Re: Using Dia for book illustration

[Gerard Milmeister <gemi bluewin ch>]

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 01:36, Alan Horkan wrote:

> I know it is only new and didn't exist when you were looking for suitable
> software but have you heard of Inkscape yet?
> http://inkscape.org
> 
> I think they would be interested to hear your comments about what is was
> bad about Sodipodi.  I haven't played with it myself yet but I believe new
> the new release of Inkscape, version 0.37 has some more arrow head
> support.
I looked at 0.37 and found no such support. You can, I think, specify
arrow heads directly by modifying the XML. But even then, the lack
of EPS output makes it unsuitable for book illustration. For web
publishing png output is fine. Anyway, I like Dia much better
for the task.

> > as a picture in a separate layer in Dia, and then traced the lines
> > of the pixmap. This was a lot of work, but the quality it
> > generated justified it.
> 
> You may already be aware of it and it might not produce the kind of
> results you were looking for but there is some sort of an autotrace
> program that I have encountered from my use of Sodipodi and reading its
> mailing lists.
Yes, I know autotrace but my figures were not so complex, and I think
it would cause more trouble than it is worth.

> Most commerical technical drawing programs end up being very good for this
> purpose.  Similary programs like Adobe Illustrator have quite good support
> for techincal drawing file formats and I'm sure we (as users of open
> source software) would all benifit if there were developers willing and
> able to take the time to take some of the parts of dia and generalise them
> for use by other vector graphics applications too.
> 
> If there were more developers willing and able to work on Dia I expect the
> improvements want would come in due course.
That would be fine. I myself have not much knowledge about this sort of software.
I think, however, it would be better to generalize Dia itself than to
fork.

> PS As an author/co-author have you considered that 70 years is a
> ridiculously long time for copyright?  I just thought I would suggest it,
> 50 years sounds to me like more than enough for anyone and I recent read
> that O'Reilly publishing was looking at having shorter copyright terms on
> all its books.
I don't know the rules here in Europe, but indeed 70 years is long. It
may be suited for writers of novels, but technical books have usually
a quite short lifetime anyway. A shorter copyright time would also allow
publishers like Dover to reissue a book, that the original publisher
doesn't want or cannot afford to.

> Also if there are any extracts of your book online we would love to be
> able to see some of the illustrations you produced and perhaps point to
> them from the website.
In fact, the complete content of the book will be available in an online
version. The online version is built from XML sources and features Java
applets and MathML and quote a few navigational niceties.

I can put some dia examples with its eps output online... 

-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Tannenrauchstrasse 35
8038 Zürich
gemi@bluewin.ch