2011-01 Tristram Shandy CD Covers

Librivox is a community work that produces audio books of texts in the public domain. I've done some readings and some covers. Tristram Shandy is book in 4 volumes and I've made and uploaded covers for 1 and 2 and 3 is nearly done but waiting on reading completion.
I checked librivox, having heard nothing for quite some time and 3 and 4 are done and waiting and covers have even been requested. I want an easy fun PTOM so this is it.

Check the process for creating covers on Librivox: Volunteer CD Covers . Things have changed a bit. There are 2 sizes of preview images, you submit them in a zip and you can do a bit of the grunt work by generating catalog page code

Cool - first the fun stuff: Buff the 2 published images, finish the 3rd and create the 4th.











I used William Morris wall paper designs as the background and imitated a woodcut effect for the images and title text using gimp and a mouse (I must try to get used to the tablet but I've grown to like the mousecut print style) I was going for a 60s English paperback style.

Now create : book_title_yymm.jpg, book_title_yymm_thumb.jpg ,book_title_yymm.pdf.

Used one of the openoffice templates CDJewelcase.odt. I found placing the images difficult to get right and wound up making the images backgrounds for cells that way the border of the cell print on top of the image even if it's not lined up right.
QAD script for making a track listing from the wepage contents list: cut and paste the contents into tracklist.txt then go.

nl -b pCha tracklist.txt | grep "Chap\|Read" | sed s/" "//g | sed s/"\t"/" "/

I used the output of that as the track listing then exported them as PDFs.

All done. I found it handy to make a check list to make sure I got everything right in all 4. Uploaded and generated the code.

2010-11 Font beerwine

There's a great naive raw looking sign by a corner dairy just down the road. Take photos and make a font based on it. Call it beerwine.
I'd forgotten until a friend and myself walked passed it and he had his camera-phone handy . Here's a trimmed shot
So the task is to make a vector font from a photo of some lettering. I checked for tools to this so I could get together a process and this seems to be a reasonable approach :
gimp -> glyphtracer -> FontForge.

• Use gimp to make an image of a full alphabet and character set in the style of the characters in the image.
• Use glyphtracer to parse them into vector fonts.
• Use FontForge to gussy-up the result into a font usable on most PCs.

And here is an example created using GIMP. Open office , desktop themes, abiword all see the font and treat it properly. Cool.