Laidout, not quite dead yet!

Behold the new Laidout website! Which looks a lot like the old website! But now it’s made with Hugo and hosted on Gitlab.

A few months ago, I went to the fabulous Libre Graphics Meeting, and left feeling inspired a bit to make some long overdue updates to Laidout. While development has been rather slow due to my time being taken up by working on Godot based projects, hiking a lot, and generally trying to pay bills, there are a couple of new things to report.

One of two new tools lets you directly make ellipses, with optional wedges cut out, and another tool lets you make rounded rectangles, allowing you to adjust the roundedness by dragging handles on screen. These two tools are also implementations in support of large, on canvas, grabable UI areas to change properties, rather than trying to grab tiny little dots to adjust things.

My current primary goal before a release is expanding imposition options so you can stack signatures from the same sheet of paper. The old behavior let you tile multiple signatures across a paper, but it could only duplicate, rather than stack.

In other imposition news, I’ve implemented various basic net templates for common single sheet flyers, that do various accordion type folds, like a gate fold, half fold, and others, including an obscure one called a Miura fold. This one is a map folding type where the pages are slightly skewed quadrilaterals, which makes folding and unfolding easier. Invented by astrophysicist Kōryō Miura, this type of fold has been used in solar cell folding for satellites! Alas, they did not use Laidout for this purpose.

In addition to working on nets, I also expanded the Singles imposition type to handle so called art board arrangements, where you can see multiple, different sized pages at the same time. You might recognize this layout style in Inkscape’s new multipage feature. Laidout can import and export this Inkscape svg with the revamped Singles imposition type. At least it could before Inkscape reimplemented it to use svg view boxes instead of custom namespace attributes! Working on it.

New “Stable” release 0.098 “soon”?

Sure? Maybe? I don’t know! I’m getting there! I swear!