[SLUG] Re: Scarborough Digest, Vol 132, Issue 4

[David Webster]

> On Saturday 29 April 2006 11:54, scarborough-request at mailman John wrote:
>
>   
>> So that means the June meeting is about doing professional graphic
>> design using Linux, from LXF 80.
>>
>> After that (LXF 81) is very interesting .. not particularly to me but
>> I'm thinking there are several people who might bite at this .. it's
>> perfectly timed for the end of the academic year: cutting costs in
>> schools, colleges and universities using Linux.
>>
>> I'm wondering whether we might be able, between us and with those who
>> have an interest, to actually put a presentation together for our July
>> meeting for people in education. What do you think?
>>
>> J
>>
>>     
> Hi
> The June meeting on professional graphic design seems a bit specialised to me.  
> Currently I am trying to learn some Ruby, and one thing I want to do next is 
> to find out how to use it in conjunction with a graphics package.  Is there 
> anyone in the group who can expand this into a talk about graphics with Ruby 
> (or perhaps Perl) and Qt (or perhaps Tk)?  That might widen the interest.
>   
What might be useful is to look as Inkscape as a vector tool and a flip 
side to GIMP's bitmap/raster nature.  Inkscape would also come under 
graphic design.

As for Ruby with graphics, there are some useful bindings to TK, GTK and 
QT, which may be of some use:

TK:
Very portable and come with most ruby distributions.

GTK:
This seems to be an up and coming project.  I'm not aware of any 
distributions shipping with this yet.
-- Ruby GNOME binding.  http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/

QT:
Binding Ruby to QT is easy, as the kde-bindings package comes with 
support for a number of languages, such as Ruby and PERL.
--  an E-Book on Ruby and QT.  The source code is free to download.    
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ctrubyqt/
--  RAD with KDevelop using Ruby/Qt/KDE.  
http://www.kdevelop.org/doc/technotes/rubyrad.html

Ruby-COCOA
--  Binding to the Mac system libraries.  
http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/doc/

The problem with most of these is that there is little documentation.


Another environment to look into is MONO, as there seems to be a 
compiler for most languages and the API and documentation is quite 
mature.  Red Hat and GNOME seem to be supporting this project quite a 
lot now.  The good thing is that people only have to write bindings for 
system libraries (such as GTK) for the mono environment, and not for 
individual languages, meaning that effort seems concentrated and the 
bindings seem quite mature.  I'm just waiting for Ruby to be supported.

If anyone has looked into this, then perhaps we could have a show and tell.

Dave