The Cobwebs Crew has put a lot of thought and creative work into their production, and it is a lot of fun watching the characters develop. Artist Evelyn Jennings has taken the lead in bringing many of the main characters to life.
Her sketches guide the animators when creating the vector art for the animation sprites. Many of these characters will appear in our ongoing episodes this Fall …
… Stay tuned!
We’re off and running with the Fall Track for “Life on a Redwood Post” – now that we have our first page template squared away, we can begin setting up the book. The first step is to set up Master Pages in Scribus. We created this mini-tutorial to illustrate a specific function for our project team, and are posting it here for posterity. We are still working the “bugs” out of our screen capturing technique —
Nature enthusiast Jeanne Hargrave sent these photos to #rdcHQ while on a bicycling trip in Minnesota. We’ll see if our friend Scott Peden or the folks at BugGuide can give us a precise ID:
“5:05 AM – Yes… I got up about that time every morning on the bike trip.”
“5:45 AM – I’m packed up and outside of my tent. He’s about ready to leave too.”
“We called these locust shells when I was a kid. But they are really Cicadas.”
Our DocGen Track continues …
with explorations in the PDF space. We have been experimenting with a couple of programs that are bridging the gap where Tesseract falls short. The first of these two programs is the newly released Nuance PDF Converter for Mac 3.0 which does an excellent job deciphering even the poorest quality of scans and provides multilingual support. Although this is a commercial product, it is certainly worth the money. It is a standalone module built on OmniPage, the industry leader in the OCR space for years. It does two things really well: 1) provide accurate optical character recognition (as we mentioned before), and 2) create first-generation interactive PDFs. These pros far outweigh the cons such as the software only being available on the Mac platform (Jasper is already researching ways to get the program to run on Linux using an emulator).
In short, interactive PDFs provide the online equivalent of paper forms that one can fill out on the computer and send electronically. These PDFs add a layer on top of an Image PDF that can include internal hyperlinks to other sections of the document, external links to the World Wide Web or an object on one’s computer, and form elements that can be filled out, digitally signed, and sent to a designated email address. Pretty neat!
Another interesting program that we are working with is LibreOffice, particularly with its “Hybrid PDF” functionality which delivers on the true promise of a portable document format. A “Hybrid PDF” is a PDF that anyone can view, but which includes the source document embedded within it so that people with modern office suites can also edit it if they want to. You can read more about Hybrid PDFs in this PDF about creating Hybrid PDFs (See also: “The Magic of Editable PDFs” from the author of that document).
So, we definitely have a lot of interesting tools to work with to complete our project – and although we were unable to use Tesseract to produce all of our document objects, there is a lot of interesting work being done in that space. Most notably, newly hatched open source efforts with minimal documentation which we are going to keep a watch on in the months ahead. Our solution for the CCR will be a hybrid model – and despite our open source ethos, we believe in a multimodal approach to solving a problem and using the best tool for the project at hand @ #rdcHQ.
Onward!
This week, we began diving into Diagrams III after completing work in Blends – a lot of complex work lies ahead in this set and we’ll be repurposing as much of our existing work as possible while remaining true to the original art. For instance, there are a lot of similar drawings based on work the Rural Design Collective completed in 2011 – The CCR image is shown on the left, and the prior art is shown on the right:
In addition to the shading, there are subtle differences in the line that we will need to address when we create the new vector graphic. Another example:
There are several graphics like this in Diagrams III, as well as completely new illustrations involving complex perspective. We’ll be testing our skills as we enter the homestretch at #rdcHQ!
