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

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Background: @font-face

WOFF is intended to work with the CSS @font-face selector. This feature builds on CSS’s previous font rules, allowing you to not only list alternatives for the font in which to render text, but to provide a URL from which a font can be downloaded. When a page is loaded, the referenced font is fetched from the server in the background, just like the images, stylesheets, embedded media, and all other content.

Making use of it has two steps. First, you define a “name” for the font, then you reference it just as you would any “Web safe” or generic font. For example,

@font-face {
  font-family: myCompanyMasthead;
  src: url( /media/fonts/mCL.ttf ) format("truetype");}

defines myCompanyMasthead as a font family. This name does not exist anywhere else; we made it up. But the src property tells the browser to fetch the file mCL.ttf from our Web server and use it whenever this font family is referenced in the page. Consequently, the CSS rule h1.mast { font-family: myCompanyMasthead, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; } tells the browser to use our newly-defined font for rendering H1 tags
of the “mast” class — falling back on Helvetica and then Arial. If visitors’ browsers don’t support @font-face, they will still see the content, just in a different typeface. But for modern browsers, we can ensure that the site masthead is rendered in the exact same font that we use on our letterhead and envelopes, without resorting to rendering it as an image.

The idea seems so simple that it’s often hard to imagine that it took this long to appear. But the reality behind the situation is that Web font support has been a long time coming, thanks to battles between browser and operating system makers, standards bodies and type foundries. Commercial type designers, who were used to a business model in which they sold fonts to advertising/design firms and publishers almost exclusively for use in producing printed materials, bristled at the notion that their product would be freely transferred over the Internet. How could they ever expect to sell a quality font to a Web designer if the designer could just as easily fetch it off of another site? Pirates could crawl the Web looking for @font-face rules and harvest everyone’s fonts en masse.

The result was years of fighting over digital restrictions and encryption schemes designed to limit how Web fonts could function. This produced formats like Microsoft’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) format. EOT was not an open standard, was IE-only, and didn’t take off; resulting in a rejection by the W3C. Only in relatively recent times, in particular after @font-face took off when used with TrueType and OpenType fonts, has momentum built to develop a truly open Web font format.

WOFF development

Although @font-face has been a success, the large size of some TrueType and OpenType font files led some to conclude that there was need for a compressed file format targeting the Web. Mozilla’s expert typographer Jonathan Kew teamed up with Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland from the font foundries Type Supply and LettError, respectively, to work on a specification in mid-2009.

WOFF is the result of that collaboration. The first draft was released in September; the most recent revision is from October 23. The basic format of WOFF is the same as structure used by TrueType, OpenType, and Open Font Format fonts, which are all known as sfnt (or “spline fonts”). The file contains a number of tables of character glyphs, an index, and various metadata and header blocks. The important difference is that WOFF uses zlib compression to dramatically reduce the size of the file.

The exact savings vary, of course, but in many real-world comparisons, a .woff file is often 1/3 the size of its .ttf equivalent. You use WOFF files exactly as you would TrueType or OpenType fonts; in your CSS selector, simply specify the file and format:

@font-face {
  font-family: myCompanyMasthead;
  src: url ( /media/fonts/mCL.woff ) format("woff");}

Despite its relative youth, WOFF is well on its way to becoming an officially sanctioned W3C format. It has the support of nearly three dozen professional type foundries, in addition to Mozilla and the open font community. In January, the commercial font-hosting provider Typekit announced that it would start serving WOFF fonts to supporting browsers. This is a significant endorsement, since Typekit makes its money serving up web fonts; the bandwidth savings to the company by shrinking all of the files it serves would be significant indeed.

Tools

Firefox is the first Web browser to support WOFF, but expect more to follow. In the meantime, other typography-related software tools are adding their own support for the WOFF format.

Kew has a straightforward tool called sfnt2woff available at his Web site that will convert any TrueType or OpenType font file into a compliant WOFF file. There are binaries for Windows and OS X, and source code for Linux. Other available tools are listed at the Mozilla blog, including WOFF validators, CSS rule generators, and Pythong utilities.

