At the International TeX Users Group Conference 2023 (TUG23) in Bonn, Germany, I presented a talk about using Metafont (and its extension Metapost) to develop traditional orthography Malayalam fonts, on behalf of C.V. Radhakrishnan and K.H. Hussain, who were the co-developers and authors. And I forgot to post about it afterwards — as always, life gets in between.
In early 2022, CVR started toying with Metafont to create a few complicated letters of Malayalam script and he showed us a wonderful demonstration that piqued many of our interest. With the same code base, by adjusting the parameters, different variations of the glyphs can be generated, as seen in a screenshot of that demonstration: 16 variations of the same character ഴ generated from same Metafont source.
Hussain, quickly realizing that the characters could be programmatically assembled from a set of base/repeating components, collated an excellent list of basic shapes for Malayalam script.
Excerpts from the Malayalam character basic shape components documented by K.H. Hussain.
I bought a copy of ‘The Metafontbook’ and started learning and experimenting. We found soon that Metafont, developed by Prof. Knuth in the late 1970’s, generates bitmap/raster output; but its extension MetaPost, developed by his Ph.D. student John Hobby, generates vector output (postscript) which is required for opentype fonts. We also found that ‘Metatype1’ developed by Bogusław Jackowski et al. has very useful macros and ideas.
We had a lot of fun programmatically generating the character components and assembling them, splicing them, sometimes cutting them short, and transforming them in all useful manner. I have developed a new set of tools to generate the font from the vector output (SVG files) generated by MetaPost, which is also used in later projects like Chingam font.
At the annual TUG conference 2023 in Bonn, Germany, I have presented our work, and we received good feedback. There were three presentations about Metafont itself at the conference. Among others, I also had the pleasure to meet Linus Romer who shared some ideas about designing variable width reph-shapes for Malayalam characters.
The video of the presentation is available in YouTube.
Postscript (no pun intended): after the conference, I visited some of my good friends in Belgium and Netherlands. En route, my backpack with passport, identity cards, laptop, a phone and money etc. was stolen at Liège. I can’t thank enough my friends at Belgium and back at home for their unbridled care, support and help, on the face of a terrible affliction. On the day before my return, the stolen backpack with everything except the money was found by the railway authorities and I was able to claim it just in time.
I made yet another visit to the magnificent Plantin–Moretus Museum (it holds the original Garamond types!), where I myself could ink and print a metal typeset block of sonnet by Christoph Plantijn in 1575, which now hangs at the office of a good friend.
When building C++ code with CMake, it is very common to want to set some pre-processor defines in the CMake code.
For instance, we might want to set the project’s version number in a single place, in CMake code like this:
project(MyApp VERSION 1.5)
This sets the CMake variable PROJECT_VERSION to 1.5, which we can then use to pass -DMYAPP_VERSION_STRING=1.5 to the C++ compiler. The about dialog of the application can then use this to show the application version number, like this:
A solution that many people use for this is the CMake function add_definitions. It would look like this:
add_definitions(-DMYAPP_VERSION_STRING="${PROJECT_VERSION}")
if (START_MAXIMIZED)
add_definitions(-DSTART_MAXIMIZED)
endif()
Technically, this works but there are a number of issues.
First, add_definitions is deprecated since CMake 3.12 and add_compile_definitions should be used instead, which allows to remove the leading -D.
More importantly, there’s a major downside to this approach: changing the project version or the value of the boolean option will force CMake to rebuild every single .cpp file used in targets defined below these lines (including in subdirectories). This is because add_definitions and add_compile_definitions ask to pass -D to all cpp files, instead of only those that need it. CMake doesn’t know which ones need it, so it has to rebuild everything. On large real-world projects, this could take something like one hour, which is a major waste of time.
A first improvement we can do is to at least set the defines to all files in a single target (executable or library) instead of “all targets defined from now on”. This can be done like this:
We have narrowed the rebuilding effect a little bit, but are still rebuilding all cpp files in myapp, which could still take a long time.
