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Interview With the Editors of Libre Graphics Magazine
TheSilentNumber writes "I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the editors of Libre Graphics, a magazine made entirely using free software (even using version control so you can see every change ever made) after they gave a talk at this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. This project is living proof of the printing abilities of Free Software, 'That really is a constant refrain even within our own community. People always still talk about the printing problem. So what printing problem?' Libre Graphics Magazine is doing a truly outstanding job showcasing free works made with free tools, creating a publication of record, and reaching out to designers with this project."
Ah, hipster's the word I was looking for!
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
A: It's a pretty obscure number, you've probably never heard of it.
But he needs them to see!!!
From their Manifesto:
"Thus, our choices are invisible, unless we make an issue of them."
IMO, tools are tools, some are higher quality, some are lower. If you have a quality end product, the tools used are irrelevant, and should stay that way.
A magazine that has published 2 issues and was built from the ground up to use free software is a far cry from a long established company trying to move existing products and processes to free software while continuing to deliver a quality products.
Has some interesting, useful stuff, from basic to about as free-wheelingly complicated as you'd like. Nice bit about customizing The Gimp.
But apart from the occasional full page (bitmap) graphics, most of the two issues is black text on white background, no graphical details, two uniform-width columns, left justified, no feathering whatsoever, widows and orphans everywhere, etc.
If this was meant as a proof of good typesetting, it fails. But whether this is FOSS' or editor's failure, that's hard to tell.
I can't bring myself to press play on the video. Is the person on the far right Pat's...um...sibling?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Have you looked at the magazine? It's targeted at quite a niche audience, and while it gets its message across and is a decent attempt, would not be considered a reference standard of graphic design. In the real world, graphic designers don't know Perl. Nor should they be expected to.
Adobe software is not particularly nice nowadays (feature bloat and bugs), and I'd love to see a truly viable competitor. The open source tools have improved as well. But there's a certain refinement professionals expect of their tools (analogous to Snap-On among car mechanics, high end scopes among electrical engineers, etc) that just isn't there yet.
wannabe geek + hipster = gypster?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All this proves is that a bunch of over-enthusiastic FOSS fans can delude themselves into thinking they're producing pro-quality stuff, when all they've really accomplished is to lower their standards. Libre Graphics is simply _not_ professional quality. Rough edges abound, obvious even at a quick glance.
"Libre"? Barf! OMG, will people just make this word go away? What an embarrassment . :(
When the tools cost thousands of dollars it becomes a large barrier to entry for beginners and small shops.
That is undeniably true (speaking as someone putting his own hard-earned cash into a new company right now). On the flip side, good tools typically pay for themselves in greater productivity and better quality of results very quickly. If you don't want to spend a few thousand on the right equipment and software, then it's possible that you're in a very awkward position, but IME it's far more likely that either you have the wrong idea about something or your business plan isn't really viable.
I did download the high-quality PDF of the magazine. The idea is interesting, but without meaning to be harsh, they're actually a pretty good demonstration of why I would never rely on today's FOSS tools to do serious work. As a guy who takes some pride in his design work, I can immediately see dozens of little details where the magazine does something poorly but professional grade software would just get it right. I won't have a dig by listing them all, but as a couple of examples, several of the pages seem to be one big bitmap, and the typography is lacking basic elements like ligatures and true small caps. They do acknowledge the limitations of their font and they're open about how they're working to improve it, but the bottom line is they could drop a few hundred bucks on some pro fonts from Adobe, do their layout in InDesign, and get the job done right.
My vote for most unintentional self-defeating article: the one starting on page 40, which contrasts proprietary with FOSS approaches. The characterisation of proprietary software is pure FUD:
Graphic artists using propriety software might spend an afternoon opening a graphic in a big bulky graphics application just to convert its colourspace.
Seriously? This is followed by the wonderful:
Proprietary software typically has two answers to your problems: don't do it, or spend more money to be able to do it. This might apply to a specific file format you want to use, or an effect you want to achieve, or a way of working.
Actually, one of the main reasons we've spent so much on various big ticket proprietary software is precisely that they do just work with the industry standard data formats out of the box. If anyone thinks FOSS does better, please get back to me once Firefox can play H.264 video, Blender can work with FBX files, and LibreOffice can reliably interoperate with MS Word while working on docx files with non-trivial formatting.
The article about AdaptableGIMP on page 47 is another enlightening read, mainly for the interesting contrast between the approach it advocates and what you read in Microsoft blogs from the guys behind the Office UI redesign. There are two completely different mindsets at work there, but one is the product of a few people doing some basic experiments and the other is the product of a massive global study funded by the kind of money and drawing on the kind of resources that no FOSS project can access. As a Brit, I'm naturally inclined to root for the little guys, but as a businessman, I know which data I'd prefer to bet on.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't think that people are complaining that something is impossible to do. From my own FOSS experience, you usually have the tools for pretty much everything, and hardware issues are solved by cherry-picking compatible hardware. The problem is usually rather about how much effort does it take to solve something with FOSS tools only, compared to proprietary tools.
Now, I have no idea what the difference is in this particular area, since I never faced the challenge, and don't know what tools would be involved (neither FOSS nor proprietary) - so it may well be that their claim still holds true. But that would be the right question to ask.
LIBRE
GRAP
HICS
What? That reads like Libre Crap Hicks. And the 1.2 looks like 12 because the . is lost by being typeset too close to the 1
This is NOT what I expect of a magazine that purports to be about using free software to do things including layout books and magazines.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"Article deserved an illustration and we couldn't find one." So they published the mag with a big blank "draw your own illustration" area, for the "work-flow" article -- Only later realizing that Creative Commons Exists, and they could have used CC media... here.