WOFF support is also brand-new in the development version of the FontForge font editor. To take advantage of it, you must retrieve and compile the FontForge source code, however, so for casual users converting existing fonts with sfnt2woff may be simpler.

If you are designing or re-designing your site and want to make use of WOFF, take a few minutes to read up on compatibility hints from CSS professionals. As with most other design details, to achieve consistent results you will need to consider the various quirks and limitations of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE, and other browsers. Fortunately, @font-face allows you to specify alternate URLs for each font-family definition, so it is possible to serve small WOFF files to supported browsers, and fall back on the heavier font formats for unsupported browsers.

The road to Web fonts has been a rocky one, to be sure, but CSS’s @font-face is now an established standard. WOFF, although comparatively new, has the backing of enough industry players. Together they bring flexible typography to the Web in a way that is long overdue. Most businesses expend considerable effort on branding, and want to ensure that their printed materials — from signs to publications to letterhead and envelopes — use consistent typography. Now they can add the company Web site to that list.

By Nathan Willis

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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

Efforts to ramp up Community Involvement have become a driving force in the development of The Open Clip Art Library. Recent updates to the platform have begun implementing key features to the already robust 2.0 environment.

Most recently, a themed clip art package has begun it’s release, alongside each monthly iteration of OCAL. Past collections have included Seasonally appropriate themes including Spring 2010, Summer 2010, and Sports 2010.

Work for next month’s Open Clip Art Library Release is already underway, and the Librarians are once again asking for new additions to an already massive collection (currently tipping the scales at over 33,600). This latest theme, Fall 2010, is building towards an upcoming Holiday Release. As such, the Community is asked to do double-duty and begin uploading their original and remixed clip arts that are related to the Fall Season, as well as the Halloween Holiday, tagging each with their appropriate key words (“fall2010″ or “halloween2010″ respectively).

Submissions for the Fall 2010 Clip Art Package will be accepted through the month of August, while Halloween themed work will continue building through September. Any contributing artists should take note of the new Activities section that displays, front and center, on Open Clip Art Library’s home page. The links contained here will display the most recent and active contests or events taking place within the Community.

The Librarians look forward to the upcoming Fall 2010 Package and would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all of the exciting new activity at The Open Clip Art Library!

This Open Clip Art Library Package Announcement is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, however, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper, so designers were left with the less-than-optimal workflow of creating mockups in Inkscape or the Gimp, or else forced to use proprietary web applications that limited storage or added watermarks. Those days are in the past, though, thanks to Pencil.

By Nathan Willis

Pencil is an easy-to-use mockup editing environment; the user simply drags-and-drops UI widgets from a toolbox onto the canvas, and resizes and rearranges them as necessary. The UI widgets remain editable, and are stacked on the canvas as individual, adjustable elements. The result is more like a “paper prototype” and has advantages over designing in a raster or vector editor, with its concerns over layers, rendering, and other inflexibilities. Pencil provides several collections of widgets, covering generic shapes, specific desktop and mobile computer operating systems, and popular Web site toolkits. The application is also cross-platform because, interestingly enough, it is a Firefox browser extension.

“Pencil can be used to create UI mockups for the web, the desktop, or any other interface.  The ’sketchy’ widgets simulate rough drawings, like in a back-of-the-envelope design. (click on image for large screenshot)”

Installation and setup

You can find Pencil in Mozilla’s add-ons directory, but you should also consider checking the project’s home page to see if there is a newer release. The extension is provided as an .XPI download on the project site; as of press time the link did not initiate Firefox’s automatic XPI installer, but if you choose to save the file locally and open it with File -> Open, the installer will launch.

There is also a stand-alone version of Pencil mentioned on the project’s downloads page. This app uses Mozilla’s XULRunner backend, so that you can run the package as a standard application program if you do not have Firefox installed, or if you simply wish to keep the applications running as separate processes. Presently, however, the packages provided in XULRunner form are not up-to-date. The most recent version of Pencil is 1.2.0, and the XULRunner version provided as a Linux TAR archive is from pre-1.0 builds.