The recommended solution
There is a proper way to do this, such that only the files that use these defines will be rebuilt; we simply have to ask CMake to generate a header with #define in it and include that header in the few cpp files that need it. Then, only those will be rebuilt when the generated header changes. This is very easy to do:
configure_file(myapp_config.h.in myapp_config.h)
We have to write the input file, myapp_config.h.in, and CMake will generate the output file, myapp_config.h, after expanding the values of CMake variables. Our input file would look like this:
A good thing about generated headers is that you can read them if you want to make sure they contain the right settings. For instance, myapp_config.h in your build directory might look like this:
For larger use cases, we can even make this more modular by moving the version number to another input file, say myapp_version.h.in, so that upgrading the version doesn’t rebuild the file with the showMaximized() code and changing the boolean option doesn’t rebuild the about dialog.
If you try this and you hit a “file not found” error about the generated header, that’s because the build directory (where headers get generated) is missing in the include path. You can solve this by adding set(CMAKE_INCLUDE_CURRENT_DIR TRUE) near the top of your CMakeLists.txt file. This is part of the CMake settings that I recommend should always be set; you can make it part of your new project template and never have to think about it again.
There’s just one thing left to explain: what’s this #cmakedefine01 thing?
If your C++ code uses #ifdef, you want to use #cmakedefine, which either sets or doesn’t set the define. But there’s a major downside of doing that — if you forget to include myapp_config.h, you won’t get a compile error; it will just always go to the #else code path.
We want a solution that gives an error if the #include is missing. The generated header should set the define to either 0 or 1 (but always set it), and the C++ code should use #if. Then, you get a warning if the define hasn’t been set and, because people tend to ignore warnings, I recommend that you upgrade it to an error by adding the compiler flag -Werror=undef, with gcc or clang. Let me know if you are aware of an equivalent flag for MSVC.
if(CMAKE_COMPILER_IS_GNUCXX OR CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ID MATCHES "Clang")
target_compile_options(myapp PRIVATE -Werror=undef)
endif()
And these are all the pieces we need. Never use add_definitions or add_compile_definitions again for things that are only used by a handful of files. Use configure_file instead, and include the generated header. You’ll save a lot of time compared to recompiling files unnecessarily.
It was once said over the grapevine that: "Our C++ API documentation has some issues, our QML API documentation has a lot of issues."
And it was true, but that is to change soon! As you might know, there is an ongoing effort to port our documentation from Doxygen to QDoc, and you can help with that.
We would like to invite you to join our porting sprint effort to finish this task. On November 14th at 1PM UTC, we'll be hanging out in the Matrix room working on this. Hope to see you there.
Welcome to the @Krita-promo team's October 2024 development and community update.
Development Report
Android-only Krita 5.2.8 Hotfix Release
Krita 5.2.6 was reported to crash on startup on devices running Android 14 or later. This was caused by issues with an SDK update required for release on the Play Store, so a temporary 5.2.7 release reverting it was available from the downloads page only.
However, the issue has now been resolved and 5.2.8 is rolling out on the Play Store. Note that 5.2.8 raises the minimum supported Android version to Android 7.0 (Nougat).
Community Bug Hunt Started
The development team has declared a "Bug Hunt Month" running through November, and needs the community's help to decide what to do with each and every one of the hundreds of open bug reports on the bug tracker. Which reports are valid and need to be fixed? Which ones need more info or are already resolved?
For the November Art Challenge, @mikuma_poponta has chosen "Fluffy" as the theme, with the optional challenge of making it "The Ultimate Fluffy According to Me". See the full brief for more details, and get comfortable with this month's theme.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - September/October 2024
8 images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from September 14th to October 11th. When the poll closed on October 14th, moderators had to break a
four-way tie for the last two spots, resulting in these five wonderful works making their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Nominations were accepted until November 11th. The poll is now open until November 14th. Don't forgot to vote!
Ways to Help Krita
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.
Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.
The Krita-promo team has put out a call for volunteers, come join us and help keep these monthly updates going.
Notable Changes
Notable changes in Krita's development builds from Oct. 10 - Nov. 12, 2024.