Keep up the good work. Everyone has to start somewhere!
--
My first programs were trash, but they were useful to some (doom & X-Com map & save game editors); Some of the web comics I like looked like crap in their early panels, none of the web designers I know produced good designs with graceful degradation and correct semantics as their first projects...
People always still talk about the printing problem. So what printing problem?
Personally I find printing in linux (read: CUPS) to generally be pretty good. A number of printers are detected and installed automatically and correctly, even across the network.
There are still specific issues that aren't truly explainable, though. For example... try using gLabel to print on blank CD/DVD media in a Canon Pixma ip6600D printer. The default output registration is about 20mm low and if you try to adjust it in the configuration files the printer will eventually lock up (requiring the power cable to be yanked) when the registration gets to within 6mm of being correct. To print CD/DVD media on this printer I still, unfortunately, need Windows in at least a virtual box.
I hear you and generally agree. GIMP's text tools, out of the box at least, are simply pathetic. However, I will note a few points. If you have a Word document with a lot of formatting, you are probably Doing It Wrong and should either be using InDesign or some presentation format. Microsoft made an h.264 firefox plugin, but the issue there is of course patent licensing, and there are a number of related reasons to prefer other video formats. Some people are cheap, some people want an open web, some want to ban software patents. The alternatives can't match the quality-to-filesize ratio, but they're close enough for that to not be an issue; the non-technical considerations are much more important. I understand h.264 gets used a lot, but you're claiming a patent-encumbered format is best for interoperability?
I found a blender extension to import FBX files. I don't know why you need that, or if the extension works, but it exists.
You're a Brit? and you have certain values because of that? How coincidental, I'm a granfalloon too! (be wary of how you integrate your culture into your identity)
Just to quickly follow up on your data type issues:
"Lots of formatting" is a relative scale, and although I mentioned docx, it applies just as well to things like spreadsheets as well, of course. In any case, even basic things like tables and numbered lists go wrong with irritating frequency if you're trying to get LibreOffice and MS Office to interoperate, and those are hardly drivers for switching to a DTP package. The bottom line is that if you write a document in LibreOffice, you can't save it in an MS Office format and trust that it's fit to send to a client.
For H.264, I will respectfully disagree with you about the technical issues. We routinely see a factor of 2 difference in file size, and if you're running a system that sends many such files over the Internet, that's a huge difference in your bandwidth costs. It's true that there are theoretical software patent issues, but they are mostly overhyped, since pretty much all major video software works with H.264 just fine. Again, the bottom line is that the other browsers support it and Firefox doesn't, so Firefox users are potentially missing out. (Chrome was going to drop support for H.264 so the mighty G could push their own "open standard", but they seem to have quietly reversed that decision, or at least delayed implementation after the market pushed back.)
As for FBX, I promise you it is widespread in the industry: if you want to outsource anything from content creation to motion capture work, this is how people communicate. The Blender plug-in, last I checked, was a one-way, unreliable implementation of a small subset of FBX features, which isn't even close to good enough. This is almost a running joke in the community, and it has been for years.
Oh, and you're right about the GIMP. In fact, unless things have changed dramatically and very recently, none of the major FOSS graphics packages can make full use of modern OpenType fonts. (Also, for the GIMP, two words: layer styles.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
- Does MS Office handle ODF completely without any formatting glitch? Can you modify it so it does?
- Does MS Internet Explorer handle OGG natively? Can you modify it so it does?
- Do all the non-Autodesk commercial 3D packages support FBX flawlessly? Can you modify them so they do?
That's one of the strong points about libre software and real open formats.
Industry is starting slowly to understand and use open formats (and I mean REAL open formats, not just freely available proprietary SDKs), but companies always want to be the first and push their own formats instead of collaborating with existing independent projects.
FLOSS has its limitations, of course. It's not perfect, and in some cases it isn't even adequate, but it allows people to change that and make it better.
- Does MS Office handle ODF completely without any formatting glitch? Can you modify it so it does?
No, but it doesn't matter. Exactly one person I work with regularly sends me ODF files. He's a fellow contractor, not a paying client, and he asked up-front whether I could read the format because he knew a lot of people can't. (Of course, those using more recent versions of MS software actually can read ODF files anyway, probably at least as well as OpenOffice reads DOC(X) files.)
Meanwhile, my paying clients all expect DOC(X) documents, so that's what I have to send them, and I need software that is going to get it right.
- Does MS Internet Explorer handle OGG natively? Can you modify it so it does?
Given that anyone can write and install their own codecs on Windows machines from a technical point of view, you're shooting yourself in the foot a bit with that one.
Meanwhile, from a legal point of view, you can't modify Firefox to support H.264 even if you want to, if you're in a jurisdiction that has software patents. (Not that I like the idea of software patents, but I run my business in a world where some places have them.)
- Do all the non-Autodesk commercial 3D packages support FBX flawlessly? Can you modify them so they do?
It doesn't matter. Pretty much everyone in the industry uses Autodesk software or something compatible with it. It is the undeniable, dominant, effectively universal standard. (See also: Adobe Creative suite.)
Meanwhile, it might be theoretically possible for Blender to be modified to support FBX, but in practice the fact is that in several years the entire Blender community have not managed to do it despite numerous calls for it to be done.
All of this shows up the basic flaw with the pro-FOSS "you can always modify it" argument: there isn't always some friendly developer willing to spend their time building whatever feature we want to have quickly and for free. While we could theoretically write it ourselves or pay someone to do it for us, in practice it is far cheaper to buy a commercial product that already does it instead of treating every software requirement as a bespoke programming job.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.