The Pencil project also has links to several extra widget collections that it calls “Stencils.” Currently there are stencil packages for UML flowcharts, business development presentations, the popular Dojo and Ext JavaScript libraries, and icons designed for iPhone mockups and touch-screen gesture display. The Stencil downloads are packaged in .ZIP files; to install them you open it with the “Tools” -> “Install New Collection” menu item in Pencil.

You do not need to install any Stencils to get started however. The 1.2.0 release comes with widgets for essential geometric shapes, basic annotations (such as indicator arrows and text balloons), basic HTML elements, Windows XP and GTK+ GUI elements, a meta-package that picks up the native toolkit widgets of whatever operating system you run Pencil in, and a nice set of free-form “sketch”-like elements that simulate the drawn-loosely-on-paper look. There are even more Stencil collections available from users on the Pencil Users mailing list and its associated wiki.

“In addition to the UI toolkits themselves, the annotation widgets allow you to mark up your designs with notes and bullet points. (click on image for large screenshot)”

 ”Pencil’s ‘Native’ widget set picks up the toolkit from your desktop environment, here, GTK+, but with the correct theme automatically.”

Finally, the project provides several downloadable “export templates” that Pencil uses to create HTML, PDF, or other document formats from your mockups. There are several styles available, depending on the intended usage, so it does not hurt to experiment with several. Unlike Stencils, you do need to download and install export templates separately, or you will be limited to bares-bones output.

Drawing

Once installed, you launch Pencil from Firefox’s “Tools” menu. It opens up a separate window, with basic menus and editing tools across the top, a collapsible list of the installed widget collections on the left, and the canvas on the right. For its overall document structure, Pencil uses the concept of “pages,” each of which is an independent canvas shown in its own tab in the interface. Pages within a document can be different sizes, you can copy and paste elements between them, and even duplicate or delete pages from the right-click context menu in the tab bar.

Within a page, the canvas is shown as a white rectangle with a drop shadow against a non-editable background layer. You can change the size of the canvas only by choosing “Properties” from the right-click context menu on the current tab. There is a grid system, which you can adjust the spacing of and enable or disable snap-to-grid on by opening up Pencil’s “Settings” -> “Options” menu item.

“Every element of a Pencil drawing can be moved around and configured independently, including structures like tables and tab bars. (click on image for large screenshot)”

You place UI elements on the canvas by drag-and-drop with the cursor; this might seem counterintuitive, since you can select elements in the Collections tab as if they were tools — but drag-and-drop is the name of the game. Every element you place has control points at the corners and on the midpoints of each side; when you select an element with the mouse you can resize it by dragging any of these points. The resize is not a scale transformation, however: instead, it resizes the element by lengthening its sides proportionally. In other words, when you resize a text box, you get a larger text box, not a magnified-and-pixelated enlargement of the original text box. Double-clicking on an element allows you to rotate it around any handle.

Many UI elements use text labels, either basic names, or more structure grids and lists, such as you might find in a tree-view or selection widget. You can double-click on any text element and edit its contents directly on the canvas, or open the element’s properties with the right-click menu. There is a very simple syntax for extending the structured text elements; the pipe character | denotes new columns, the hash character # denotes which item in a list is selected, and the asterisk character * denotes which item is highlighted. There is some variation as to the support for # and * if different widgets, but which one works is always easy to determine.

Several of the compound widgets you need for GUI prototyping support more direct adjustment than simple highlighting. For example, you can change the “progress” shown on the progress bar indicator by dragging a special handle that appears when you select the widget. You can create a tab bar with as many tabs as you need (added by editing the tab labels and inserting pipe characters), and even change which one is selected by putting a hash character in the tab name.

