Category Archives: Uncategorized

State of Toronto weather

Bancroft avenue, soon to be LGM Central.

Bancroft avenue, soon to be LGM Central.

In the spirit of states of (LGM 2015 will include sessions on both the state of libre graphics and the state of color management), we bring you the state of Toronto weather. April in Toronto is a tricky month. It might rain, it might be beautifully warm and sunny. Today, some heartening news: we’ve had a week of warm, sunny weather and, though trees aren’t in leaf yet, spring is making its presence felt.

Announcing Two Pre-LGM Workshops

reclaimYourTools

Brussels-based design collective Open Source Publishing will lead two workshops from the 27th to 29th of April. Using Visual Culture, a git-based tool for collaborative design, OSP will convene workshops around the themes “Portrait of a (digital) community” and “What happens in Canada stays in Canada (for the next twenty years).”

Learn more about the workshops (and other off-track events) on our Off-Track Events page, and register for the workshops through Eventbrite.

Announcing the HarfBuzz Documentation Sprint

During the week before LGM, a volunteer team will write all-new documentation for the HarfBuzz text-shaping engine. Applications use HarfBuzz to map text strings into font glyphs, including complex positioning for Arabic and Indic scripts and advanced OpenType features. We will create a “Getting started” guide to help developers use HarfBuzz in their code, as well as supporting reference.

Volunteers are welcome! If you care about improving FOSS typography or just want to help write documentation, please join us.  You can contact Nathan Willis (nwillis@glyphography.com) or write to the HarfBuzz mailing list (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/harfbuzz/).

Details about times and locations will be posted to the off-track events page as soon as they are available.

State of Libre Graphics

The opening presentation at Libre Graphics Meeting is “State of Libre Graphics,” an update from the many software, curation publication and umbrella projects of our Libre Graphics community.

For each project we want a title slide and one, none, or two content slides. The title slides should/could contain name of project, logo and perhaps a brief tag-line for/description of the project. The content slides should be about changes in the last year; as well as perhaps plans for the near future, it is good if the slides are a mostly visual; with speaker notes with context for what to to say with the slides.

Naming of files:

projectname-0.png (or .jpg)
projectname-1.png
projectname-2.png
projectname.txt

The graphics files should be 1024×768 – if they are not; they will be resized to fit. Feel free to bundle the files all in a tarball or zipfile, and send them as an attachment to pippin@gimp.org in an email with ‘State of Libre Graphics’ as part of the subject.

For projects focused on video/animation; an up to 100second video/animation with audio would be welcome instead of slides 1 and 2. If this option is taken, upload the video somewhere and provide an URL for fetching it.

Content should be submitted by Wednesday the 22nd of April, a week before LGM.

Announcing off-track events: The Inkscape Hackfest

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For three days before LGM 2015, Inkscape developers will be getting together, face-to-face, in Toronto. The Inkscape Hackfest provides an opportunity for developers who normally collaborate online to get together, talk, and solve problems.

As they put it, “Being together in one room also allows us to work on things that are harder to do on-line: designing a new plugin/extension system, teaming up to squash particularly nasty bugs, authoring better user documentation, and planning where to take Inkscape development in the future.”

More details about the Hackfest are available on the Inkscape website, and dates and locations will be published here as they’re available. The Inkscape Hackfest is one of several off-track events taking place around LGM 2015.

LGM 2015 Pledgie Campaign Launches

Click here to lend your support to: Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 - Toronto, Canada and make a donation at pledgie.com !

Every year, donations from supporters make it possible for LGM to subsidize the travel costs of participants. 2015 will be no different. Today, we’re launching our annual campaign to raise funds which will go towards reimbursing travel costs for attendees who contribute to the event (whether in the form of a talk, participation in the project, or offering a workshop), but who can’t necessarily pay for travel costs on their own.

In the coming weeks, the program for LGM 2015 will start taking shape. Donations to the fundraising campaign will help ensure that exciting workshops can be given, talks can be presented, old collaborations can be continued, and new ones can be started.

LGM 2015 Call for Participation Released

We’re very excited to announce that the Call for Participation for LGM 2015 is now out! Taking place in Toronto, Canada, from 29 April to 2 May, 2015, we’re looking forward to an exciting and vibrant tenth edition of Libre Graphics Meeting. We just need you!

If giving a talk, running a workshop or organizing a Birds of a Feather or hack session sounds like your idea of a good time, take a look at our call, and consider submitting something. The deadline for submissions is the 1st of February, 2015.