Laidout Version 0.092 News 8 April 2012 Alignment tool preview Behold a preview of a new alignment tool in Laidout! With it, you may distribute sets of objects along paths. I hope someday to port (or help someone else port) this tool or some equivalent to Inkscape, where it would be most useful. I hope to smooth it out to show a less buggy version of this alignment tool at the Libre Graphics Meeting in early May in Vienna, which I'll be going to. The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual gathering of users and developers of all kinds of open source graphics software. This allows a kind of cross fertilization across projects resulting from face to face contact that might not otherwise happen just from developing over the internet. They are trying to raise money enough to cover travel costs of developers who otherwise could not afford to come. 11 February 2012 Laidout +1 There is now a new fangled Laidout Google+ page, for your amusement! Also, Tom will be in Brussels soon for the Libre Graphics Research Unit's Co-Position meeting, to brainstorm with fellow interface explorers about possible futures of open source layout tools. Click here to read an interview some of those folks did with Tom back in May on Laidout and related topics. One last item, I uploaded new 0.092 versions to the download area, which fix a couple of bugs. One helps compiling on i386 systems, which was breaking upon checking for Cups. The other is a greying out problem on the default Ubuntu desktop. Hopefully those are fixed now. Let me know of other bugs you may encounter! 30 December 2011 Laidout 0.092 Released! Woowoo! Laidout Version 0.092 is at last available, as source or an amd64 precompiled deb package, for you to experiment with. What's not new is that there is still no native text tool. What IS new in this release: There is now an interface for modifying page labels. See a video tutorial here. You may now add custom printer marks, including some automatic marks if using signatures. Automarks are cut and fold lines just outside the printable area, and/or tiny dots just inside the pages. The dots are useful in case you have no inset in your signature. Work will be done hopefully soon to be able to customize various gaps, colors, and line widths of the automarks. For custom marks, future versions will also provide much more control over which printer spreads get which printer marks. There is now a very basic path editing tool. It is somewhat new, and probably inadequate and buggy, but you can at least build paths, and change the stroke and fill color with it. You cannot currently see transparency on screen in paths, but it will export with transparency. You can now select different units in the rulers. You can select a few common small units like inches, points, cm, mm, m, and yards. Also you can select what units should be default units from the new document creation dialog. Scribus import has been slightly improved to handle page number labels, and master pages. Note however that the master pages are converted to actual page objects on import. This simplifies exporting back out to a Scribus document after imposing onto some bizarre layout. For the Scribus plugin, there are now a couple of Scribus based dialogs that can popup to try to get settings to simplify calling laidout when things are not where they are expected. The automatic marks are available from the Scribus plugin, but you cannot currently add your own custom ones. For that, you still have to import into a running Laidout, not from the plugin. Read more about Laidout with Scribus here. Now uses ~/.config/laidout to store options, rather than ~/.laidout. Also there is a Laidout .desktop file provided to make it easier to access for those who don't like the command line. Unsnarled some really convoluted behind the scenes object movement code. This finally makes moving groups of objects from one page to another (or off of pages) actually work almost like one would expect it to. Still some serious problems moving objects that are nested in groups though! A prime example of Laidout being a work in progress. I swear I'm working on it. A few interface polishes, such as being able to click outside of a menu to make it go away, and tiny text writing in the rulers that might make them actually useable. My focus for the next release at the moment is to advance the spread editor to make it easier to group and move groups of pages. I've been stalling making a large book of my cartoons until Laidout can do this efficiently, and it is several years overdue!! Also still next on the development agenda is revamping the net based impositions to make them actually usable without manually editing files. Also, rendering in Laidout continues to still be undergoing an overhaul, so mesh warping is still obnoxiously slow in this release, but should improve by next time maybe. Be advised that I tend to work on Laidout to suit my immediate needs, so I leave it to you to find all the bugs that are not in my immediate path. If you find any, please let me know! There's also a bug tracker. Read old news      What the hell? Laidout is desktop publishing software, particularly for multipage, cut and folded booklets, with page sizes that don't even have to be rectangular. It currently only runs on Linux. See the Laidout Features page for what it can do now, the Roadmap for what it's supposed to do eventually, and this (incomplete) comparison to a few other desktop publishing and vector graphics programs. It is in the "Mostly does what I want on my machine" stage of development. I try to have a new "stable" release once in awhile, at least when various other projects don't eat all my time, which seems to happen a lot lately. "Stable" in this context means that it is only slightly less buggy then the raw development branch. Usually, I only work on it when I have to get a new book done. I have been using Laidout to lay out my comics into books since 2006. So, one out of 6.9 billion people agree that Laidout might actually be useful! An example of what I use Laidout for is to make small booklets by chopping up tabloid sized paper. With a fold, two cuts, and stapling, one can make three cute little 5.5inch x 5.6inch books. Laidout allows editing in the master printing page order, or, just as easily in reader spreads, as it would appear after the book is assembled. Also, Laidout's approach to imposing pages is broad enough to allow non-rectangular pages, paving the way for easy creation of, for instance, dodecahedron calendars, or indeed any layout on arbitrary polyhedral surfaces (sometimes otherwise known as packaging). Many more features are planned, like such non-essentials (to me anyway) as text! Who needs text when a picture is worth a thousand words? Laidout is currently built with the Laxkit, an X gui toolkit. Laidout and the Laxkit are both rough and highly experimental. The main development aim is to make a well documented, very modular, expandable, and configurable desktop publishing program, with an emphasis on developing features and interfaces not commonly found in other programs, as long as they are useful. Download    "Stable" The current release is Version 0.092. Really these are more like development snapshots than anything resembling stability. You can help turn Laidout into something like stable by posting feedback on your experiences with it to the Laidout mailing list, or dropping me a line. In any case, you can get Laidout in source code form or as a deb package. The main download area is here.    laidout-0.092.tar.bz2 (the source code)    laidout_0.092_amd64.deb (binary, should work on Debian Unstable, and recent Ubuntu)    Development For the development version, you can browse the subversion repository here or you can grab a copy from the repository with this command: svn co http://laidout.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/laidout/trunk laidout If you think you might like to help develop Laidout, please see this page. Also, go to the Laidout Sourceforge project page for mailing lists, project statistics, and other Sourceforge goodies. Contact There is a general purpose mailing list here. Currently, the only developer is Tom Lechner, and he has been hacking away at Laidout to help make his artwork.

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