Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day

An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."

Comments

Re:For a day?

[bzipitidoo]

Try sticking two images together, edge to edge.

I have never used Photoshop, but there are quite a few utilities from the 1980s and 1990s that do that without much fuss. Even the weak image manipulation software often included with scanners could do that. But in the Gimp, such a seemingly simple thing is a huge pain. Have to enlarge one of the pictures (or create a new one) with Image->Canvas Size, and you have to enter in the size you want. To find the optimum size, have to call up Image->Image Properties for each image and keep note of their canvas sizes. Then you copy and paste the other image in. And-- this is the part I still haven't troubled to grok-- sometimes it goes into another layer, so it looks like your paste didn't work. If you Flatten the result, the pasted image may be wiped out. Every time I want to do this, which isn't often, I have to poke around until I hit on the right order and combination of commands and settings. Many of those ancient utilities have that operation available as one monolithic item somewhere in their menus. The Netpbm suite has pnmmontage and pnmstitch. Have I missed an easy way to do this in the Gimp? Why does the Gimp make that so hard to do?