Linux and free/open source software are the best computing environments for children because they can get under the hood and learn to control and shape the technology, rather than be trained like lab rats to click buttons and be good little unquestioning consumers. Here is a batch of excellent educational and creative software for children, and for beginners of any age.

Tux Paint

Here at Worldlabel we have a special fondness for Tux Paint, the cross-platform drawing and painting program. (We even hosted a Tux Paint drawing contest with awesome prizes last summer!) Tux Paint teaches the fundamental functions used by most computer painting programs such as drawing tools, shape tools, special effects, and labels and captions. It has a giant assortment of stamps and sound effects. And it has a helpful assistant that is actually helpful, and teaches file management and how to use the program. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 1: A colorful Tux Paint doodle.

Tux, of Math Command!

The fine folks who give us Tux Paint, New Breed Software also created Tux, of Math Command!. This is an excellent math tutor with plenty of educational action. Like Tux Paint it is designed for children, but it’s great for anyone who needs to brush up on their basic math skills. It has exercises with great graphics and fun sound effects, and also a selection of fast-paced games for honing math, mouse, and keyboard skills. It supports network play, and has special options for teachers or parents to organize competitions. You can even create custom games. Figure 2 shows Commander Tux using her quick typing and math skills to defend against the attacking equations. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 2: Commander Tux defending against marauding equations.

There is one more from the fine New Breed folks, and that is the Tux Typing tutor. Computer users need good typing skills, and Tux Typing is a fun and effective tool for learning to type, or improving your existing skills. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

KDEdu

The hardworking people at KDE have assembled a nice batch of excellent teaching apps aimed at older kids in the KDEdu package. This contains 20 high-quality apps including math, algebra, trigonometry, and geometry; a periodic table of the elements; desktop globe; vocabulary trainer; memory trainer; the excellent KStars astronomy and planetarium program, and the Kturtle programming teacher. (Linux.)

Figure 3: The Marble virtual globe, part of KDEdu.

Etoys

Etoys is an ambitious application that teaches concentration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Kids learn math, science, and programming concepts by creating sketches of various projects, such as building a car, building a moon rocket, making a movie, or going wherever their imagination leads them. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 4: Etoys teaches kids how to think, imagine, and create.

Fly Through Space With Celestia

The Celestia Space Simulator takes you on journeys through space. It needs some horsepower, so you should have a PC with at least a dual-core CPU and a good OpenGL 3D video card. It opens in Earth orbit, and you can visit any of 120,000 celestial objects in the included Hipparcos catalog. Tour our own Solar System, visit newly-discovered extrasolar planet rho-1 Cancri e, and many of our galactic neighbors. The better your video card the nicer it looks, because it supports several different texturing modes. So you can use lower resolutions with less detail for lower-end video cards, or crank it all the way up for better video cards. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 5: Approaching Venus in Celestia.

GCompris, a Feast of Activities

GCompris is an award-winning suite of over 100 activities for children aged 2 to 10, though as with all the others in this article it’s a high-quality feast for beginners of all ages. The name is a French pun. GCompris is pronounced like “I have understood”, J’ai compris.

GCompris teaches basic computer skills such using the mouse and keyboard, reading, memory training, all kinds of science, geography, math, reading, how to tell time, how to draw cartoons, puzzles, understanding money, games, and even Braille training. (Linux, Mac, Windows.)

Figure 6: Learning about water systems in GCompris.

Operating Systems for Kids

There are only two operating systems that are customized for children: Sugar, which was originally created for the OLPC (One laptop per child) program and is now installable on a number of Linux distributions, and several Linux distributions.

Sugar is a radical departure from the computer operating systems we’re used to. It is designed to encourage exploration, learning, and sharing, to learn problem-solving and creative thinking.

There are a number of Linux distributions aimed at children: they bundle kid-oriented software and artwork, and have simplified interfaces that are friendly to little hands learning to use mice and keyboards. Some of these are:

• Qimo 4 Kids
• Foresight Linux
• Doudou Linux
• LinuxKidX
• Edubuntu

My favorite is Qimo (pronounced Kim-oh) because I think it does a great job at bundling first-rate software and inviting kids in, and it’s the only one that is available pre-installed on a cool-looking PC, thanks to excellent independent Linux vendor ZaReason. All of them are excellent in their own way, and it costs nothing but a bit of time to try them out.

by Carla Schroder

One of the funnest features of digital image editing is taking pieces of different images and blending them together in a single image, like putting a funny hat on your mom or putting your dog on a jet ski. Or even something serious, like improving a photo of a landscape by adding an element from a different photo. Today we are going to learn how to do this in GIMP, the excellent open source image editing program.

