)

In our case, the test part checks whether the number of days is less than 0 (i.e., whether the deadline has passed) and the status is not “Completed.” If both conditions are met, then the value of the D2 cell (the Days left column) is set to “OVERDUE.” Otherwise, the formula runs another IF function that sets the value of cell D2 to “OK” if the article’s status is “Completed”; otherwise it sets the value to the number of days left to the deadline.

Now on to the formula used in the Conflicts column:

IF(COUNTIF(B2:B31;B2)=1;”OK”;”CONFLICT”)

This formula uses the COUNTIF function to count the cells containing the same date as the B2 cell. If the count is 1 (meaning that only one article is scheduled for the specified date), then the formula set the value of the E2 cell to the “OK”; otherwise it sets the value of the cell to “CONFLICT.”

Once you’ve specified both formulas for a single row, you can apply them to other cells in the Days left and Conflicts columns by selecting the cell with the formula and dragging the selection handle over other cells in the row.

Calc scheduling spreadsheet in all its beauty.

Although the spreadsheet is ready to go, there are a couple of things you can do to make it more efficient and easy to use. For starters, you can turn the cells in the Status column into a drop-down list containing predefined values. To do this, select the Status column and choose Data -> Validity, and select List from the Allow drop-down list. Specify status items in the Entries field and press OK.

 Specifying conditional formatting options.

You might also want to spice up the spreadsheet by applying conditional formatting to the cells in the Days left and Status columns. For example, you can specify conditional formatting that displays the “OVERDUE” warning in red bold font on a yellow background. To do this, use the Stylist (press F11 to evoke it) to create a new style using with the described formatting and save it as “Overdue.” Select then the first cell in the Days left column and choose Format -> Conditional Formatting, and specify the following condition:

Cell value – is equal to – “OVERDUE”
Cell Style – Overdue

In a similar manner, you can specify conditional formatting for the cells in the Conflicts column. To make data entry easier, you can use two extensions: DataForm (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/DataForm) </a> and Date Browser (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/RiessDateBrowser). The former adds a data entry form that makes it easier to enter data in cells, while you can use the latter to quickly enter a date in a cell in the Deadline column using the Date picker pop-up window.

That’s all there is to it. Obviously, this solution doesn’t rival a dedicated project management application, but it can help you to keep track of your tasks and deadlines with a minimum of fuss.

BY DMITRI POPOV

Take a look at our free PDF planner Pro

Is it too early in the year for next years calendar? We had a few request from our viewers for a fillable 2010 calendar, so here it is. Start organizing for next year now.

Check out our free, fillable and printable PDF document template 2010 calendar with notepad! It has the features you need to keep your life on track on calender pages that are a fully printable 8.5″ x 11″. Please also check out our PDFplannerPRO, a fillable printable planner, organizer, diary and more! If you need our 2009 Calender, go for that as well!

Features at a glance:

• Customize with your own logo or image
• Input your data and save or print
• Print the complete calendar or specific pages
• Notepad for each month
• PDF format allows for easy sharing and opening

Instructions For Inputting Your Data:

Click on month in Contents menu within the calendar to jump to desired page.

Insert your own image – Place cursor on Worldlabel.com logo and click; a Select Image File window will pop up; choose the desired file from your computer. Images must be about 4 inches w x .75 inches. Once you choose a file, it will automatically populate the template.

More Tools: – Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text properties. Select “More” in the font properties toolbar for paragraph alignment and more.

• Select Control + 5 to reduce/increase line weights.
• Select Tools > Typewriter > Show Toolbar > fill in the blank areas in the PDFplannerPRO with your desired information.

Specs:
PDFplannerPRO is cross-platform and application-independent. It will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues between different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download the free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

PDF is and ISO International Standard: ISO 32000-1. PDF Reader Required.

