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News 12 May 2013 LGM, and sharing tools This year's Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid at Medialab Prado has come and gone. The LGM always opens up new doors, showing the wide variety of what people are working on, with some great ideas for what kind of tools and working methods are possible. I gave two short talks. One about Laidout, and another about the concept of sharing tool interfaces across different applications. In making tools in Laidout, I find I want to use them in other programs, and some things in other programs I want to use in Laidout, such as Inkscape's in-development on canvas tiling tool. This should be easy to do, but there is much work to be done! Read more about this here. Development update I am hoping to have a new release of Laidout by July 14. One year between releases is way too long! One new feature being debugged is scripting, which will allow scripting tools among other things, such as a graphical shell, available right on canvas. Another feature coming soon is alignment anchoring, so that child objects can orient themselves to parent objects 15 July 2012 Laidout 0.093 Released! Yippee! Laidout Version 0.093 is at last available, as source or an amd64 precompiled deb package, for you to experiment with. As always, Laidout is very much a work in progress. I tend to work on Laidout to suit my immediate needs, so probably there are loads of bugs I fail to activate. I try to fix any bugs people tell me about, so when you find some, you can let me know via the mailing list, or perhaps the bug tracker. What's not new is that there is still no native text tool. I swear I'm working on it. What IS new in this release:
Otherwise, here are some new tutorials, for things new in 0.093:
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 7 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. System Requirements Laidout only works on variations of Linux for now. It should work on Macs after a small amount of hacking, but I don't have access to a Mac to make it so. Download "Stable" The current release is Version 0.093. 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 for amd 64bit systems. The main download area is here. laidout-0.093.tar.bz2 (the source code) laidout_0.093_amd64.deb (binary, should work on Debian Unstable, and recent Ubuntu) Compiling the source If you download the source code form, you must compile and install from the command line. First, as root or with "sudo", install dependencies:
apt-get install g++ libpng12-dev libx11-dev libxi-dev libxft-dev libcups2-dev libimlib2-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype6-dev libssl-dev xutils-dev
If you want to use the unstable polyhedron unwrapper, then you need to also do this:
apt-get install libgraphicsmagick++1-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libftgl-dev
And then:
tar xvfj laidout-0.093.tar.bz2
If you want to attempt to use the unstable polyhedron unwrapper, then you need add --yesgl to the configure line above,
or try the standalone version in laidout-0.093/src/polyptych.
cd laidout-0.093 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local make make install Alternately, you can build a deb package from the source tar like the following. You'll need to have dpkg-dev and fakeroot packages installed. This will create an installable deb package! If you try this and it doesn't work, please let me know. It is supposed to work!!
tar xvfj laidout-0.093.tar.bz2
cd laidout-0.093 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot 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 checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/laidout/code/trunk laidout-svn
To compile from svn source, see the further instructions in the README. 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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