I had a nice surprise last Monday, I learned that the city where I live Saarbrücken (Germany) is hosting the 2019 edition of the nice Libre Graphics Meeting (lgm). So I took the opportunity to attend my first FOSS event. The event took place at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar from the Wed 29.05 to Sunday 02.06.

I really enjoyed, I meet a lot of other Free Software contributors (not only devs), and discovered some nice programming and artistic projects.

There were some really impressive presentations and workshops.

Thursday 30.05.

GEGL (GIMP new ‘rendering engine’) maintainer Øyvind Kolås presented, how to use GEGL effect from the command line and the same commands can be used directly from GIMP. This is helpful, when we want to automate some workflow.

In the afternoon, I discovered PraxisLIVE, an awesome live coding IDE where you can create effect with Java and a graph editor and showing the effect instantly on for example a webcam stream or a music track.

Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente explained their past workshop in Porto where the participants create pixel art fonts with git and the gitlab-ci.

Friday, 31.05.

On Friday, I took part to two workshops. The first was GIMP, there I met a lot of GIMP/GEGL developers. But it was more development meeting than a workshop where I could get my hand dirty.

I also took part in the Inkscape workshop, where I learned about all of the nice features coming in Inkscape 1.0 (a new alpha version was released during the LGM 2019 and users are encouraged to reports bugs and regressions). I also learned that Inkscape can be used to create nice wood works:

The model is published in the Thingiverse under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

After this productive day, most of the LGM participants went to the ‘Kneipentour’ (bar-hopping) and enjoyed some good Zwickel (the local beer).

Saturday, 01.06.

After last night, it was a bit difficult to get up, but I was able be only one minute late to see Boudewijn Rempt talk “HDR Support in Krita”.

In the afternoon, I took part in the Paged.js workshop, where we were able to create a book layout with CSS and HTML. Paged.js could be interesting for generating nice KDE handbooks with a professional looking feel, because it’s only using web standards (not implemented in any web browsers), and we could generate the pdf from the already existing html version.

Sunday, 02.06.

Sunday I took part in the Blender workshop, and Julian Eisel did an excellent job explaining the internal of how “Blender DNA and RNA system” archives great backward compatibility for .blend files and make it painless to write UI in Python almost directly connected to the DNA.

Conclusion

In summarize, LGM was a great event, I really enjoyed it and I hope I will be able to attend the next edition in Rennes (France) and see all these nice people again.

Oh, and now I have now more stickers on my laptop.

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Many thanks to Drew DeVault for proofreading this blog post.