[Viscom-dev] Project Flyer

[Malte Halbey-Martin]

Hello Tyler & Arnulf,

as you certainly know the GRASS community created a flyer based on
LaTeX. I got the response from the community that LaTeX is the way we
should use. Know the Flyer is available in English, German and Italian
and the LaTeX source code is available on the grass svn (this makes the
translation and improvement of the flyer very easy).

Unfortunally the flyer hasn't the OSGeo layout for severla reasons:
1. I found the OSGeo- template to late
2. The OSGeo template is based on Scribus.


Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) schrieb:
>
> On 30-May-07, at 8:06 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>
>> Hi Tyler,
>> Stephan and Hendrik have sent you updated project flyers including
>> the new projects QGIS, OpenLayers, FDO and GeoNetwork.
>
> I just had a look at them - good work guys. It would be good if they
> can describe what changes they made.
>
>> Skribus seems to have been somewhat reluctant to cooperate - at least
>> I gather that from the complaints that I heard from the next room
>> while they were at it... Are we going to stick with Skribus for this
>> job?
>
> My heart is not set on Scribus, but I used it so we could use a
> package specifically designed for desktop publishing. What other
> options are there? It has been slowly improving, I suggest building
> from source if possible :)
>
I'm trying to create a nice 'n fancy brochure for the GRASS project and
use the scribus template from OSGeo to have somewhat of cooperate
identity. And I got stuck. I spend more time on layout stuff and Scribus
functions than with the content and that's exactly why I'm prefer to use
LaTeX (although I must admit that I'm not a professional).
> The one thing I was trying to aim for was to be able to just save a
> text file and then import it into Scribus and be done with it. But
> that wasn't working perfectly. Perhaps a latex approach would work,
> just maintain a template and import project-specific text files... if
> that was possible it'd be coolest. Or at least a website where you put
> some text into a couple text boxes and then the website creates the
> PDF for you from a template. Doesn't Mapbender has a similar function ;)
>
Hm, I'm always thinking about exporting the layout of the OSGeo flyers
as a picture and maybe there's an opportunity to use it as the
background image in a LaTeX template (as far as I know the LaTeX flyer
template has the opportunity to use an image as background). I want to
check that out anyway because I would like to use the OSGeo layout for
the flyers as well (corporate identity).
>> Next question is how to get the Projects update and maintain their
>> Info sheets themselves. We went through all of them once now to have
>> a stable baseline but from now on maintenance needs to be done by the
>> projects themselves. Maybe we can do the same thing as I suggested
>> for the portal pages. Make a Wiki page and use that plus some nice
>> layout in Skribus to produce the Flyers.
>
> This is tougher. I originally harassed all the initial projects to
> send me the text, some bullets and some graphics. It seemed like a lot
> of work for them :) Some projects only pointed me to their website,
> instead of refactoring text for me. It made it a lot more work for me.
> Isn't there an incubation requirement to help with promotion stuff?
>
Ups, I wasn't aware of that (I think I joined the OSGeo community to
late). I can send you the content and the grafix from the GRASS flyer.
>> Maybe you could put the PDFs on the web and remove the tag saying
>> that they are still being worked over? http://www.osgeo.org/visibility
>
> I have uploaded them to the server, just have to replace some links to
> make them live.
> Thanks again,
>
> Tyler

Okay, time to call it a day and doing an apt-get install beer
Malte