[cairo] New cairo artwork and slides template

Carl Worth cworth at east.isi.edu
Tue May 18 06:48:45 PDT 2004


Some of you may have noticed the fancy new scarab-themed logo on the web
page. I thought I'd share the story behind it.

I recently gave a talk on cairo at the X Developer's Conference[1]. In
preparing the slides, I cribbed heavily from slides Keith and I had used
previously (of course), and noticed that we had used a bitmapped image
of a beetle for bullets.

I thought it would be appropriate to have my slides be fully
vector-based and rendered with cairo, so I asked my brother Richard if
he would like to draw a little beetle for us.

As usual, Richard went above and beyond the simple request, and drew
something quite lovely that shows off radial gradients and shares the
color theme of the freedesktop.org logo. So, it was a natural
replacement for the lame logo we had drawn previously.

In addition to the scarab, Richard also designed a custom logo for the
word "cairo" itself, a nice banner, and a clever combination of the two
that would make for fine stickers. All of this artwork can be found in
the new cairo-artwork module in CVS.

But wait, there's more. Richard also designed a nice SVG slide template
incorporating several of these elements. I used the template to manually
create the the slides[2] I actually presented. Since then, Richard has
cooked up a build environment that takes a simple XML-based outline and
generates SVG slides. The template allows for arbitrary SVG chunks to be
placed on each slide. This is also in cairo-artwork along with a few
example slides similar to the ones I presented.

Richard has licensed all of this work under the Creative Commons
ShareAlike license, which means anyone is free to use and modify it as
long as modifications are released under the same license, (ie. like the
GPL but without any distinction of source and object forms).

Anyone that gives a talk related to cairo is encouraged to give the
slide template a try. Richard would be happy to hear comments and
suggestions.  (I've already requested the ability to maintain a simple
indented-text outline along with code snippets, and have all the XML and
SVG generated from that. We're getting there.)

Oh, and Keith added support to xsvg to display a sequence of files
provided on the command-line. Navigation works with space and
backspace. So we have a fine slide viewer too.

Have fun,

-Carl

[1] http://freedesktop.org/Software/XDevConf

[2] http://freedesktop.org/~cworth/xdevconf/




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