GIMP is not LAME

Computer geeks think they are funny, and that how we end up with names like GIMP and LAME. GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. LAME is a recursive acronym for LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder. Together they form my mildly amusing subheading. At any rate, whatever the shortcomings of the name, GIMP is an excellent open source painting, drawing, and image editing program. It is free of cost and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows, and supports a number of drawing tablets like Wacom.

You’ll need a batch of existing images to follow this tutorial– photos, clipart, anything is fine. You can copy images from Web pages by right-clicking on them, and then left-clicking “Save as” in the right-click menu. This is legal for private, personal use; don’t commit copyright infringement by distributing copyrighted images without permission. Visit the Wikimedia Commons to find excellent permissively-licensed images, and you can even share your own.

Saving Your Work

The first and most important lesson is to make a habit of saving your projects as .xcf files. This is the native GIMP file format. You can create composite images out of any mix of image file formats such as JPG, GIF, and PNG. But always save a master file as .xcf because it saves all of your layers and all other editing information, so you can easily re-edit your images. You can export to any image file format you want from .xcf such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP…as long as you have that master .xcf file you can do anything you want.

Fun With Layers

Understanding how to use layers is the #1 most important feature of any higher-end image editor. This is your mighty power tool that gives you fine control over your images. In figure 1 I opened an existing image of Tux, the Linux penguin. Tux was created by Larry Ewing using GIMP. GIMP can take a little getting used to because the toolbars and dialogues are all in separate docks, instead of a single window. You can expose just the ones you want to use and drag them anywhere on your screen. Some users love this, some don’t. (GIMP 2.7.3 includes the long-promised single-window mode option, and will soon be available.)

Figure 1: Tux the Linux penguin in a new GIMP session, with the Toolbox, first image layer, and Layers dialogue.

Now let’s put a hat on Tux. I have a red fedora downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, and this image is given to the public domain, so I can do anything I want with it. I want to put it on Tux’s head. The first step is to go to File > Open as layers in Tux’s window (figure 2.)

Figure 2: Hat image opened in a new layer on Tux.

It’s the wrong size and in the wrong place, but that’s OK. It’s in a separate layer so I can edit it just as though it were in a separate window. Note how the Layers dialogue shows two entries now (figure 3). If you don’t see the Layers dialogue, then press Ctrl+l or click Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers to open it.

Figure 3: the Layers dialogue displays two layers and several controls.

The first image you open will always be labeled “background” in the layers dialog. You can change this name by right-clicking on it, and then left-click Edit Layer Attributes. Note how this right-click menu offers you a whole lot more controls (figure 4). GIMP has a lot of redundant controls, so you’ll see the same ones in multiple locations.

Figure 4: Right-click any item in your Layers dialog to see this menu.

But let’s not get distracted by all these new controls, for we have a hat to edit. Aim your eyeballs to the left and take a look at the Toolbox. This should always open by default (figure 5).

Figure 5: The GIMP Toolbox.

The Toolbox contains a selection of cursor tools. By default it becomes a paintbrush when you pass it over your image. I don’t want a paintbrush, I want the Move tool. That is the little four-pointed dealie. Click on it so you can move objects (figure 6). Remember to always select your tool first.

Figure 6: The Move tool.

Now I’m going to drag the hat onto Tux’s head. And oops, my canvas is a little too small. Which is no problem, because Image > Canvas Size makes it bigger. A little more height and I have room for the hat (figure 7).

Figure 7: A slightly bigger canvas for more headroom.

Well now, that’s not too bad, except the hat is too big. First I click on the hat layer in the Layer dialog to select it, and then click Layer > Scale Layer in the image window. This opens a dialog for changing the size of the image just in that layer. Note the little chain link between the Width and Height values; when these are linked changes are proportionate. Click the link to un-link the values and control them separately.

With the hat resized and positioned, I’m still not satisfied because the hat points to the right, and I want it to point to the left. Layer > Transform > Flip Horizontally turns it to the left. A little tweaking the position, and voilà! Tux has a stylin’ hat (figure 8).

