Laidout

     DTP, and experimental vector graphics tools
     Version 0.097


News

25 March 2021
Building for Gentoo

Brief development update to mention that madsl put together something that lets Gentoo users build Laidout! This is done using this build script. Simply add the fol4 repository either by eselect:

eselect repository enable fol4

or by layman:

layman -fa fol4

and install by running emerge -av laidout.


Scaling the UI

One new feature in progress is being able to scale the UI. When you run, use the option laidout --uiscale 2 to scale up the ui by 2 (for instance). I'm working on being able to scale the UI while running Laidout in a global settings window, instead of having to fuss with command line options or manually editing the laidoutrc, but that's not quite done yet.


13 January 2021
More quarantine updates from the zone

In celebration of 2020 sort of being over, here is some of what has been going on with Laidout development, as I slowly inch toward another "Stable" release:



30 August 2020
Quarantine updates from the zone

Thanks to coronavirus among other things, I suddenly find myself with some free time, some of which I've spent working on Laidout. Mostly I've finally had enough continuous time to fix various nuts and bolts that have been bugging me for a long time. In particular:




More to come!

...assuming the virus, societal collapse, or eviction doesn't kill me!



20 July 2019
Laidout AppImages

Thanks to probonopd, Laidout now has continuous AppImage builds! These will be built whenever there is a new change, letting people try out the cutting edge version without having to compile it themselves. Just a reminder this is for the development version of Laidout, so it might be a bit unstable.

See here to try it out!


8 June 2019
Libre Graphics Meeting Recap

This year's Libre Graphics Meeting in Saarbrücken, Germany has finished. There are always a lot of interesting talks, meetings, and other random conversations about everything concerning making art with open source software, and this year was no different.

One big announcement was Inkscape 1.0, or at least the application of the git tag live at the meeting. You can't download 1.0 directly off Inkscape's website yet. The tagging is a kind of abstract developer convenience, but just trust me, it's a major milestone. Congratulations to Inkscape!

Speaking of milestones, Darktable turned 10 years old. Really I didn't realize it had been around for so long. Almost as long as Laidout! Darktable is a great way to mass edit photos, making it easy to apply a ton of high bit depth effects on large numbers of photos all at once. Although, just about every time I use it, I end up spending what seems like a really long time trying to figure out where the final "export" button is that actually does the exporting, as Darktable loves big masses of controls filled with tiny text.

There was a great talk about a color mesh interface from Pieter Barendrecht, for use with svg, and maybe Inkscape soon? A big problem with meshes is that when editing, they quickly become an unbearable, dense tangle of mesh outlines. This new interface allows local subdivision of only the parts of the mesh you want to subdivide, making the ui much less cluttered and easy to work with. He also demonstrated an interface for editing diffusion curves, a very interesting method of defining complex color fields with a few simple curve points.

One very interesting development is a new curve type from Raph Levien, famous for spiro curves, among other things like a brand new font editor project. This new curve, like his older spiro curves, potentially reduces the clutter of editing bezier curves with handles, and provides nicer and easier methods of producing smooth curves. I had not included his older spiro curves in Laidout due to its incompatibility with the LGPL that part of Laidout's path tool uses, but not long ago, he revised the license to Apache2 or MIT, which is great news. This new license type also applies to the new curve type. So now, I look forward to adding this new curve to Laidout.

Raph, with Colin Rofls and others, is also involved with making a 2-d UI toolkit native to Rust, that uses the GPU for rendering. This seems like a natural progression for a widget toolkit, as shaders and other creation tools normally found in 3-d software have a lot of potential for 2-d graphics production.

One new project was ommpfritt by Pascal Bies, which elevates cloning and other effects to being first class objects that affect their child objects, allowing somewhat easy specification of procedural modeling for 2-d vector graphics. This allows things like clearly structured template objects, where you can define an abstract arrangement, create many instances of this arrangement maybe based on a big list of data loaded via a python script, like a mail merge for instance. Then you are able to change just the "template", and have changes propagate to all the imported instances, avoiding the need to manually adjust those instances one by one. Some kind of similar template functionality is something Laidout needs as well! That would make master pages easy.

One workshop I attended was about Blender's DNA system, which theoretically allows extreme levels of forward and backward file compatibility. Essentially, a description of the entire Blender low level data structure is saved with each blend file. This allows any version of Blender to at least load and save every bit of data in any blend file, past, present, and future. In practice, the user interface or custom scripts still need to know what to do with the data to really make use of that in a meaningful way, but having the potential for such data preservation can be useful. This was quite unique when written decades ago, and remains quite unique today. A nearly empty Blender scene still means a somewhat large file since it stores the whole data model description, but Blender files tend to be large, complicated, and not meant for realtime network transfer anyway, so that file size overhead is very acceptable.

A file format approach I've taken in Laidout is to allow the file format description to be exported directly from the runtime (with laidout --file-format). This makes it easier to match a file to its format, rather than needing to hunt for it on a website somewhere. This file format description is meant to be parsed by humans that might be responsible for programming converters, and not currently meant to be directly parsed by machines. Blender's DNA takes the approach of keeping the underlying data model very simple, rooted primarily in basic, well known data types, plus you don't even need the runtime to figure out what is in a file you come across. The DNA system is also a big part of what makes Blender files load so quickly, since there is very little difference between how the data is stored on disk, and how it is stored in memory. In summary, Blender never fails to impress.