PDFCalendarPRO 2010

Screen Shot

If you rely on computers to help you get things done in your personal or professional life, then you’re probably on the lookout for useful applications that will help you stay on top of things. Recently, we took a look at productivity tools for the KDE desktop, but there are plenty of options out there for the GNOME desktop, too. Here are a batch of tools designed with GNOME users in mind.

Tomboy — This is one of the best note-taking apps you’ll find anywhere. It helps track the random bits of info you collect throughout the day and organize it into searchable data. The most recent version also previews a new online note synchronization feature that syncs and shares your notes across multiple computers.

Evince — Everyone needs a reliable document viewer and Evince is just the ticket for GNOME users. It features a robust search that displays the number of results found within a page and highlights them, and uses thumbnail shots of pages so you can jump around quickly in a document. Evince can open encrypted PDFs, and printing is a snap thanks to its GNOME/GTK printing framework.

Evolution — Here’s a full-featured email, address book, and calendaring suite designed specifically for the GNOME desktop. It’s got everything you could hope for in a personal information manager, and then some: a to-do list, support for iCal, user-defined filters, a strong spam catcher, and the ability to easily manage multiple email accounts.

Gnumeric — If you need to track inventory, manage graphs and charts, or crunch numbers, then a good spreadsheet application is a must. Gnumeric helps you plot, graph, analyze, and manipulate all types of numerical data. It will even read and import spreadsheet files created in Microsoft Excel.

GnuCash — If you’re looking for a way to track your finances, you can’t go wrong with GnuCash. It’s one of the most popular personal and small-business accounting software programs for GNOME — and with good reason. It handles reports, graphs, invoices, scheduled transactions, and even double-entry accounting. It’s powerful enough to manage your entire business, but approachable enough to use as a simple checkbook register and bank account tracker.

gLabels — We’ve talked about printing labels from the desktop before but gLabels is so handy that it bears repeating. This free app for GNOME lets you print all kinds of labels and business cards from your laser or ink-jet printer using one of the templates that’s included in the large collection. Don’t see what you need? Then create your own using the template design wizard.

By Lisa Hoover @twitter.com/lisah

If you run a business, finding an efficient system for managing invoices is critical for sustaining a positive cash flow. Here’s how you can create an easy invoicing solution using OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc.

By Dmitri Popov

CREATING A DATA SOURCE

First, you need to connect OpenOffice.org to an address book that contains your customers’ contact data. OpenOffice.org can talk to numerous address book formats, including the address book module of the Mozilla Browser Suite, which is an open source software package available for a variety of platforms. Better yet, OpenOffice.org also includes a wizard that allows you to easily set up a Mozilla-based address data source.

Go to File > Wizards > Address Data Source. In the Address Data Source Wizard, choose Mozilla/Netscape and then select which address book you want to use (you can choose between Collected Addresses or Personal Address Book). Give the data source a name and choose a path where it will be stored. Make sure that you select the option, “Yes, register the database for me,” then click Finish to close the wizard.

Tip: You can also use the Wizard to connect to other data sources containing addresses. For example, to connect to the Thunderbird address book, select the Other data source option, press Next, click on the Settings button, and then select the Thunderbird Address Book from the Data type drop-down menu.

Now you can launch Writer. To connect to the created Address book data source, choose Data Sources from the View menu or press the F4 key. This opens the Data Sources window. Double-click on Addresses (or click on the plus icon next to it). Double-click on the Tables title and select Personal Address Book to view it as a table.

CREATING A INVOICE TEMPLATE

An invoice must have at least two parts: the address fields and a table containing the invoice data. The address part consists of fields (think of them as placeholders), which will be filled in automatically by OpenOffice.org using the data from the created data source.

You can add fields to the document in two ways. The easier way is to click on a column title (e.g. company, first name, or last name) and drag it onto the desired location in the invoice document.

The second method is a bit more complicated, but it essentially does the same thing. Choose Insert > Fields > Other, click on the Database tab, and select Mail merge fields in the Type window. Choose Address > Personal Address Book, select the field you want to insert, and click the Insert button. Click Close after you’ve added all the necessary fields.