Figure 8

There is one last task, and that is creating a caption. To launch the text editor, go to the Toolbar and click the big A. This also automatically creates a new layer for the text. GIMP has a habit of opening dialogs in inconvenient locations, so drag the text dialog anywhere to get it out of the way. When I type my caption into the text dialog it appears on the image at the same time, and gives a live preview of size, font, and color (figure 9).

Figure 9: Adding a caption.

By default layers are transparent, and my text doesn’t show up very well. So one way (there are several ways to do this) to give text a solid background is to click Layer > Transparency > Remove Alpha channel. This results in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Tux now has a hat and caption with a white background.

Now my stylin’ Tux can be saved as any image file format, but don’t forget to always first save your work in .xcf format. Then if you need to make any changes simply select the layer you want to work on. Take a look at the Layers dialog and you’ll see a wealth of useful options: delete, re-order, stack in whatever order you want, duplicate layers, all kinds of modes, and lots more. Which we will explore in future installments. If you like good howto books, Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional is the best GIMP book.

By CARLA SCHRODER

Check out this post: Gimp resources to take you from Newbie to Power User

The free software world moves rapidly, but every individual project also moves at its own pace and rhythm. Consequently, it is easy to get behind on the news. Here is a look at the state of the art in the open source desktop publishing (DTP) arena for fall 2011.

What’s new in Scribus

Scribus remains the solid leader among free DTP applications. The big news at the moment is that the next major revision of Scribus, 1.4.0, is in release candidate status. That makes it short of a recommendation for stable usage, but worth testing, and a possible option if you find yourself in need of one of the new features.

1.4.0 will sport a port to the Qt4 application framework, the newest version of Qt. A lot of the internal changes to Scribus during this development cycle have been refactoring updates; as a result the list of bug fixes from the code cleanup is impressive, while the “new feature” bullet points are not as numerous. The canvas now uses Cairo, vector file import is significantly improved, and users who have not tried the unstable builds will get their first taste of render frames, which allow embedding of externally-rendered content like TeX, gnuplot, and Lillypond.

The biggest change in development is support for tables courtesy of Elvis Stansvik, which is important because these are popular structures in word processors, but often an afterthought when doing DTP layout. Stansvik’s work is a Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) project, as is the new Scripter2 Python scripting engine.

You can download Scribus 1.4.0 RC 5 (the latest release as of press time) from scribus.net. Builds are provided for Windows, Mac OS X, and Debian/Ubuntu packages.

Apart from the official releases, the Scribus scripting community has been hard at work this year, too. ScribusStuff is a site managed by OpenDesktop.org (the same folks who brought you the leading theme browsing sites for KDE and GNOME); several new scripts have been added in recent months, including a mail merge generator and utilities to work with CSV files and the new table functionality. Also of note on the scripting front is Olivier Berten’s Pantone script, which allows you to import Pantone swatches into Scribus. Since Pantone does not allow the Scribus project to ship its named spot color lists, this is the best solution for most users.

For a more complete listing of Scribus scripts, consult the Scripts category at the Scribus wiki. Most scripts are the work of single authors, and often do not see individual release announcements when updated.

What’s new in other layout tools

Despite Scribus’ well-earned heavy hitter status, there are several other DTP layout tools that deserve a place on your Applications menu. Tom Lechner’s Laidout tackles a task not covered by Scribus: impositioning a document or image onto the page (or, in most cases, across multiple pages) for printing. Laidout received a minor update at the end of 2010; since then Lechner has been working on Polyptych, a program to “unwrap” 3-D polyhedra, and a configuration tool for XInput2 pointers. Laidout is one of the first applications to support multiple pointing devices in X (officially known to X.org fans as Multi-Pointer X or MPX), so it is definitely ahead of the curve.

Arguably at the other end of the creative spectrum is LyX. While Laidout is a visual artist’s tool geared towards customized output for image-heavy output, LyX is a GUI application designed for typesetting professional-looking articles and papers. LyX is a front-end for TeX and LaTeX, but designed to provide immediate visual feedback as is generally provided in word processors. It received a major update in May of 2011, bumping to version 2.0.0, incorporating literally dozens of new features. Among them are formatting-aware search-and-replace, inline spell-checking and thesaurus, export to XHTML, LuaTeX, and XeTeX, improved table handling, and many new math rendering capabilities.