Speaking of workshops, thanks to everyone who came to my Comic Book Workflows workshop! My own takeaway is that I really need to play around with Krita more. I hadn't known what Krita's filter masks were all about, for instance. I also gave a tour of the various tools in Laidout. Some of these tools I haven't really worked on in years, so it strikes me I need to do some work polishing Laidout's tool set, rather than blasting ahead with new tools instead. I'll do that right after I finish adding the new spiro curve type, as well as.. oh never mind.

There were lots of other talks, that hopefully soon you will be able to watch online if you missed them. Keep an eye out on the LGM site for those, and also make plans to travel to Rennes, France for LGM 2020!


23 May 2019
Gif to flipbook

Just in time for Libre Graphics Meeting, here's a tutorial about how to make a physical flipbook based on an animated gif using Laidout. This uses a new GraphicsMagick based image loader, which makes it easy internally to load subimages from the gif.




11 May 2019
Comic Book Workflow Workshop

I hope you can come to this year's Libre Graphics Meeting in Saarbrücken, Germany, May 29 to June 2. I'll be giving a workshop about comic book workflows with open source software. For instance, we'll talk about methods to tag objects to be used in a comic parallax panel, like pictured. The tortoise clearly represents Laidout's rate of development.




14 April 2019
Development Update

This year's Libre Graphics Meeting will be in Saarbrücken, Germany, May 29 to June 2. I'll be giving a workshop about comic book workflows with open source software. We'll discuss best methods and software for making comic books, from the sketching and illustration phase to the printing phase, whether actual print or the web, using a variety of software (including Laidout). To that end, here are a couple of new features in development that may help.




25 November 2018
Laidout 0.097 Released!

At long last, Laidout 0.097 is now released! Three years since the last release is really not that long compared to the age of the Earth, and to show for it, we now have:


20 May 2018
Libre Graphics Meeting Recap

At this year's Libre Graphics Meeting, I’m happy to say node based interfaces had a strong presence. For instance, Neil Smith demonstrated Praxis Live, including live music through a mix of code and nodes. Antonio Roberts performed “live noding” with nodes in Pure Data, manipulating 3-d structures together with music in real time.

After this meeting, which included interesting talks with devs from Gimp, Inkscape, and others, Laidout now has many more things on it's node to-do list! Speaking of to-do lists, thanks to everyone who came to my node workshop, we found several bugs which are now all fixed!

In other news, I hope to have a new "stable" version of Laidout released within a finite amount of time. I've narrowed down my task list to about 50 or so bugs and usability issues to clear up before then. Hopefully this will only take a few weeks, as long as I can stick to that list and not implement new tools instead!







Read old news



    
What the hell?
Laidout is desktop publishing software built from the ground up with imposition in mind. Currently one may arrange pages into various cut and folded impositions, such as a booklet, or even a dodecahedron. You can fill pages with images, gradients (linear, radial, and mesh), mesh transformed images, engraving-like fill objects, and some basic text. Export with varying degrees of success to Svg, Scribus, Pdf, and more.

See the Laidout Features page for more detail about 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.

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! For example, one can make small booklets by chopping up tabloid sized paper (11x17 inches). With a fold, two cuts, and stapling, one can make three cute little 5.5 x 5.6 inch books.

Many more features are planned, like such non-essentials (to me anyway) as flowed text boxes. Who needs text when a picture is worth a thousand words?

Laidout, together with the Laxkit backend, aims to make a well documented, very modular, expandable, and configurable desktop publishing program, with an emphasis on developing tools not commonly found in other programs, as long as they are useful. A side project is to foster the ability to share these tools with other software.


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" (November 2018)
Debian Unstable (2018) laidout_0.097_amd64.deb
Ubuntu 18.04 laidout_0.097_ubuntu1804_amd64.deb
Source code
(requires compilation)
laidout-0.097.tar.bz2

Unstable
Development snapshots AppImages...
Development repository github.com/Laidout/laidout


Yes, I realize the "Stable" version is rather old. I'm working on it. You can help turn Laidout into something stable (without quotes) by posting issues to the issue tracker at github, or by dropping me a line.

The main 0.097 download area is here.

Compiling from "stable" 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++ pkg-config libpng-dev libgegl-dev libreadline-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxi-dev libxft-dev libcups2-dev libimlib2-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype6-dev libssl-dev xutils-dev libcairo2-dev libharfbuzz-dev libsqlite3-dev libgraphicsmagick++1-dev zlib1g-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libftgl-dev

And then:

tar xvfj laidout-0.097.tar.bz2
cd laidout-0.097
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

Some of the dependencies above (from mesa-common-dev on) are for the unstable polyhedron unwrapper. You don't need them if you disable the opengl based unwrapper by passing --nogl to the configure line above. The unwrapper exists also in a standalone version in laidout-0.097/src/polyptych.

If there is a problem with missing icons, you can use prebuilt icons from laidout-icons.zip.

Instead of compiling as above, 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-0.097.tar.bz2
cd laidout-0.096
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot


Development
The unstable development branch of Laidout is continuously built into AppImages to test out here.

If you think you might like to help develop Laidout, please see this page.

Development source code is currently hosted at github. You can browse the git repository here, or you can grab a copy from the repository with this command:

git clone https://github.com/Laidout/laidout.git

To actually compile from this git source, see the further instructions in the Compiling From Development Git section of the README.



Contact
For most things, you can post an issue at Laidout's issue tracker at github.
Currently, the only developer is Tom Lechner, and he has been hacking away at Laidout to help make his artwork and otherwise experiment with interface design.

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