The annual Libre Graphics Meeting for 2010 was held in Brussels, Belgium, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go and meet many of the makers of the software I use all the time. There were about 170 people from 47 different countries, each day was action packed with interesting talks about lots of different programs and subjects. When navigating the streets of Brussels early in the morning trying to find the conference, you simply have to throw out any preconceived ideas about urban planning, and this really puts you in a great, open frame of mind when you finally get there and listen to the talks!

Now that I've mostly gotten over a really bad cold I picked up in Brussels, here's a short overview of the meeting. Other non-LGM photos from my trip will trickle in on my flickr page over the next month or two.

I presented Laidout and my interactive polyhedron unwrapper on the second day of the conference. People seemed to enjoy it. You can watch my talk, and all the other talks online, thanks to River Valley TV. The LGM was certainly inspiration to get me to spend more time developing Laidout!

Among some other interesting news was that the development version of Scribus now has new mesh gradient capabilities. Also exciting was some new code to do more intelligent image caching in Scribus, mostly eliminating the huge bottleneck that used to make Scribus impossible to use for documents with a ton of images in them!

That was accomplished by Marcus Holland-Moritz, who used Scribus and various other things he coded himself to create a coffee table book with 200 or so color photos of New Zealand! His presentation covered many innovative and very interesting experiences using Linux and open source software to make image heavy books. This talk hit on many issues I've encountered using Linux, and particularly Scribus, to make books. Definitely one of my favorite talks.

Susan Spencer gave a talk outlining the requirements for fashion design software, and soliciting help to create open source software to cover those requirements, as existing software all costs several thousands of dollars, and is a serious deterrent for new fashion designers wanting to adapt their designs easily to different body types. I can't help but think perhaps Laidout could fill some small part of that pipeline. Layout on strange surfaces is no end of fun.

Martin Renold, one of the developers of Mypaint, gave a talk about extending python with c code. He detailed the strategy of using python for the gui, but when you need pixel pushing power, one may write extra python functions in c. Mypaint is quite an interesting new painting program, which has a lot to recommend it, including removing most gui clutter, to let you focus on the image you are constructing, and still has quick and easy access to a multitude of brush types and effects.

There was a very interesting Nodebox 2 demo, where graphics results from various scripts that can be changed in real time. This strategy seems to be a theme in graphics software these days, and I'm thinking particularly of Portland's own Luz.

Alexandre Prokoudine, who seems to know about every single graphics application imaginable, presented his Darktable photo management program. Darktable can work on all kinds of images, apparently unrestricted by bit depth, or color space. There seems to be adaptible batch processing. Looks promising!

Ana Carvalho gave a short talk about using open source software to make and publish comic books! She is a part of Plana Press, which has published several books of comics, using open source software. See, it can be done!

On the whole, the LGM was a complete information overload, and I hope to go again. You can see various other reviews of the goings on there here.