Nine people attended the SLUG meeting last night. After some announcements, suitable heckling, and the obligatory protector fussing, Rob Anderson got underway with a presentation on InkScape. He started out explaining why he started playing with SVG in the first place. It turns out Rob knows somebody with a laser cutting/engraving machine. Rob wanted to have some designs cut, and that meant he had to supply a vector graphics file to run the machine. Vector graphics are needed because the machine can only trace lines -- this isn't an inkjet.
If I was smart, I would have asked Rob to send me the URL of the pictures and graphics he used. So you'll have to make due with some description: There was the outline of some mountains, a stylized name, and a slogan. Rob started with a bitmap, which InkScape easily imported. The "Trace Bitmap" function did an amazing job of turning that into vectors -- almost perfect on the simple logo Rob had. From there, the group spent over an hour in a semi-interactive exploration of InkScape. These sorts of unstructured adventures are both educational and fun, which is grand. Unfortunately, they do tend to defy easy prose description. Suffice it to say: InkScape is a very powerful and capable tool. Random trivia: Rob asked InkScape to trace a full-color photo of a scenic overlook. It didn't choke, even when the result was an SVG with over 100,000 nodes. Upcoming SLUG meetings: Next month - Mon 12 Nov - Panoramic Photo Processing with Linux. Rob will be showing us some tools and techniques for building panoramic pictures (very wide aspect ratio) from regular digital camera photographs. The tools are "hugin", "autopano", and "enblend". The techniques... well, you'll have to attend to get those! December - Mon 10 Dec - Linus Torvalds speaks at UNH. Hah! Bet that got your attention. But sorry, we're not that lucky. In the tradition of holiday re-runs, this will be a showing of a video recording of Linus's talk at UNH, circa 1996/1997. Thanks to Rob for, well, all of the above. :) Hope to see you all next time! -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/