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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is probably the most respected rule in the development of Krita. But now that we have made three major releases, and even if the development version is under heavy refactoring, most of the framework is in good shape, and now is time to start optimizing. Which is something on which I have started to work actively in September, after the feature freeze for 1.6, some new progress will be included in the upcoming 1.6.1 (mostly in the convolution code, the painting, and gradients).

One of the oldest feature requests for Scribus have been character styles and hierarchical styles. These are now finally implemented in Scribus 1.3.4cvs. Also Tsoots has done some good work on the new Style Manager, which replaces the old Paragraph Styles dialog, and he will hopefully describe it in a blog entry soon. I’ll take [...]

One of our translators and contributors mentioned to me that they had comments to the effect that Scribus is a “closed shop”. In other words, the team is really not open to adding new developers and contributors. So let’s dispel that rumour right now.It is not true. Not now, not before, never.To an outsider, it [...]

I have been thinking for a long time about a replacement for my old dying mascot, a vectorial happy chap with raising hand, which I used in the new skin for my web site that I have been developing for the past four years, but never find the time to finish, in other word, I wanted to replace a vapor-mascot. And today I figure out that a sheep would be a cool mascot, so I think my dreams and drawings will be filled with sheeps this days. And what better start for this, than trying watercolor ?