[lug] Installfest flyer

[Chris Riddoch]

"Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org> writes:
> Vector tools are severely under represented in the open source world. 
> There are a few tools - see
> http://www.graphics-muse.com/cgi/gmcat.pl?id=16
> Artstream had promise as a commercial product when I saw it a few years
> back at LinuxWorld, but for some reason they never seemed to go public
> with it.
...
> The lack of vector tools is what keeps me working with GIMP so much. 
> I'd love to do poster sized art but that's difficult (re: slow) to do in
> GIMP without tons of memory and very fast CPUs.

Thanks for the insights, Mike.

A few months ago, I attempted to make some posters with penguins and
arrows (going in various different directions) that could be put in
appropriate places to lead people to BLUG events.  I thought it would
be a relatively simple task.

OpenOffice's print filters, for whatever version I had at the time,
failed to produce valid postscript (and has quite likely been fixed
since then) and I had some difficulty creating something as simple as
that poster, being quite unfamiliar with the "Office" way of creating
vector graphics.

I tried several of the programs mentioned, and ran into mysterious
bugs with all of them that I couldn't produce consistently enough to
write up a halfway decent bug report.

I eventually broke down and attacked the problem with raw postscript:
spent a few hours trying to figure out how to reference, position, and
scale the Tux EPS file as needed before I decided it would be easier
and faster to import the file into the GIMP as a suitably
high-resolution raster image, print the stupid thing, and grab a
permanent marker for the arrows.

What's frustrating about the whole situation is that I rarely need a
vector graphics tool, and when I do, it's for something obscenely
simple.  The hours spent trying to find *some* tool that can do what I
need isn't enough for me to justify the time I'd need to track down
and contribute a bugfix to whatever promising vector tool needs it.

If only my time were as copious as the bugs.

-- 
Christopher.Riddoch at colorado.edu
 - epistemological humility -