Features

Here is a list of the current features of Laidout. Most of these features can be seen in action on the screenshots page.

You might also be interested in this comparison between various desktop publishing and vector graphics programs, and also the rough Laidout development roadmap.

Interface

A splittable window system, reminiscent of Blender and the Ion window manager. You can dock, float, and move and temporarily maximize the panes of any main split window you have up. The window configuration is also loaded and saved with whatever document you are working on. The panes of each splittable window can be:

Page view window, for working on objects within pages

Spread editor, for rearranging the page order

Palette Window

Command prompt window

Help window (very basic at the moment)

A (non-functioning) button window

A fairly unique feature of the Page View and Spread Editor windows is that the whole view can be arbitrarily rotated. Normally, programs only allow viewing a page in portrait or landscape orientation. I hear tale that such a feature might be appearing in a future version of Inkscape!

Object Types

Images

Linear Gradients

Radial Gradients

Color patches using full cubic tensor product patches, as seen in Postscript and PDF

Warped images, like color patches, but with image for the color (this would be HOT for the gimp! a side project..)

EPS objects, imported as a whole. They cannot currently be taken apart.

Objects can be moved, scaled, rotated, and sheared, by themselves or as a group. There is a special 3-point transform, where you can define an anchored center of rotation and scaling, then drag another point to scale and rotate. Or you can anchor 2 points, and drag the third point to shear the object accordingly. See here for a video tutorial of this.

Impositioning

Rather arbitrary impositioning for booklets, or even a dodecahedron and other polyhedra.

You can define arbitrary impositions with faces that don't have to be rectangular in Net Impositions.

Also, you can define one or more paper arrangements for any kind of layout from any of the impositions. Each paper arrangement lets you place the same page, or page spread, or scratch space data across many pieces of paper. This is very useful for postering.

Printing and exporting

You can export everything, or just a range of spreads to a single file or multiple files as is possible for the format. You can also export from the command line, without actually starting up a window. The currently supported export formats are:

Postscript

EPS

Png images

Pdf, cannot export EPS objects

Svg, cannot export EPS or image warp objects, has trouble with radial gradients where one circle is not inside the other,

Scribus, images and groups only

Passepartout, images and groups only

When printing, or exporting to postscript or eps files, images with transparency will be masked based on 50% threshhold of the alpha channel.

Misc

Simple multiple image import by selecting one or more from a directory

Import images from a list file

Page Labels, so you can number like: i, ii, iii, 1, 2, 3, A-1, A-2, etc.

Ability to use preview images as stand-ins for your hundreds of 15M tiffs.

Batch processing. You can export files to various formats from the command line, without opening up a window.

There's a command line option (--file-format) which outputs a sort of mockup of the current file format. Hopefully this will help people make extra utilities, and aid batch processing.