The toolbar at the top allows you to manually adjust the settings of any selected element — from its precise X,Y positioning on screen, to foreground and background coloring, to text properties like font and alignment. Of course, the emphasis in Pencil is on quick-and-easy manipulation of objects. To make this easier, whenever you drag an element or a resize handle, horizontal and vertical guide lines appear whenever you drag it to within a few pixels of a nearby element — thus allowing you to place objects into perfect alignment without resorting to worrying about their specific X,Y coordinates.

You can add images (such as icons, photos, or screen content) by dropping in the “Bitmap Image” element from the Common Shapes widget collection. The right-click menu for this element allows you to either import an image, or link to it (in which case the image file must remain in its present location or else the link will break). Some UI widgets, such as buttons, also allow you to attach an image file as one of their properties. Finally, Pencil includes a built-in search interface linked to the Open Clip Art Library. Using this feature, you can search and browse through scores of Creative Commons-licensed art and design elements, and import them directly into your mockup. It is a handy feature that beats trying to maintain a Pencil-specific clip art collection.

Exporting and sharing your designs

The drawing tools essentially give you total freedom to design your mockups as best you see fit. There are a few quirks here and there, such as the automatic truncating of text in tables and list box widgets, but for the most part the sky is the limit. Before you can use your prototypes to change the world, however, you need to export them into a common output document format. This is where Pencil’s export template system comes into play.

If you simply select “Document” -> “Export Document” from the menu, the default export window pops up. From here, you can simply save the mockup as a series of PNG files, one per page. You can also use this dialog to export to HTML, PDF, OpenOffice’s .ODT, or even Microsoft Word .DOC. However, all of these export options require you to install an export template like those provided at the Pencil Web site. Technically, you can still select an output format like HTML without a template installed, and the export wizard will step you through the process, but all it will do in the end is generate unlinked PNG files and drop them in a directory.

“Export templates allow you to theme and style your final output, for the web or for PDF / ODT / DOC documents. (click on image for larger screenshot)”

Export templates are provided for download in .ZIP archives. To install one, simply save it locally in its Zipped form, then open it from within Pencil’s “Tools” -> “Manage Export Template…” menu item. One important caveat for this process is that Pencil requires you to choose either HTML or “Text Documents” (a category including PDF, DOC, and ODT) when you install each template — you can choose the wrong type, and Pencil will not warn you that the template is incompatible; you’ll only find out that you installed it to the wrong section when you try to export.

The installed templates will be available for use immediately, appearing in the export wizard. For some reason, when exporting to HTML, Pencil chooses the filename “index.html” for you automatically, which can overwrite other exports in the same directory, but requires you to manually specify a filename for other document types.

The templates provided at the Pencil project site are fairly minimalist; if you are interested in HTML output, you will probably need to either perform some heavy CSS theming on the results, or write your own template for further usage. The project site, unfortunately, does not host documentation on producing your own export themes, but it is easy enough to read through the basic themes and get the idea — themes consist of an XSLT style sheet, an XML file containing basic template properties, and external resources (such as images) that will be included in the final output.

All in all, Pencil’s main strengths are its ease-of-use: creating a mockup is drag-and-drop simple, editing even tricky elements like multi-column text is straightforward, and the snap and alignment tools make creating neat, organized images easy. If you have far-out ideas, you may be better off creating prototypes form scratch with a raster editor like the Gimp, but for many cases, the quick turnaround afforded by Pencil makes it a win.

by Nathan Willis

Free BookPlate Labels in fillable PDF label templates are printable on your laser and inkjet printer. Each book label design is an autofilll, which  allows  you to place your info in one label cell, hit tab and the complete template will populate with that info. These templates make your book labeling so much easier.

Use Worldlabel.com Product number WL-150 (Shipping labels, same size as Avery® 5164) to print.

Specs: These Book Plate labels in PDF are 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 the free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

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.