A new project named PressBooks was announced in 2011, although it is still in alpha development. PressBooks is a book publishing system designed to help authors prepare a single text for printing, output as an ebook, or online publication in HTML. Finally, LibreOffice has been making leaps and strides since it forked from the older OpenOffice.org code base. A new release (numbered 3.4.3) was made in August, and the project announced a public repository for extensions and templates in September.

What’s new in fonts

There have been two major developments in the open font world in 2011. The first is Google’s Web Font Directory, an online repository of open source fonts covering a wide variety of scripts and styles. Although the emphasis of the project is serving the fonts over HTTP (for use in web publishing), all are also downloadable and freely resuable.

The other banner development was the relaunch of the Open Font Library with a new back-end system built on the open source Aiki framework also used by Open Clip Art Library. The revamped OFLB site makes it easier to search and test out new fonts, and to collaborate with other font developers.

In addition, the developers and designers at Open Source Publishing (OSP) in Brussels have been working on the OFLB site design and some documentation. Finally, the open source font editor FontForge made a new release in February, focused mostly on bugfixes.

What’s new in imaging

Of course, DTP without images would just be word processing, and the raster and vector applications most designers depend on have been busy as well.

Inkscape made two minor releases, 0.48.1 and 0.48.2, in March and September respectively. Both focused on bugfixing. But the project was very active in 2011′s GSoC, adding a new, faster caching system, improved support for CSS code embedded within SVGs, and support for preserving JavaScript in files. Work is also progressing on SVG Font support and a new measuring tool. These and other changes may be ready for 0.49, the next release.

Three raw photo editors made major releases in 2011, RawTherapee 3.0, Darktable 0.9, and Rawstudio 2.0, and one (UFRaw 0.18) made a minor update. In all four cases, the list of bugfixes and image development features either added or improved is substantial — perhaps too long to summarize in a paragraph. If you are a DTP designer, however, what you care about is compatibility, and all three will provide you with higher-quality photos to embed or link into your documents.

There were also updates to Hugin, MyPaint, and Digikam, and a major new version of Krita is expected to arrive shortly.

What’s new in printing

The open source printing stack saw an important new color mangement feature, a newly-revitalized project, and interesting movement on several other projects.

The color management feature is found in two important CUPS filters, foomatic and gstoraster. Both are image processors that take intermediate document formats (PDF or PostScript) and produce raster image data to be sent to the printer. The change is that both now use the colord system daemon developed by Red Hat’s Richard Hughes. Colord allows users to manage device ICC profiles at a system-wide level. Instead of maunally changing the settings for every color-aware application, programs simply query colord for the preferred profile and get back the correct result. The system automatically handles multiple profiles for different paper/ink combinations, and has a graceful fallback mechanism for coping with inexact matches.

The newly-revitalized project is Black Five Imaging’s suite of printing tools: PhotoPrint, CMYKTool, and DuoToner. All three have seen intermittant releases as the main developer’s schedule allowed, mostly in the form of source code tarballs. Now they are also hosted in a public git repository at Gitorious. The Black Five tools are still largely developed by a single coder, but moving to a public source code repository is always a healthy sign and may attract new blood.

Several other pritning projects received minor updates in 2011, including the Gutenprint driver collection (version 5.2.7), the GPL version of the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter (9.0.2), and the CUPS printing framework (mentioned earlier in the colord context).

Finally, although it is not code per se, Alexandre Prokoudine published an updated and revised version of his guide to using CMYK and spot color with Scribus and Inkscape. It is an oft-circulated myth that working with spot colors or CMYK is “impossible” in open source DTP; the truth is that if you want to do it, you can — you just need to know where to look, because RGB data is still the norm assumed by most of the tools. The guide will take you a long way.

There are still three months to go in 2011, and there are likely to be several new releases in that time frame, but then again, that is always true: open source just moves that quickly, DTP in particular.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Today, Fabricatorz broke the news regarding The Open Clip Art Library’s latest update: Version 2.9. This first 2011 Release for the site sees an increase in Community involvement, as well as many key usability enhancements, like a comments feed authored by Chovynz:

Registered users can now log into OCAL, select their ‘My Cliparts’ section, scroll to the bottom of the page and see a list of the most recent comments made on their uploaded works!

Check out the Fabricatorz blog post for full details on the new-and-improved OCAL!

