One Shot Design

Donationcoders.com published a comparative review of proprietary and open-source word processors.

I am currently buiding an e-commerce website for a client. My client uses Microsoft Excel to edit the data we need to build the database. As of the 30^th of November, the original file compiled by Excel for Mac weights 2,007 Kb. The same file, recompiled by Windows Excel weights 2,000 Kb.

I have good reasons to believe that in this particular case, OpenOffice comes as a much better solution than Excel, and here are the reasons why:

1. OpenOffice Calc, has very good import and export filters allowing it to open and save in the proprietary Microsoft Excel file. I noticed that the CSV files exported by Calc seamlessly import into the MySQL database with an automated process. The CSV created by Excel, on the other hand, are not formatted properly, and the worst thing is that Excel does not allow to set the CSV export parameters.
2. The OpenDocument format for spreadsheets maintaints all the parameters set in the Excel file, but when compiled, it only weights 330 Kb, simply because the Open Document format automatically involves data compression. And that is a lot of disk space saved! Especially since this particular file is meant to be mailed back and forth between me and my client.

The European Commission has taken steps to promote the use of open source systems and software in the public sector. “It has selected a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to create and manage the Open Source Observatory and Repository“, the company announced. Other members of the consortium are the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, consultancy GOPA Cartermill, and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid. They will provide an internet service and portal enabling European administrations to centrally store and share the software code of their open source applications and exchange open source knowledge.

This week I was able to design a web site layout while switching back and forth between Inkscape 0.44 on Windows 2000 and Inkscape 0.43 on Ubuntu.

Inkscape is the cross-platform vector editing application mentioned in an earlier post, which uses the XML-based SVG as its native format.

First of all, the SVG compiled by the Open-Source application is backward-compatible, so I can actually open the same work on older builds of Inkscape.

Import filters

Inkscape does a very good job at importing SVG’s exported by Illustrator. Colors are preserved, although Inkscape is not yet equipped to handle Pantone references, and it sometimes changes the CMYK values without changin the colour.

Export filters

At the time of writing, export filters are still approximate. The size of fonts and linked Bitmaps comes out oddly when an SVG created by Inkscape is imported in Illustrator or Corel Draw!. PDF’s do come much better, although Illustrator has trouble understanding their page orientation and scale settings.

I have personally favoured using Inkscape because despite all its importing and exporting flaws, it beats the mainstream applications with the following:

• Alpha transparency: in Illustrator, alpha transparency is nonexistent. It is impossible to change the transparence of a colour to reveal what is behind it. Corel Draw! offers a powerful filter settings that allows a plethora of transparency effects and gradients, but it remains embedded within it native format and hardly works when exporting. Inkscape beats both by allowing to use the alpha transparency featured in the SVG format, and it also exports it in PDF, which is another format supporting alpha transparency.
• Layers: Here, Illustrator is the one left behind, because both Corel Draw! and Inkscape allow to use layers, that can be hidden or locked.

Eighteen month after having written this entry, I definitely give a five star to th

I have been handed a text translated in Bulgarian to include in a layout. The file has been saved in the Microsoft Word format. The localized version of Microsoft XP didn’t quite like having to deal with a shortcut including cyrillic characters. In simple words, you can’t double-click on the file icon to open it, you have to go through Microsoft Word’s menu file > open.

On GNU/Linux? I double-clicked on the icon and it seamlessly opened it without complaining.