Clean Lines Template Download

Damask Template Download

Gingham Template Download

Modern Blocks Template Download

Buy all your Laser Labels from Worldlabel.com: as low as $10.45 per 100 sheets

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic design tools used to create labels and business cards with gLabels: the drawing tools, text tools, how they compare to raster- or vector-graphics editors, and the object manipulation tools. We also covered how to print your creations, and what formatting options gLabels provides to make life easier. Chances are, though, that at some point you will need to take advantage of some of gLabels’ more advanced features, such as the ability to do “mail merge” printing, to incorporate readable barcodes, or to edit label templates of your own.

by Nathan Willis

MERGING

The term “mail merge” usually means printing a set of documents, labels, or envelopes based on a common template so that the generic information in the template is replaced with a unique set of specifics — typically pulled from an external file, such as a comma-separated-value (CSV) text file. That way, you only set up the document once, but can print out hundreds of uniquely-addressed copies.

Obviously this sort of functionality is not limited to use with mail envelopes, so gLabels refers to it by the more general term “document merge.” The official documentation even gives an example using name tags.

To add a document merge to your label design, you must start with configuring the data source. Click on the “Edit merge properties” button on the toolbar, which will open the configuration window. gLabels supports several data formats, including plain text with either tab, colon, or comma delimiters between the fields, VCard address book files, and direct import of address book entries from GNOME’s Evolution email client. Select the appropriate format from the drop-down box, then select the actual file you will use for the merge.

“gLabels can do a document or “mail merge” from several data sources.”

gLabels then loads the contents of the file into the preview pane, both to help you see whether or not the fields are aligned correctly and so that you can check or uncheck specific records for inclusion in the final merge. Check to make sure that each field is correctly displaying the data you expect — including any blanks. If your export skipped a field without data rather than inserting a properly-delimited blank space, it could throw off every other field for that particular record.

When you are satisfied with the structure of your data, click “OK.” It is time to incorporate your document merge placeholders into the label design. You do this by inserting text objects, then inserting special control codes into the display text. The format for a control code is ${FIELD_NAME}. For a typical CSV or plain text data source, gLabels uses simple numbers for the field name, such as ${1} for the first field, ${42} for the 42nd field, and so on. A VCard or Evolution data source would use ${PHONE}, ${SUFFIX} or other appropriately self-explanatory field names provided by the data source itself.

If you select a text object, gLabels’ object properties pane allows you to insert a field control code with the “Insert merge field” button — the adjacent “Key:” selector is automatically filled with the available field names extracted from the data file, so there is no chance of mis-typing.

When gLabels encounters a blank field in a record, it prints nothing, so (for example) $[FIRSTNAME} ${MIDDLENAME} ${LASTNAME} will not cause an error or an unsightly extra whitespace when printing an entry without a middle name. Nevertheless, you must take an additional precaution to prevent the accidental printing of a blank line in your output. If you are formatting postal addresses of the form:

${FIRSTNAME} ${MIDDLENAME} ${LASTNAME}
${ADDRESS_LINE_1}
${ADDRESS_LINE_2}
${CITY}, ${STATE} ${ZIPCODE}

then you must ensure that ${ADDRESS_LINE_1} and ${ADDRESS_LINE_2} are the only text on their respective lines, including whitespace. If so, gLabels will skip printing the entire line for records missing one of those fields, which is the expected behavior. If, however, there is also a blank space on the same line as ${ADDRESS_LINE_2}, the resulting output will include a blank line.

As long as the control codes remain in place, you can do any other text style manipulation you wish to make your final output appear as desired; there are no limitations on font, color, or other properties. To check the output of your document merge, open the Print dialog and click on the Print Preview button — gLabels will show you the final merged output.

“gLabels shows a preview of its merge data import, to check for accuracy.”

If you try a print preview, you will immediately notice that gLabels automatically detects the number of entries in the file and composes its output with the correct number of labels or cards. The same is true for final printing; you do not need to worry about counting the number of merged records. You can, however, select which label position on the sheet to start printing on. This allows you to re-use partially printed sheets of labels.

BARCODES

Another business-friendly feature supported in gLabels is the ability to incorporate barcodes into your label designs. Barcode objects are among the elements you can insert from the toolbar, and like rectangles, ellipses, or images, you have full control over their size, position, and color. Much like a text object, though, you must specify the contents of the code to be created.