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

Fans of OpenOffice, Abiword, and KOffice, and Scribus dominate the open source document printing discussion, because traditional office suites and desktop publishing apps account for the lion’s share of the pages in our paper trays. But for a lot of old-school typesetters and writers, nothing in the WYSIWYG realm can hold a candle to the performance and flexibility of TeX, and its popular LaTeX and BibTeX derivatives. Although TeX is most often used to create structured documents like research papers, it can be used to generate any document type — including specialty items. For the unfamiliar, here are some resources for using TeX to print envelopes, labels, badges, and cards.

A bit of background

TeX, for those who have not used it, is a text-markup language. The markup syntax is different, but much like HTML, it uses special tags to designate emphasis, boldface, spacing adjustments, bulleted lists, footnotes, and all other sorts of typographic elements. But TeX is designed for printing, not on-screen display. It was created by computer science guru Donald Knuth to help him typeset The Art of Computer Programming, and it handles complex print-centric tasks like hyphenation, justification, and footnotes/end-notes with ease. It also has robust support for typesetting mathematical expressions, which makes it the de-facto choice of a variety of scientific journals.

In practice, the chief difference between a word-processing program and authoring the same document in TeX is that TeX requires you to mark up document elements semantically, rather than directly changing the formatting. For example, when mentioning a book or article by title in a word processor, you highlight the title then click on the italicize button in the menu. In TeX, you would mark up the title with the \emph{} tag, which functions much like HTML’s <em></em> tags.

But TeX gets far more advanced by combining multiple features. To create footnote citations in a word processor, you might highlight the title of the work, then type in a footnote number parenthetically after it (perhaps even creating a superscript), keeping track of the numbers used, and enter the bibliographic data at the bottom of the page . In TeX, you enter all of the bibliographic entries you need once, then in the text, simply reference them in-line, like \cite{McGuffin}. When sent to output, TeX automatically keeps track of the footnote numbers for you, and pulls in the “McGuffin” entry from your bibliography. If you add, remove, or rearrange references, TeX fixes up all of the revisions with no intervention on your part.

In practice, most TeX users create their documents with the LaTeX and BibTeX add-on systems. These are sets of commonly-used macros and reusable document definitions that provide a high-level interface to raw TeX. But the nitty-gritty details of TeX itself are always accessible as well.

The TeX and LaTeX community is free-software-driven, and many users share their own macros, templates, and packages for implementing useful printing techniques. Printing for labels, envelopes, and cards is no exception. There are several packages that solve particular printing problems, plus a few that offer more general-purpose facilities.

TeX and LaTeX packages for specific label and card types

Perhaps because TeX enables the user to use fine-grained manipulation, a lot of TeX enthusiasts have used it to create precise packages for specific print jobs.

For example, Piet van Oostrum’s badge package is designed to typeset and print conference ID badges. The package pulls attendee names and employers from a file, then generates a set of output files fitting as many badges onto a badge as possible, complete with logos and conference information common to each badge. The default badge size is 7.5-by-4 centimeters (approximately business-card-sized), although you can change this setting.

The flabels package is built for printing labels for 3-ring binders. It is written for “Leitz-Ordner” binders, which are A4-sized; however, the macro source code is thoroughly documented, so adjusting the measurements for different sized binders is straightforward.

There are not one but three packages for creating cassette tape labels, which perhaps reveals as much about LaTeX long history as it does the tricky problem of fitting labels onto the varying space provided on cassettes. Morgan Besson’s casslbl is designed for audio cassettes, rendering two-sided track-listings for cassette “J cards.” So too does Alexey Shipunov’s cassette-shipunov, which includes instructions in Russian as well as English. Martin Nickel’s megatape offers a bit more, such as printing multiple tape labels per sheet, and a global numbering scheme for people working with collections.

More useful today are the packages that target standard label layouts. R. Bharat Rao’s labelmac3 targets the Avery® 5160 label sheet, which is frequently used for postal address labels. Label-pln produces 1.56-by-2.75-inch labels, which are a bit larger than 5160. The address package is built for an unspecified three-across page layout, but it also features several utility routines that make it more useful, such as the ability to pull addresses from an external file, and do a “mail merge”-type form letter generation.

