Tag Archives: Open Source

Design a Trendy Business Card in Inkscape.org

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In this tutorial, we’ll be making some very neat business cards using Inkscape. We’ll be starting from a template to keep sizing completely accurate – which also means you can actually print them!

bcard-40

By Aaron Nieze from Shmoggo.com

Setup the Document

Step 1

Since we’ll be starting from a template, go to Worldlabel.com and download their business card template WL-244 in PDF. Once that’s downloaded, you can actually open that file straight from Inkscape. It’s a PDF file, so it’ll open up the PDF Import window. The standard settings should be just fine, so just click OK whenever you’re ready.
bcard-1

 

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Seven Reasons for Choosing LibreOffice over Microsoft Office

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OK, LibreOffice is free for the download, and you can install it on as many different machines as you choose. But a free price and a free license aren’t much good if the software doesn’t have the features you want.

Happily, that’s usually not a concern with LibreOffice or its predecessor, OpenOffice. Although many people assume that a free application must be inferior to one that they pay for, a comparison of LibreOffice with Microsoft Office (MSO) proves that the opposite is often true. Sometimes, MSO has features that LibreOffice lacks, but, just as often, it’s LibreOffice that has more tools than MSO.

However, unless you’re concerned about a must-have feature, there’s usually no need for a point by point comparison. Focusing on performance and high-level interface choices alone, I can think of at least seven reasons to choose LibreOffice over MS Office:

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Open Source Ebook Readers for Android

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Your Android device is a versatile tool which can be put to a variety of practical uses, including reading ebooks. But for that you need a decent ebook reading app. While there are several ebook readers available on the Android Market, the Cool Reader and FBReader open source apps are probably the best of the bunch.

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Linux / Open Source For Kids: A Feast of Riches

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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.

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Blending Multiple Images and Creating Captions in Gimp

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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.

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Open Source Desktop Publishing 2011

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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.

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Label & Card printing resources with TeX and LaTeX

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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.

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50 Open Source Tools to Make Your Life Easier

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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.

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Photography with Open Source / Linux

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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

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Prototyping with Pencil (FireFox add-on)

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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.

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