“gLabels supports generating barcodes from data.”

When you insert a barcode, the object properties pane displays a “Data” tab. Here you can manually specify the text contents to be rendered in the label as a barcode, or you can link the contents to a field in a document merge. To do the the latter, just select the “Key” radio button, and choose the field of choice from the drop-down menu. As with text objects, gLabels pre-loads the available keys into the drop-down menu, so there is no danger of choosing the wrong one.

The “Style” tab allows you to specify the barcode format to be rendered, and the color in which it will be drawn. gLabels supports a range of different barcode formats — at present a total of 30, including POSTNET, UPC, ISBN, and the 2-D DataMatrix format. The different formats have different capabilities; for example, you can only encode numeric data in POSTNET, because it was created for encoding ZIP codes. If you try to render incompatible data into a barcode, gLabels will write an error message to that effect when it prints or in print preview. Consequently, if you intend to use barcodes for internal usage rather than compatibility with the post office or some other business, brush up on the available formats before selecting one.

 ”gLabels allows you to choose from numerous barcode formats.”

You can also use a field from your data source to set the color of the barcode. On the Color setting in the “Style” tab, just click on the “Key” radio button and select the field to be used from the drop-down menu much like you did for “Data.” Acceptable values for a color key include the standard X named colors from /etc/X11/rgb.txt or an RGB hex value formatted much like HTML colors. gLabels can use more significant digits in its hex values, though, so #RGB, #RRGGBB, #RRRGGGBBB, or even #RRRRGGGGBBBB are acceptable formats.

TEMPLATE EDITING

For the vast majority of the print jobs you create with gLabels, the supplied templates will be exactly what you need. On the other hand, if you have to create a curiously-shaped label (perhaps to be cut out of one of the larger label sizes), or if you need to change the dimensions of the generic business card template to fit your design, gLabels can help.

“The template designer steps you through the process of creating a template.”

gLabels templates are written in XML that defines the shape, spacing, margins and other properties of the label or card in question, and provide some metadata useful to the application. System-wide labels like the ones that come pre-packaged in most distros are stored in /usr/share/glabels/, but the program will also look in ~/.glabels, so you can store your custom designs there.

You can consult gLabels’ help documentation for a tutorial on creating templates with a text editor — the process is not that hard; you must define height, width, round-ness of corners, and other properties. An easier option, however, is gLabels’ “Template Designer,” found under the “File” menu. This is a simple GUI wizard that walks you through the steps of defining the required physical properties and metadata.

 “Designing a template is not hard, but requires making some precise measurements.”

To begin with, you must enter a “Brand” and “Part number” for your template — these correspond to a commercial label product; if you are creating a custom template from scratch, you can use any information you find descriptive. You then select the paper size, and the basic shape of the label or card. Of note, gLabels templates require that all labels on a single sheet be the same size, however, gLabels can accommodate templates that use multiple label sizes (such as CD label sheets that include a CD case label) by creating multiple layouts. You simply design with and print them separately.

When you get to the step defining the actual dimensions of each label you can add the “safe area” lines that appear in the label drawing area, and the amount of overprint that can be tolerated without bleeding into adjacent labels on the sheet. The last page of the template designer allows you to specify the layout of the page — how many rows and columns of labels or cards there are, and the distances between them and from the edges of the page. There is a print button that allows you to print or print-preview a test template before you finalize your design.

CONCLUSION

gLabels undergoes constant development, but over the years it has evolved into an easy to use tool with a deceptively large feature set. Most users may never need to design their own templates, and few will need to incorporate barcodes regularly, but it is nice that the application not only supports these tasks, but makes them simple. On the other hand, almost everyone will have occasion to do a document merge at one time or another, and the robustness of gLabels’ support for this common task shows real code maturity. gLabels manages to make even this potentially complicated task point-and-click simple.

See Part 1 Getting Started with gLabels by Nathan Willis