Meeting Notes: SLUG / 8 Oct / InkScape

[Ben Scott]

  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