Not much happening here in Boston, it’s all good.

By Tkensum

Seotch-san (the author) has just released two new editions in Japanese and I’m busy editing pages, and others are busy transcribing and translating in the google group. We could do with some help doing either translation or transcription of the Japanese intot he google spreadsheets. Information is available here if you can help us.

Also needed are two artworks which go on the Stop pages, to explain to English readers how to read Manga right to left instead of the western left to right. In the last edition I personally did the work taking over from the fabulous ~c-quel who did all the previous editions. You can see the past stop/go pages here.

So if you’d like to be involved in drawing some Manga art for Ubuntu, this is your opportunity. The work needs to be related to the chapter it’ll go into, and either be vector svg or high resolution raster png file format. Please comment below to get involved!

P.S. These are the last two chapters of Ubunchu, after this, I don’t think there will be any more.

Doing this piece I found there are a couple of pieces missing from Inkscape for doing production work, perhaps this is why so many people use Scribus-ng. The normal workflow from what I have seen is to make artwork in Inkscape and then transition to Scribus for the nitty gritty of doing production.

I also did the structural editing of the book contents. That is using LibreOffice to haddle all the titles, paragraphs and types as class styles instead of ad-hock ms-word inline styles. Also dealing with the pagination and a bunch of other production issues. LibreOffice was an ok tool, but a lot of the interfaces are confusing and could do with some more design being brought in on them.

Your thoughts?

We had an excellent chat about how much the author of software can be said to be responsible or involved in the art expression and how software as tools are different or the same as physical art tools and art education.

There was a nod towards proprietary software being profoundly bad for education as well as a lot of mooting that control over your own art tools was very important from an artistic point of view.

I’d have gotten better notes, but I was completely zonked from work on Friday and 4 hours sleep. Then I had wine and was drunk and deathly sleepy. But I seem to remember there might have been Mexican food and a chat between Janine Melnitz and google maps to find the hidden hotel of the elves.

2 days later I’m almost completely recovered! Let me know below if you’re interested in LibreGraphics and if you’d like me to report on any issues that might be talked about.

This month we have some great additions to the Ubuntu Artists gallery, all done using a Free Desktop (usually Ubuntu) and Free Software tools like Inkscape, Gimp and MyPaint:

Do you like the edits that have gone into each revision? Is the wording easy to understand and direct enough for public consumption? Please give me your thoughts in the comments below.

Well it looks nice on my wall as a replacement design for the boring old default design the clock came with, but other than that I haven’t the faintest idea, perhaps you do?