If you fall into one of those rare groups of people needing to make icons for both Windows and MacOSX the simplest solution I found was using the Axialis Icon Workshop. Not only can it save to both operating system formats it also has some nice image object tools to make fancy buttons really fast and starts at only $35usd.

While it is easy to convert icons between MacOSX/ Windows or to quickly make your own it seems horribly difficult to edit these icons later due to the lack of layer support. So, if you are only looking to make a few icons that cannot later be "tweaked" then this is not bad at $35. The included images also help to make it a very comfortable starter package for icon development.

There's a bunch of other stuff to do batch image conversions, a photoshop plugin, export packages for commercial sale or presentation but those are in the Corporate Edition which is $60usd.

Tags: icons, macosx, windows

If you have ever struggled through making regular expressions when writing software these editors might help you out.



All free text editing packages allow you to enter in text and make Regular Expressions against it to see the output BEFORE you put it into your code!

Tags: regular expressions

Well, at first I was simply amazed by what Inkscape .42 could do for vector graphics. Flowing text inside vector outlines, easy to use gradients, great text kerning, and runs in Windows, MacOSX and Linux!

But then I wanted to make a PDF of the work I'd done and wham, bang lotsa problems. I had to export to postscript for the PDF but Inkscape does not export gradients or alpha channels. Also the touted "Perfectly compliant SVG format file" seems to have problems opening in Batik and other SVG viewers, seemingly because of text flow issues. Even without the gradients the A4 PS export always ended up being too big in the PDF output and so became cropped.

Supposedly I can export the PDF using Scribus (linux only Desktop Publishing Software) but I have yet to try that. I guess I will have to find a Knoppix CDROM to give it a try.

All I could finally do was try exporting PNGs and making PDF's of those... which sorta worked but the PDF file size was way to big.

So, it is nice for editing SVG directly and saving nice PNG's, maybe for making icons, logos, widgets... but otherwise I was loosing too much time to show the work to clients.

Tags: inkscape

Wow, all weekend I tried to get any PDF links using FOP 20.5 XSL Stylesheets 1.69 and olink (I needed olink since I had broken my book into chapter.xml files). Links to within the same .xml orignal file worked but as soon as I tried to cross link to another section... no link.

All I wanted was clickable cross links in my PDF to other sections in a PDF document. It works great when you have one single XML document and link things with xref and link but as soon as you try and get fancy and break out the chapters into their own chapter.xml files and then put them together as a book things get nightmarish.

Once I had broken everything up into their own XML files I saw that my xrefs and links were not working any more, at least when they referred to something in one of the other files. Of course everything worked great with RenderX's XEP but that is expensive and I needed something in a free processor like Apache's FOP.

The best I could get was this error "FO processing failed: internal-destination or external-destination must be specified in basic-link" and that was after discovering I needed olinks and needed to make a text file to describe where the links were kept (olinkdb.xml). Ugh, what a pain.

Of course I had the syntax for that olinkdb.xml file all messed up and couldn't understand the whole olink idea to begin with. Finally I got the olinkdb file right... with some tests using RenderX's XEP Personal edition. Then thanks to Google I came across this newsgroup comment from 2 weeks ago and everything started to fall into place: HERE .

So, following Robert's suggestion to turn off insert.xref.page.number I suddenly found my olinks appearing . No page numbers or named destinations but at least there are links. RenderX works great with this insert.xref.page.number activated but FOP just choked unless it was off.

Here is a summary of what I did. Note any directory paths to be sure files are in the right place.

1. make a customization xsl file with the following parameters:
   
   < xsl :param name="fop.extensions" select="1"/>
   < xsl :param name="insert.xref.page.number" select="0"/>
   < xsl :param name="targets.filename" select="'C:/documents/targets.db'">
   < xsl :param name="target.database.document" select="'file:/C:/documents/olinkdb.xml'">
   < xsl :param name="collect.xref.targets" select="'yes'">
   < xsl :param name="current.docid" select="'testbook'">
   < xsl :param name="prefer.internal.olink" select="1">
   < xsl :param name="insert.olink.pdf.frag" select="1">
2. 
   
   
3. 
   Make an olinkdb.xml file (the targets.db will be autogenerated) like below
   < ?xml version="1.0"?>
   < !DOCTYPE targetset SYSTEM "file:/C:/docbook-xsl-1.69.0/common/targetdatabase.dtd" [
   < !ENTITY book-targets SYSTEM "file:/C:/documents/targets.db">
   ]>
   < targetset>
   < targetsetinfo> Description of this target database document,
   which is for the examples in olink doc. < /targetsetinfo>
   
   < document targetdoc="testbook">&book-targets;< /document>
   < /targetset>
   
   
4. 
   
   
5. 
   Put my olinks in with only the targetptr set to the linkend name of someplace in one of the documents (without any targetdoc). These olinks could either be with preset text or empty (and becoming autofilled later.) NOTE - the auto filling seemed to have some problems if the linkends were placed on a title. All should be fine if linkends stay on sections and chapters.
6. 
   
   
7. 
   compile my pdf from the main book.xml.
8. 
   

Sorry if some of the above texts did not come out right. I'll try to clean them up again later. As I said, ugh.

Tags: docbook, fop, PDF