Comments on: Episode 087

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:17:48 +0000

@aqua – it was easy in this screencast to do a trace bitmap because the image was basically one colour with a nice uniform background of another. It’s much more difficult to get good results if you’re working with something like a person on a complicated landscape background.
What I’ve tried in the past is to use the ‘multiple scans’ option in trace bitmap and set it to ‘colors’ and then choose something like 12 scans. Then I ungroup the resulting object into all these layers and try deleting the ones I don’t want until I’m left with something decent. Then I union what’s left into one path. Again, this doesn’t always yield very good results.
I was thinking about doing a tutorial on this very thing to create silhouettes. Give it a try. But heathenx is correct in saying that something like the Gimp is much better at doing this sort of thing.

By: heathenx

heathenx — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:00:15 +0000

@Aqua
It might be easier/quicker to do that in Gimp before using the image in Inkscape.

By: Aqua

Aqua — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:28:55 +0000

Not really, but that would be one way. I meant to do the same thing like Querin did in this episode but remove a background like is only black or any other color instead of white so you don’t have to draw a line all around it like you did in episode 033.

By: heathenx

heathenx — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:41:38 +0000

@Aqua
Do you mean like I did in episode 033?

http://screencasters.heathenx.org/episode-033/

By: Aqua

Aqua — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:49:58 +0000

Nice tutorial you got there. But I am just wondering if you guys knew any sort of way get rid of the background at an image that has a black or any other color as background.

By: Ignacio

Ignacio — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:17:05 +0000

I Love U (K)

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:05:24 +0000

@Pam,

When you use a mask it will give different parts of the ink blot different levels of transparency. This usually gives a more realistic look than just decreasing the whole object’s transparency uniformly. Of course the results will vary depending on the object, mask and background.

By: Pam Water

Pam Water — Sat, 30 May 2009 09:29:58 +0000

What advantage to doing the mask verses just making the ink bolt transparent?

By: instantlx

instantlx — Sun, 17 May 2009 02:18:52 +0000

Your tutorial helps me a lot ,thank you so much. I am Chinese, and I am using inkscape both on windows XP and ubuntu.

By: heathenx

heathenx — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:17:26 +0000

testing captcha…

By: Johny

Johny — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:03:56 +0000

@heathenx

Wonderful… i will try it later at home thank you

I just got shared folders working OS X Crunchbang

I wish it was that easy (well.. it seems easy) compiling for OS X aswell
Not many builds have been made for OS X since 0.46

Again.. thanks for all help guys

By: heathenx

heathenx — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:44:26 +0000

@Johny

To compile Inkscape on Ubuntu (CrunchBang) follows these steps:

1. sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape
2. install “libgsl*-dev” package.
3. download a recent SVN release from: http://inkscape.modevia.com/svn-snap/?M=D
4. unpack and open a terminal from that directory
5. ./autogen.sh
6. mkdir build
7. cd build
8. ../configure –prefix=`pwd`/../install
9. make install (< - this will take a while...watch a screencast while you wait)
10. run inkscape from /install/bin/inkscape
11. Thump your chest and yell, “I just compiled Inkscape!”

The above method is a method that I got from Ted Gould on the Inkscape mailing list. It allows one to have the stable release (0.46) installed system wide and a devel version that can be run from a certain directory without interfering with the stable release. In other words you have run both versions.

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:07:02 +0000

@Johny

Glad to hear you got it going. That sounds exactly what I had to do to get it going in VBox, but I think I also edited the xorg.conf file to give me a specific resolution I think…

Anyway, with regards to getting the absolutely latest version of Inkscape (if you’re not satisfied with 0.46 from the repositories which is what I use), you might want to check out heathenx’s post on our blog from a while back and give him a shout via our the contact page on our website. His post about compiling Inkscape (and he’s got one or two others I believe on how to make a .deb package for it) can be found at: http://screencasters.heathenx.org/blog/2008/07/02/compiling-inkscape-update/

By: Johny

Johny — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:02:56 +0000

@Richard

Thank you for helping!

I now installed Crunchbanglinux on my office iMac 24 in VB and after some googeling i found out how to get the right res
I had to install the GuestAdditions, after that the screen runs perfect in full screen.
I added the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso as CD/DVD.ROM and in Linux from terminal did:
sudo /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

Next mission… upgrade Inkscape to latest build, how do you do that in Linux?

Thanks again

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:46:43 +0000

@Johny,

I had the same resolution problems running crunchbang in VirtualBox to start with. I’ll check the details at work tomorrow, but I do know you have to install the “extras” or Virtual Box “additions” or something to get those extra resolutions I think (plus a slight modification to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Like I said, I’ll check into it sometime tomorrow and let you know.

By: Johny

Johny — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:58:43 +0000

@Richard

Thank you for the fast and informative answer!
A screencast howto in Linux will probably be highly apreciated.

I just installed Ubuntu in VB and just get a tiny 800×600 window on my Dell 30″
How do you reconfigure the monitor resolution? i only see 800×600 and 640×480 in the monitor config panel.
I know this was the reason i never continued with testing Linux the last time… never found out how to set the right monitor res

I will download and test the Crunchbang aswell just for fun.

Regards

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:34:03 +0000

@Johny

This was done on my new laptop on which I installed Crunchbang Linux (crunchbanglinux.org). The dark theme is the default one in Crunchbang. It’s a good distro which is kinda-sorta a lightweight distro, but it’s based on Ubuntu (so it’s relatively stable) and comes with all the good stuff pre-installed (codecs, Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox, etc..). I recommend it. I actually run it in a virtual machine on my XP box at work. It runs quite nicely in a VM.

Note that it uses the Openbox window manager instead of Gnome or KDE, so you have to right-click to get to your app menus etc.

Both heathenx and I use RecordMyDesktop on Linux to record our screencasts. This produces an ogg or ogv file. We then use some tweaked mencoder scripts to turn those into avi files and flash files.

We’ve really got to do a good screencast on ‘how we screencast’. We’re getting asked that more and more these days.

By: Johny

Johny — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:14:39 +0000

Thanks for yet another great tutorial!
Allways a pleasure to watch your tuts.

I like the dark theme you have, what Linix dist do you use to get it?
What screenrecording app do you use?
I currently don’t use Linux, i mostly use OS X and try avoiding Windows as much as possible, but i thought i’d give Linux another try via VirtualBox in OS X.

Best regards

By: Richard Querin

Richard Querin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 01:48:26 +0000

@heathenx – p@#$-off!

@cb2k – the cheque is in the mail.

By: cb2k

cb2k — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:57:51 +0000

Thanks again guys first class.