Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 - London - 15-18 April

Lorenz Schori

SpreadFlow comes from a Swiss publishing company which produces WOZ Die Wochenzeitung. As their name suggests, this is a weekly newspaper which comes out in print and digital versions, with a tight production schedule. Traditionally, there was a group of workers responsible for the print edition, then someone else translated this for the digital version, which had some different layouts as well as certain licencing issues which affected the layout. Since these were two separate groups, the workers on the print edition would not stay to wait for the secondary digital version to come about, regardless of any issues which might come up. Therefore, an effort was made using a combination of proprietary and open source software to automate this process, so that the print editions would be automatically transformed for the digital version.

Sarah Garcin and Victor Lebeau

PING came out of a group of students’ frustration with trying to keep some real-time collaborative notes which they could use later to extract parts and create some final document, but also keep track of who “said” (typed) what when. There is an ability to add other material such as images. They had found Googledocs and Etherpad lacking in not quite having all of the capabilities they desired. It has an interesting and attractive interface.

Andre Castro

Here we learned about a particular utilization of hybrid publication in an academic environment, used for internal publication of documents as well as a teaching tool for students. Their approach has been more multifaceted, using various approaches to creating paper, web, and digital publications of various types. The flexibility of methods leads to adaptation to the most pleasing end result.

Gottfried Haider

Taking the hybrid publishing concept a bit further is this method Gottfried and others have developed to use a web-based approach along with GitHub to keep the sources online and process them on the server very quickly, editing as much and as often as you like, particularly useful for collaborative efforts.

Inte Gloerich and Léna Robin

Hybrid publishing refers to the concept of creating materials one wishes to publish in one or many ways, and being able to, as desired, produce HTML, PDF, ePub, iBooks which can be used on whatever devices one might have, or even printed as a book. Previously, one had to use different workflows using different programs for each intended result, since directly converting between these final formats was either difficult or impossible. A group from the  Netherlands has managed to come up with a system in which a master source file is used to generate a markdown (.md) file, which can then be used with pandoc to create whichever formats you wish.

Hin-Tak Leung

To the surprise of many, Microsoft last year released most of its code for Font Validator as open source. Hin-Tak gave us the history of FV, along with its limitations. He is well on the way to having it available as a multiplatform application which typographers and designers will find highly valuable.

peter sikking

Since LGM 2015, there has been a working group which is trying to pull together the human and other resources to develop a common approach to implementing in FOSS advanced text features that exist in OpenType fonts. Peter gave us the history of what’s gone on in the last year, along with the expression of hope of more minds being involved and perhaps even a sponsor to support this development. The desire is to try to avoid the process running out  of steam.

Adrien Tétar

TruFont comes out of Adrien’s experience helping with the development of FontForge. The concept is to create a less hard-wired font editing environment using “simpler” approaches with Python and Qt. This will hopefully make it feasible for a broader range of font designers to create their own modular customized suite of scripts which they should be able to learn how to modify for their specific needs.

Tom Lechner

Tom has a way of seeing some problems with his workflow and then going out and writing his own custom program to solve the issues. It’s still in progress but already does a lot of interesting things in interesting ways. He also showed off his font of little houses.

Pierre Marchand, Pacôme Bérut, Sophie Boiron, and Pierre Huyghebaert

This is a project, Wænd, which aims to take over the world, at least from a geographical mapping point-of-view. Still in the relatively early stages of its development although already having a large number of features, it may be a bit hard to grasp and hang onto all of its capabilities. It combines making use of the geospatial mapping that may be associated with images and data with an extreme flexibility with zooming in and out of your display, as well as connecting one geographic set of information with many others. So complex it’s a bit dizzying.