We rant and rave about Scribus’ PDF quality and its ability to make commercial grade PDF by mere mortals. A design decision made early on to focus on robust PDF export was in hindsight a brilliant one by Franz. OK, now that is one side of the PDF coin. The other side is [...]

Marcel working actually on next 0.9.0-RC2 release. Test packages are available at this url. Please report all compilation problems to the [email protected] mailing list.10 bug entries in B.K.O have been fixed with this release especially with Color Management. Take a look at the current NEWS file for details.

A few weeks ago, I made a blog entry about a watercolor sheep in krita. And someone ask me how to do watercolors in krita ? And I told myself that it would be better to write an howto. A month to answer a question, so good for my willingness to be fast to answer questions :( But until a few days ago there was one aspect of watercolors that I didn't understand. And mostly because it was yet to be used, but now it's fixed in the incoming 1.6.2 version. So along the cool smudge paint op, there will be a dry filter for water colors.

The kipi-plugins team is proud to announce the first beta release of kipi-plugins 0.1.3 and libkipi 0.1.5.The kipi-plugins 0.1.3 series has been under heavy development since November 2005 and offers you the opportunity to test and enjoy a variety of new features, additions and improvements.The source for kipi-plugins and libkipi is available at this urlNew features and bug fixes since kipi-plugins 0.1.2 are listed below:Kipi-plugins NEW FEATURESNew Plugin : MetadataEdit : New kipi plugin to edit EXIF and IPTC pictures metadata (by Gilles Caulier).
New Plugin : GPSSync : New kipi plugin to sync photo metadata with a GPS device (by Gilles Caulier).
New Plugin : IpodExport : New kipi plugin to export pictures to an ipod device (by Seb Ruiz).

Native Language Support is now complete on current Exiv2 library. the 'gettext' svn branch have been merged into trunk. This will be the major feature included into next Exiv2 release planed to Christmast.Metadata tags titles/contents/descriptions will be internationalized now. Translate Exiv2 will improve digiKam/kipi-plugins i18n. There is a screenshot of digiKam in French using Exiv2 with NLS support at this url.If you is interressed to contrib on Exiv2 project, take a look into current Exiv2 implementation from svn. You can start a new translation using the Exiv2.pot file or update the current PO files. Look this link to get the files.

Often I read comments about people wondering why krita require this or that library, and therefor will not work without it. Like in the last dot announcement about koffice 1.6, or in a bug report asking for krita to be separated from koffice.

The three hard requirements of krita are kolibs, qt/kdelibs and lcms. It's nearly impossible (unless making a local copy of those one in the krita tree) to build krita without any of them. And as I will try demonstrate bellow, we make an extensive use of those libraries.

The first bug fix release of KOffice 1.6 is out. With a lot of bug fixes in all the applications, and mostly kexi and krita which were the most actively developed in the 1.6 cycle. This version also include a few new features like a color level filter for krita, or a new combo box for database relation ships and parameter queries in kexi.

But what a difficult release it has been to do.

My experience at releasing software for a wide public started in May last year with krita-plugins, and I think I have screwed all of them. I did create the tarball by hand and attempt to clean them of all what I thought was unnecessary. It turns out that the package was around ten times too big. So someone suggest me to use some "scripts" that would help me. Well my experience with the scripts for releasing KDE software has been a hard reminder of "never trust blackbox", the problem is they are written in "shell script", and I have always believed that shell scripts of more than ten lines are written in the wrong languages, so I did give up on understanding them.

Exiv2 0.12 library is now available for download. This is a bugfix release. Look the changelog on the web project page for details. To download tarball, please consult this page.I recommend all users to use this new version with the recent digiKam/DigikamImagePlugins 0.9.0-RC1 packages and with the current kipi-plugins implementation.

Thanks to Frank and Thiago for giving me that tip: if you are not interested in profiling the startup of your application, just launch valgrind with --instr-atstart=off, and then reactivate profiling, with "callgrind_control -i on".

This will make startup be ten times faster, and on positive note, it will give you cleaner outputs.

It's really easier to blame the hardware for the slowness of your software, and to sit idly while the law of Moore increase the speed of computers. On the other hand it's also easy to track little mistake that can considerably boost your program. The other I made a brief overview of all the available tools, today I will tell about a practical session of optimizing.

A few days ago Casper came on irc and sayed that krita's startup in trunk was really slow. Which was true, so I launched sysprof then krita, and I noticed that the CPU did spend half of its time in the gradient loading code, and more precisely on creating KoColor objects.