The „Kiel Open Source and Linux Days“ (KieLux) take place every year in Kiel, the capital of the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Given the somewhat peripheral location of the city, this is a rather informal event, in contrast to LinuxTag or the Libre Graphics Meeting, and is best compared to the „swiss publishing days“. The venue for KieLux is the Kiel Innovation and Technology Centre (KITZ), an offshoot of Kiel University.
At the beginning of this year, I received an enquiry from one of the co-organisers of KieLux, Maren Hachmann (Inkscape project), asking if I could name any potential speakers from the LibreGraphics sector who might be available for talks or workshops in Kiel. As I know Maren and her husband (also co-organiser) personally and consider Schleswig-Holstein to be the most beautiful German state, I shamelessly suggested myself for two lectures and registered them early. The topics were „Open Source for Photographers“ and „Desktop Publishing with Scribus and Free Colour“. Both suggestions were accepted, and my proposed dates were also taken into consideration.
The journey was quite stressful due to the well-known problems with the Deutsche Bahn (two hours late), so I had to catch up on some sleep before I could go to the KITZ. But that wasn't so important, because on the first day the LPI exams and „typical“ Linux topics were in the foreground in the morning.
Maren Hachmann and I had a joint stand with a focus on Inkscape, Scribus and free colour, and shortly after the atlas, the fans and the other material were laid out „to go“, participants stopped and asked questions - colourfulness (in the general sense of the word) attracts people. Incidentally, the joint stand proved to be extremely useful, as Maren was able to refer visitors who had questions about transferring vector graphics from Inkscape, LibreOffice and other programmes into Scribus for print output directly to me.
Maren also held an Inkscape workshop that day, which I took part in. The power of this vector programme is really amazing and, from a creative's point of view, probably hard to beat. Unfortunately, it still lacks PDF output and support for CMYK, LAB and spot colours.
The questions and discussions on the topic of „colour“ at the stand and outside the stand covered an unexpectedly broad spectrum, from legal problems to pre-press, automotive coating or sRGB workflows to television.
My first lecture on free image processing software for photographers was very well attended (the room was full), and some even knew more than I did about details of the programmes presented. By the way, one of the audience members took the fF flyer with him because he had many questions about colour and colour models. Since education about colour is one of the aims of the association, I think this is welcome.
As expected, the second lecture attracted a smaller audience and the room was only half full. Thematically it was divided into two parts: 30 minutes Scribus, 30 minutes free colour, although it was not always possible to separate the two. In the Scribus part I mainly introduced the new features in typography and import filters. In the remaining thirty minutes I presented and explained the association, the colour fans and their use in practice as well as the colour atlas. The demonstration of the PDF version of the atlas caused some amazement - as did the fact that all this is freely available. I also mentioned the OCSC, showed the download options, mentioned SwatchBooker as a conversion tool and demonstrated the CxF import in Scribus. The DIN spec also came up. By the way, the fans and the atlas were examined with much more interest by those present at the lecture than during the LGM in spring.
Even before I returned from Kiel, a KieLux participant signed up as a new member of the association. Together with the requests of some visitors to come back next year and offer some practical workshops, I consider the participation in the Kiel event a good success for both Scribus and freieFarbe.
Christoph Schäfer
Contribution pictures (Christoph Schäfer)
The Inkscape part of the LibreGraphics stand. The LibreGraphics poster for KieLux. Maren Hachemann (Inkscape) talking to a user.