Worldlabel WL-875 (same size as Avery® 5160)

There is also basic support for mailing address labels built-in to LaTeX’s “Standard Letter” document class. This class defines a “letter” environment that contains (among other things) the mailing address. Using the \makelabels command in your document will print out a sheet of Avery® 5352-formatted labels using the value of the address defined by the document. There is more detail in the official documentation (PDF).

Configurable, multi-format packages

The LaTeX package named simply “labels,” maintained by Julian Gilbey, was initially designed to support only Avery® 5360 label templates, but now covers many more. The documentation explains how to alter the package variables for number of columns and rows, left, right, top, and bottom border width, and even provides sample values for a dozen common Avery and Dennison label stock layouts.

Thomas Emmel’s ticket package provides a general interface for defining your own smaller-than-a-page printed items, whether they are labels, business cards, badges, or event tickets. You simply write a “ticket definition” file specifying the size, horizontal and vertical offsets, and row and column count, then create a document containing \ticket specifications for your data. There are options for adding registration marks or cut-marks to the final output, which is a nice touch.

Both of these packages require a significant amount of work, either in defining the layout of the label or card, or in manually assembling the data.

Boris Veytsman’s EnvLab package, on the other hand, is a full-featured LaTeX package that supports multiple label types and envelope sizes. It works by modifying the \makelabels command found in the Standard Letter document class, extending it to support several additional options, such as Avery® label templates (avery5160label, avery5262label, et cetera) and standard envelope sizes (“business,” “personal,” “booklet,” et cetera).

The package makes a distinction between “normal” labels and “big labels” (in particular the 5163 and 5164 label sizes), because the “big labels” are generally used to print both the sending and return address on a single label, and consequently require different data layout parameters. EnvLab supports starting a label-printing job in the middle of a partially-used label sheet, can print postal barcodes beneath addresses, and even supports passing printer-specific commands through the document to the output, such as waiting for envelopes to be fed through the manual paper slot, rather than the normal paper tray.

There are also customization options to handle printing logos onto labels and envelopes, rotating the orientation of the printout, several other tweaks. Perhaps the nicest thing about EnvLab, though, is that it builds on top of LaTeX’s existing Letter class, so you can easily integrate it into your printing workflow with the documents you already create.

Starting points for the new TeX aficionado

Although TeX itself has a very clean and easy-to-read syntax, if you are a complete TeX newbie you may still face a learning curve because of the different approach you take to creating a document and generating final output for it. There is a different toolchain, and you must adjust to creating your document using semantic rules that do not directly tell you what the printed output will look like.

One excellent place to get started is at Wikibooks, which has a robust e-book guide to LaTeX, covering everything from the basics of markup, to using document types, to advanced formatting, bibliographies, and embedded images. LaTeX is generally easier for newcomers to pick up on because it presents an easy-to-use layer of common operations on top of raw TeX. You can always move on to a TeX guide once you have the basics of LaTeX down pat. The TeX Users Group maintains a detailed list of helpful resources for those learning TeX and LaTeX, as well as publishing a newsletter and other content itself. The really hardcore will, of course, want to read Knuth’s TeXbook and Leslie Lamport’s LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, the official guides to each project.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Other resources:

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/maillabels/

Glabels

Openoffice.org Labels Templates

Printing Avery Labels in Linux

Label Nation

*World Label does not sell Avery-branded labels. “Avery Dennison®”, “Avery®” and all other Avery-branded product names and SKU trademarks are trademarks of Avery Dennison Corporation. Avery Dennison does not sponsor or endorse any products made or sold by World Label.

The Open Clip Art Library has seen impressive growth in 2010. Month after month, artist registrations trend higher, rich new features make their way into the interface, and the Library’s collection adds a steady stream of new and remixed clip art (now at over 35,000 unique images). October’s release is as feature-packed and content-heavy as any that have come before it, and the Librarians are proudly presenting Open Clip Art Library 2.6, backing up a brand new version of it’s web platform, Aiki Framework 0.5.

Among the many enhancements Open Clip Art Library has received through this Release, cgbug’s enhancements to user profiles are instantly gratifying. Avatars make their triumphant return, as logged in users can now associate their Community alias with their most inspired creation that has been uploaded to OCAL! Along with avatars, the “Edit Profile” section (found within each logged in user’s “Profile” tab) allows artists to adjust personal information like: email, artist name, and homepage.