The next step is to add a table that contains invoice items such as description, prices, subtotal, VAT (or tax), and total sum. Choose Insert > Table to create a table. To define a calculation for the subtotal cell, place the cursor in the B7 cell and press F2. In the calculation field, enter the following calculation: <B2:B6>.

This calculation means that the contents of the B7 cell is the sum of the cells from B3 to B6. The calculation for the B8 cell (Subtotal) is =sum(<B7>*25/100) (assuming that VAT is 25%). Finally, the total calculation is =sum(<B7:B8>). Check whether the calculations work correctly by entering a couple of invoice items and examining the subtotal, VAT, and total results.

If you want the invoice to automatically calculate the due date in the payment due field, you can use the following calculation: =days(<b1>+n), where B1 is the cell that contains the invoice date and n is the number of days.

You may also want to format numbers in the price column as currency. Select all cells in the column by clicking on them while holding down the Shift key. Choose the Number Format command from the Format menu. In the Number Format dialogue box, choose the appropriate currency and define formatting using the provided options. Finally, save the created invoice document as an .ott file (OpenDocument Text Template).

CREATING AND PRINTING INVOICES

With all these pieces in place, you’re ready to create and print invoices. To create a new invoice, open the template. Press F4 to open the Data Sources window if you haven’t already done so. To fill out the fields with the address data you want, select the appropriate record row in the table and press the Data to Fields button. Save the resulting invoice as a Writer document.

When you press the Print button or choose File > Print, you are prompted to choose whether you want to print the form letter. Choose No, and if you don’t want to see the prompt window again, tick the “Don’t show warning again” check box. Don’t worry, you will still be able to print the invoice, you will just bypass the whole form letter printing procedure.

Finally, to make the solution complete, you need to create an invoice managing system that will help you keep track of invoices and their status.

CREATING AN INVOICE MANAGER

Start by creating a new spreadsheet that will be your tool for managing invoices. To keep track of all invoices, create a column that contains links to the invoices stored on your computer.

To insert a link to a specific invoice, click on the A1 cell and choose Hyperlink from the Insert menu. Select the Document option in the Hyperlink dialogue window, then enter the path to the invoice in the Path field. In the Text field, enter a descriptive name for the invoice, such as the invoice number number and title. If you leave this field blank, Calc will insert the full path into the cell. Click Apply and then Close.

<p>Now that you have all your invoices in one place, how do you know which ones have to be mailed or have already been paid? You need to add a status column with color codes. First, use the Stylist to create three cell styles: To be sent, with a red background; Sent, with a yellow background; and Paid, with a green background. You can, of course, choose whatever background color you like.

Click on the cell B1 and choose Conditional Formatting from the Format menu. In the Conditional Formatting dialogue window, define three conditions as shown in Figure 1. The specified conditional formatting will be used to apply one of the defined cell styles, depending on the cell’s contents.

Now that you’ve defined the conditional formatting for one cell, you need to do the same for all the cells in column B, or at least some of them. To do this, click on the formatted cell B1, click on the black handle in the lower right corner (the cursor changes to the hair-cross), hold the mouse button down, and drag the handle down. If the defined formatting works properly, the result should look like the one in Figure 2:

Tip: Instead of entering the status manually each time, click on a status cell and press the Ctrl-D key combination. This gives you a drop-down menu containing all previously entered items. </p>

<p>To make the invoice manager even more useful, you can add a feature that will mark overdue invoices. To do this, simply add a Payment due row (column C) and add a function to the cells in column D.

Click on the cell D1 and press the Function Wizard button. Use the Function Wizard to enter the following function: =IF(AND(C2<TODAY()-5;B2=”Sent”);”OVERDUE”;” “). This means that if the payment due date is less than the current date minus 5 days and the status of the current invoice is Sent, then the invoice will be marked as OVERDUE. Use the formatting trick described above to apply the function to other cells in column D, and your invoice manager is ready to go.

By Dmitri Popov

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