Laidout Version 0.09 News 9 June 2010 Laidout in Brussels The annual Libre Graphics Meeting for 2010 was held in Brussels, Belgium, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go and meet many of the makers of the software I use all the time. There were about 170 people from 47 different countries, each day was action packed with interesting talks about lots of different programs and subjects. When navigating the streets of Brussels early in the morning trying to find the conference, you simply have to throw out any preconceived ideas about urban planning, and this really puts you in a great, open frame of mind when you finally get there and listen to the talks! I presented Laidout and my interactive polyhedron unwrapper on the second day of the conference. People seemed to enjoy it. You can watch my talk, and all the other talks online, thanks to River Valley TV. The LGM was certainly inspiration to get me to spend more time developing Laidout! You can read mini-reviews of some of the other talks on my website or lots of other people's takes here. 21 February 2010 Laidout 0.09 released! After a mere 2.5 years, there is a new "Stable" version of Laidout. There have been a lot of under the hood changes, which makes some things better, and probably buggier in some areas, but it all represents progress, if you can believe it! One notable bug is that you should turn off desktop effects if you are running Compiz. Laidout Version 0.09 is now available, as source, or your choice of x64 or i386 precompiled deb packages, 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 the ability to import a few vector based formats with varying degrees of success, include Scribus. Most data that Laidout doesn't know how to convert is stored as Mystery Data, which can then be exported back out to a Scribus file, for instance. This of course lets one do things like reimpose a Scribus document into a booklet and have it still be editable in Scribus, among other things. Be warned, though, that not much testing has been done in this area, so your success rate may vary. Another large change is the introduction of a very rudimentary scripting interface, accessible from the command line. This will be vastly improving in future versions. You can now do things like import, reimpose, then export files from the command line, without opening up any windows. This of course lets you do things like reimpose a Scribus document without leaving Scribus, with a script like this. You can now add, remove, load, and save different scratch spaces, as well as paper groups, so you don't have to recreate them whenever you start Laidout. Net impositions have been completely reprogrammed, to allow more adaptable import of 3-d models. You can specify an OFF file to use as the basis for unwrapping, for instance. Gradients, including color patch gradients, now display with transparency. Laidout's display mechanisms are undergoing an overhall, so the state they are in now will be improved with the next version. Be advised that I tend to work on Laidout to suit my immediate needs, so there are probably lots of bugs I fail to activate. If you find any, please let me know! 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 6.5 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, 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 0.09. 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-0.09.tar.bz2 (the source code)    laidout_0.09_i386.deb (binary, should work on Debian Unstable, and possibly recent Ubuntu)    laidout_0.09_amd64.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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