Laidout Version 0.08 News 8 August 2008 Developments Just so you know, Laidout development has been slow for several months, since the development team (meaning Tom Lechner), has been screwing around with a new camera and fisheye lens to make spherical panoramas. However, the current goal is to have another release in mid-September. The major change will be a complete reprogramming of the Net impositions, so that you can import any flat sided polyhedron, and unwrap it either automatically or manually into an imposition, with the potential to project an equirectangular spherical panorama onto said unwrapped polyhedron. The polyhedron importing code and image projection is almost done, but the interface still needs to be programmed. Stay tuned! 23 September 2007 Zut! C'est impossible!! Thanks to Nabyl Bennouri, Laidout 0.08 has been translated into French! It is available in the 0.08b download. 15 September 2007 Laidout has now been downloaded over 1000 times! I haven't seen much discussion on the net about Laidout, so probably people download it, can't get it to do anything useful, and move on. But still, over 1000!! In any case, Laidout Version 0.08 is now available, as source or a i386 precompiled deb package for whatever it's worth. What's not new is that there is still no native text tool. What IS new in this release: There is a much improved export mechanism. You can now export with various degrees of success to PDF, Postscript, EPS, transparent png images, Passepartout, SVG, and Scribus. You can also select what kind of spread, and which range of spread you want to export, and choose whether to export to a single file, or multiple files. Also, you can export straight from the command line. - Postscript, EPS, and png export work the best, with all objects being supported. - PDF export can handle anything but EPS objects. - Scribus and Passepartout export can only handle images and groups at the moment. - SVG cannot export EPS objects or image warp objects. It has a little trouble with radial gradients whose inner circle is not inside the outer circle, and can only very roughly export patch gradients, which get approximated following the strategy outlined by Inkscape's Bulia Byak here, and when I say approximated, I mean approximated. Step 7 of that method is not currently implemented, and the blurring is a little irrational, but only because I'm lazy. Fixing that is tentatively slated for version 0.09. ¡Caramba! Laidout has been translated into Spanish. Through the miracle of gettext, Laidout can now be easily translated into any language that can be encoded as Latin-1. I threw together a Spanish translation based on my minimal Spanish knowlegde and Google translations. I hope to have support for more than just Latin-1 languages by the next release. Multiple, interchangeable scratch spaces are now possible. I've been calling them limbo spaces, so just think "scratch space" when you see "limbo". Up in the left corner of a view window, you can select which document to work on in the viewer (or no document), and also which limbo space to work with. A new limbo space is created whenever you create a new view window. You cannot actually delete these limbo spaces in the program yet, but first things first. In the future, this limbo selection feature will be expanded to allow easy object libraries access. There is now a paper tiling interface, which allows you to tile over any spread with an arbitrary arrangement of papers. This is useful for making large posters from smaller pieces of paper, and for printing otherwise unattached limbo objects. In other words, say you work in a viewer with no document, and thus no established imposition. You can easily print out the objects in that viewer by laying down some papers. See below right for a video tutorial. In addition to the paper tiling video tutorial, I also made one about the basics of the Laidout interface, demonstrating how to scale, rotate, and shear objects with draggable handles, and also with anchor points. New video tutorials: Laidout Basics The Paper Tiler 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 a month or so, at least when various other projects don't eat all my time, which seems to have been happening a lot lately. I succeeded in using Laidout Version 0.07 to layout and print out master sheets for a 28 page comic book called Tales of Inertia. I am using version 0.08 or thereabouts to lay out a 160 page volume of cartoons (involving 160 or so huge tiffs), which is exposing numerous little bugs to clean up! Plus I've been using Laidout as one step in a process of assembling pictures for spherical panoramas. So, 1 out of 6.5 billion people agree that Laidout might actually be useful! As a starving artist when I first started programming Laidout way back when, I needed a program to help me lay out my cartoon books. This means fast and easy placement of images on the page, being able to quickly move images between pages, being able to rearrange page order quickly, and being able to arrange pages in various impositions, or signatures. The very basics to get my cartoon books done, in other words. No other program within my tax bracket filled those needs better than scribbling layout diagrams on paper, then cutting, pasting, and whiteout-ing photocopies. Hence, Laidout. One impositioning example is printing master pages on 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 page order, or, just as easily, as it would appear after the book is assembled. Also, this idea of impositions is easily extended 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, a new X gui toolkit. Laidout and the Laxkit are both very young 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 not commonly found in other programs. Download    "Stable" The current release is Version 0.08b, which is basically 0.08, only it includes a couple of bug fixes and a new French translation. 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-0.08b.tar.bz2 (the source code)    laidout_0.08b_i386.deb (binary, should work on Debian Unstable, and possibly 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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