The User Profile Management is a great example of Community members beginning to take an active role in Open Clip Art Library’s development. Librarians continue to advocate Community involvement with a new Community Help section (appearing on the sidebar of many pages within the site) in which the 10 most requested features on OCAL’s Launchpad appear.

Alongside these excellent new elements, a brand new Halloween-themed Clip Art Package is out! This ghoul-tastic concoction celebrates the Holiday with 158 brand new themed creations from members of our Open Clip Art Library Community (including the graphic above, by netalloy). The images are available on a per-image basis, as well as in a single compressed file.

For more on OCAL’s latest as well as details about Aiki Framework, please visit the Official Release Announcement.

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

The open source community is vibrant, continually growing, and just loves to create applications and tools to make lives easier. Here are 50 of our favorite open source apps that help us do everything from managing pictures on our computer to learning about Jupiter and Mars.

PRODUCTIVITY

Chandler – An information management application for personal use or small group collaboration. Includes integrated calendaring, data organization tools, and allows backup and data sharing via web access.

Tomboy – A cross-platform note-taking application packed with features text highlighting, font styling, inline spellchecking, and more.

BasKet Note Pads – More than just a note-taking app, BasKet lets you organize in track data in several different ways, import information from other apps, and easily share your notes with others.

Freemind – This free mind mapping app can easily handle maps with as many as 22,000 nodes. Easily import and export existing data to and from Mindjet Mind Manager or Microsoft Office and transfer maps to your mobile device.

Task Coach – A robust todo list tracker. Users can .et tasks to alert or reoccur, sort by attribute, view by list or as a tree, and more. Works in tandem with Thunderbird email client to create a new task, and add files, emails, and URLs as attachments via drag and drop.

TaskJuggler – Full-featured project management app that includes an an optimizing scheduler to analyze project outlines and various user-provided constraints, then build project time lines and assign resources based on the data.

Sunbird – Standalone calendar application with a tiny footprint, perfect for use on a computer that’s tight on memory and disc space.

Elgg – A social networking platform that allows users to create their own social environment. Perfect for businesses, volunteer organizations, and educational institutions.

Dolphin – Build your own social networking community that pulls in data fom Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, and more. It’s an all-in-one package of scripts and apps that makes it super easy to build and launch a custom network in just a few minutes.

MEDIA MANAGMENT AND PLAYERS

Songbird – A music and video manager for Windows, this app has terrific search features and supports CD ripping, playlist sharing, and music purchases from 7digital.

iTiVo – Downloads recorded shows to your Mac, then converts them to different formats that are easily transferred an iPod or iPhone.

VLC – This cross-platform media player can handle files, discs, and streaming content, and just about every file format you throw at it.

Handbrake – This popular video transcoder is great for making personal-use backup copies of DVDs you already own. Presets make it dead simple to format videos for the iPhone, AppleTV, handheld games, and more.

Rockbox – Don’t like the software that’s built into your portable media player? Change it to Rockbox and turn your media player into a customized pocket-size jukebox.

Banshee – Play music, podcasts, and videos right on your computer, or sync them to your Android, iPod, or other handheld devices.

MEDIA EDITING

Blender – Create amazing 3D videos with this professional-grade application. Model, shade, animate, render, and more with this tool that works on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Gimp -The GNU Image Manipulation Program is great for power users and novices alike who need a tool for photo retouching, image composition, and more. Supports a wide range of photo formats.

Open Movie Editor – Use this Linux-only video editing program to make movies. Easy to use and perfect for amatur filmmakers.

Audacity – A very popular open source audio editor used to make podcasts, create ringtones, remove vocals, and pretty much anything else you want to do with sound files.

Seashore – Use this Mac-only photo editor for simple picture touch-ups or full-blown editing projects. Use the doodle feature to draw freehand.

BROWSERS

Camino – A great alternative to Microsoft Explorer, this open source browser was designed specifically with Mac users in mind.

Firefox – The quintessential and enormously open source browser with a huge supply of addons and plugins to make it even better.

Konqueror – A full-featured browser for those who use the KDE desktop environment.

Epiphany – The browser of choice for many GNOME desktop users. Includes a customizable interface, smart bookmarks, and more.

IRC & MESSAGING

Pidgin – Cross-platform chat and instant messaging client that supports more than 15 chat networks including Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, and MySpace.

Adium – Robust instant messaging client for Mac OS X that works with Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, and more.

Colloquy – An Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for the Mac. Customizable, intuitive, and easy to use.

