Laidout Screenshots

The newly improved patch editing interface is getting to the point where it is actually a useful tool! At version 0.07, it's still more or less at the proof of concept stage of development. In another couple of versions, it should get easier and easier to use.

Version 0.07 saw major enhancements to the patch controls, but much work needs to be done still. The basic controls are as follows. Hovering over an outer edge, then click and drag lets you drag that edge around. Shift-click-drag adds a new row or column off the side. Inside, control-hover lets you select which inner edges you want to delete, and shift-control-hover shows where to subdivide a row and/or column. Pressing 'j' (for jagged) toggles whether dragging vertex points will also drag the adjacent control points. Pressing 'd' will toggle between various ways to display control decorations. Finally, 'b' will toggle through various ways to interpolate controls so that you don't have to.

Click on the image below to see a video tutorial that shows how linear and radial gradients function now. To sum up, hovering over an edge then clicking and dragging will let you resize the linear gradient, or change the start or end radius of a radial gradient. You can select and move the color control points on screen, and change their colors by fiddling with the viewer's color box below.

Here we see how to fake having text and other exotic features, by importing EPS files generated by other programs. On the left is text imported from a page exported from Scribus, and on the right is a page of Bach's Partita 6 generated by the Lilypond music typesetting engine. These imported EPS files can then be repositioned to suit your fancy. Please note that when you import EPS into Laidout, you cannot manipulate the components of that EPS, only the EPS as a whole.

Alternately, you can still export Laidout pages as EPS, then import them into, for instance, Scribus, after a fashion. There is no inherent way that I know of to import mass quanities of EPS files into Scribus, though I imagine it could be done in a script similar to this one, When importing single EPS files to Scribus, remember to NOT use the File->Import->EPS! That seems to insist on breaking apart the EPS into its components, and can't deal with color patches, and I've noticed that objects that use masks, such as an ImagePatch object, seem to crash the import. The way that does work in Scribus is to create an Image frame, and then right-click and "Get Image", which grabs the EPS as a whole, and preserves the color patch gradients and warped images. Then you can lay on text if you want, print out, and even make PDFs with patch gradients and warped images!

Here is a shot that shows various features of Laidout, including a splittable main window, shown as a tatami mat sort of layout. You'll notice in the upper left that the whole view of the page is a bit rotated. In Laidout, you are not restricted to viewing pages as only portrait or landscape, like every other program in existence [note: there's been a recent flurry on Inkscape's dev mailing list in April 2007 about adding this feature]. Also in the upper left is the Object tool, which allows scaling, shearing, and rotating of multiple objects. It has handles to drag around, as seen in Inkscape, but there is also what I call a three point transform, in which you can define the center of scaling/rotation (control-left click), then click and drag any other point, and the objects are scaled and rotated to match where you drag. Or you can define the center, and also one other constant point (a second control-left click), then clicking and dragging a third arbitrary point will shear the image to match where you drag this third point, with the first two points staying where they are.

Another feature seen in the lower right are definable page labels. The pages for this document are normally 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, but here you see the custom i, ii, 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is two page ranges, one with roman numerals, and the other with arabic numerals. The only drawback currently is that you have to enter the labels manually to a saved file. There isn't quite a point and click way to add page ranges. That will probably come in version 0.09.

This is an example of a Net Imposition. This particular net is a 30 sided Rhombic Triacontahedron layout, with a picture on each page. Each "page" is a kind of squashed square (rhombus). Also notice that each page clips the picture contained in the page. If you look in the pagestyle element of each page in a saved document, you can include or delete 'pageclips' to toggle whether or not a page will clip its contents. This also allows easy creation of centerfolds, for instance. In that case, you might want your picture to span 2 pages, so you would not want 'pageclips' set on those pages. Manipulating net impositions is very primitive in Laidout at the moment, but I have big plans in that direction, such as being able to unfold something like this triacontahedron any way that it can be unfolded.

Cut this thing out, and you can fold it into a spherical-ish polyhedron. As you can see, I mounted a camera inside one of these things so that I can photograph spherical panoramas, such as this scenic staircase at the edge of the Portland, Oregon Rose Gardens. The colors would match more but for my impatience with the partly cloudy sky that day.

(development version 0.03.1)

Here is a feature that should certainly be in the Gimp. You can distort images based on the same sort of bezier patch as the patch gradient below, only using an image as the color source, rather than a gradient. The current implementation of this feature still needs a bit of optimization, but it is enough to allow displaying and printing out the results. What it needs is attention from someone who is actually skilled in low level rasterizing to speed it up a bit.

This shot shows the splitable main window in action. It contains a 40-some page booklet on legal sized paper that gets folded down the middle. The pane on the bottom is the spread editor, where you can swap pages, one with another, or move a page to another spot so that the pages in between the old and new spots get shifted over. Also, you can drag a page up to a view window to set the view to that page. You will notice in this screen shot that a 'page' is half of a legal sized paper, and you can rearrange the half-legal pages in the spread editor. You can also change how the page numbers are circled in the spread editor, as a shorthand for how done you are with those pages. When it prints, it will print out master pages on full legal sized paper: 1 sheet with the last on the left and the first on the right, on the back of which goes a paper with the second on the left and the next to last page on the right, and so on. Make double sided copies, fold and staple, and off you go!

(version 0.02)

Here we see two bezier color patch gradients and a few squashed circle gradients. Like a bezier line segment with 2 vertex points (on the line) and 2 control points, a bezier patch first has 4 vertex points and 12 control points. Each vertex can be assigned a color, and the color of the inner part of the patch is computed from those vertex colors. The patch can then be subdivided and worked further. The 'w' key can warp a bezier patch to a ring as shown. It is a 6 by 2 grid of patches. The central swirl is a patch subdivided once and the inner points have been rotated. Patches can only be manipulated as a grid, though in future versions, they will also be able to exist as a branching chain of simple un-subdivided patches.

(version 0.02)