Open Source Valentine

Last night my (young) son declared he wanted to make a Valentine’s card for someone in his class, and he wanted my help to make it so off to the Batcave!

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Er, I mean my office.

Now my main machine (which runs Windows) was busy rendering video for a project, so I switched to my Ubuntu machine instead. I often tend to bypass Linux for media related stuff – I know it can handle most tasks, but I know that Windows definitely can do what I want and I’m more familiar with the applications. However due to time constraints (like bed time) I had no choice but to rely on the penguin.

First things first, he wanted a nice picture on the front, so Open Clip Art was my first port of call. We easily found a suitable image but it was in SVG format so instead of using the GIMP as I’d expected,  I  had to turn to Inkscape (I suppose I could have used Scribus but I didn’t think of it at the time). We knocked up a quick layout, and then it was time to print.

At this point I have to say that Inkscape’s print dialog sucks!

Frustrated by the inability to print I instead exported it to a PNG file, opened this in the GIMP and printed it from there to my printer (which incidentally was on another machine and networked via CUPS).

All of this (including installing Inkscape – thank you apt-get) was managed in a very short space of time, and my son was over the moon with it. I’m by no means a graphic artist or a designer so I can’t comment on the capabilities of the Free applications I mentioned here, but they allowed me to get the job done and I will have to invest more time in playing with them in the future.