Xchat – An IRC chat client for Linux and WIndow. Supports private messaging, file transfers, and multiple channel connections.

FINANCE

GnuCash – Ideal for small business and personal use. Supports reports and graphs, scheduled transactions, invoicing, and lots more.

KMyMoney – A full-featured personal finance manager for use on the KDE platform.

EDUCATION

Pauker – This flash card application is available in nine languages. Dozens of card decks are available for free download, including geography, pharmacology, vocabulary, and computer-related acronyms.

Stellaruim – An amazing astronomy app that puts a planetarium right on your computer and shows the night sky in 3D.

TuxType – Enormously popular typing tutor for kids that includes two different games designed to increase typing speed and efficiency.

Edubuntu – A customized version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system bundled with a huge assortment of learning applications and games.

gbrainy – A brain teaser game for all ages to keep your mind sharp and your reasoning skill sound. Includes mental calculations, memory trainers, logic puzzles, and verbal analogies.

HOME OFFICE

OpenOffice.org – A full suite of office applications, including a word processor, spreadsheet creator, and presentation maker.

Abiword – Word processing application that’s a great replacement for Microsoft Word. Works on Widows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Dimdim Web-based tool for web conferencing, webinars, online meets, real-time collaboration, and more.

Amanda – Backup and recovery software to help secure all your important documents and data.

eHour – Web-based time tracking software that supports multiple projects, multiple uses, and different hourly rates per client. Easily exports data to Microsoft Excel.

Thunderbird – Extremely customizable email client that includes message archiving and search, filters, and a one-click address book. The integrated Migration Assistant makes it dead simple to import existing data from other email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

OpenProj – Use this project manager to create charts, graphs, and all kinds of reports to help keep your home office running smoothly. Supports budget data, time lines, Gantt charts, and resource management.

Scribus – Professional-grade desktop publishing system that’s great for turning out media-ready page layouts.

RANDOM GOODNESS:

WordPress – Available in both a server-based and hosted version, WordPress is one of the most extensible, user-friendly, and full-featured blogging platforms on the market today.

7-Zip – Use this file archiver to compress files into ZIP files for easy emailing or to save storage space on your computer’s hard drive.

PDF Creator – If you create a lot of PDF’s you’ll love this app. Use it to easily create PDFs from any Windows program or convert files on your computer’s hard drive into a PDF format.

Prey – A small security application that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Use it to track your laptop via geo-location in the event it gets stolen and use it as a gateway to communicate with the person who stole your computer by sending onscreen messages and triggering alarms.

KeePass – Secure password manager to keep all the passwords on your system under lock and key.

MediaWiki – A server-based full-featured wiki with support for multimedia and image management, multiple themes, and more. Ideal for large groups and busy websites.

By Lisa Hoover

It’s a new calendar month, and that means it’s once again time for The Open Clip Art Library to continue it’s mission of regular upgrades. September 2010 sees the Release of The Open Clip Art Library 2.5. This feature-rich upgrade continues along the path of it’s predecessors, but the latest key design implementations set this release apart.

The most up-front addition to the OCAL experience is also the most powerful of the 2.5 feature set. An Activities Box has been placed front-and-center for all site visitors to make use of. This new section is a key element to increased Community contributions, as users will find up-to-date links relating to the most recent goings on in The Open Clip Art Library domain. In this way, the Activities Section serves as a platform for Community projects and Contests to grow and prosper like never before!

In the weeks since it’s implementation, the statistics, alone, provide an exhibit A of sorts. Site registration is up 1,100 over the month prior, while last month also saw over 1,100 new image uploads (bringing the total to an unbelievable 34,160 – as of this writing).

One in every ten new clip art uploads went into this month’s coinciding clip art package, making this Fall 2010 Collection the most successful and content-heavy Package to date! All 120+ Community-created images can be downloaded in a single Zip. Users are also free to browse each themed collection, via their individual pages. Looking ahead, October will see the next Holiday Release, as Halloween 2010 takes over The Library. To be included in the package, artists will have until October 3 2010 to upload related work and tag it appropriately (using the key term halloween2010).

Keeping pace with OCAL, Bassel Safadi’s Aiki Framework updates to Version 0.4! This latest release includes features-a-plenty and several key bug fixes involving the SQL in the admin panel. The latest stable build can be acquired via the project official press release.

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

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

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.