Stable branch (5.2.9-prealpha):
Layers: Fix infinite loop when a clone layer is connected to a group with clones, and a filter mask triggers an out-of-bounds update. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
General: Fix inability to save a document after saving while the image is busy and then canceling the busy operation. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Resources: Fix crash when re-importing a resource after modifying it. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Brush Tools: Fix the Dynamic Brush Tool to not use the Freehand Brush Tool's smoothing settings which it doesn't properly support. (bug report) (Change, by Mathias Wein)(Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Recorder Docker: Prevent interruption of the Text Tool by disabling recording while it is active. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
File Formats: EXR: Possibly fix saving EXR files with extremely low alpha values. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
File Formats: EXR: Try to keep color space profile when saving EXR of incompatible type. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
File Formats: EXR: Fix bogus offset when saving EXR with moved layers. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
File Formats: JPEG-XL: Fix potential lockup when loading multi-page images. (Change, by Rasyuqa A H)
Keyboard Shortcuts: Set the default shortcut for Zoom In to = instead of +. (bug report) (Change, by Halla Rempt)
Brush Editor: Make the Saturation and Value brush options' graph and graph labels consistently agree on the range being -100% to 100% with 0% as neutral. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Bug fixes:
Vector Layers: Fix endlessly slow rendering of vector layers with clipping masks. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Layers: Fix issue with transform masks on group layers not showing until visibility change, and visibility change of passthrough groups with layer styles causing artifacts. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Brush Editor: Fix crash when clearing scratchpad while it's busy rendering a resource-intensive brushstroke. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
File Formats: EXR: Add GUI option for selecting the default color space for EXR files. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Transform Tool: Liquify: Move the Move/Rotate/Scale/Offset/Undo buttons to their own spot instead of alongside unrelated options, to avoid confusion. (bug report) (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
Move Tool: Fix Force Instant Preview in the Move tool to be off by default. (CCbug report) (Change, by Halla Rempt)
Pop-Up Palette: Fix lag in selecting a color in the Pop-Up Palette. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Scripting: Fix accessing active node state from the Python scripts. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Usabillity: Remove unnecessary empty space at the bottom of Transform, Move and Crop tool options. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
We have been hard at work making sure our design system keeps moving forward. For the past weeks, we have made significant progress in the space of color creation and icons.
There is also an easter egg in the form of PenPot. Read the rest!
As previously mentioned, we restructured our color palettes to have set color variations at various levels. We will combine those colors into tokens that will be named something like this:
pd.sys.color.red50
Meaning:
PD: Plasma Design
SYS: System token (We also have reference tokens and component tokens, .ref. and .com. respectively)
Color: Token type
red50: color name + color value
Note that as we follow Material design guidelines for these colors, we have a collection of 100 different color shades for a given color. Depending on the needs of the system or changes in design, we could decide to not use red50 but we would like more intensity. So we would choose red49, or red48, and so on.
The color variable name would change accordingly. This set up would allow designers and developers to understand the kind of token they are working with and it would be the same language for both developer and designer.
In Figma and PenPot, designers have the ability to name tokens however they like. I opted for keeping token names as we are recommending them for the Plasma system. That way there is good consistency.
This week, we consolidated these colors and we added them to the list of tokens in Figma and PenPot. However, there is still more to be done in the form of documentation for our Plasma developer team. We are still working through it, making sure we are accurate in the request for development.
Additionally, this week we had the pleasure to meet with Pablo Ruiz, CEO at PenPot. Mike, one of our team members met Pablo recently and spoke of our Plasma Next project. This led to a meeting to discuss the needs that our team currently has for developing a design system.
The team at PenPot is excited to partner with our KDE team and the Plasma Next initiative. They have generously offered a few resources to help.
This couldn’t come at a better time as very recently we have been hitting gaps in our team knowledge when it comes to developing design systems. This process is a first for our desktop system and we want to get it right. With the help of the PenPot team and the changes they are making to the application, this should be easier.
As such, we also decided to request prioritization for some of our tickets that would allow us to set up and migrate our Figma assets into PenPot and eventually, share these with the community at large.
Today, we are not close to releasing a full design system for others to use, but we are making good progress. Stay tuned!
We also moved into the process of editing 16px icons. Given that we already have new icons in the 24px collection that we can leverage, we cut the design time in half or more. We don’t have to brainstorm new icons, we mostly just have to edit the 24px icon and adapt it to a 16px version. This work just barely started but we are making good progress.
One area that is still up in the air is our colorful icons. Given we edited the monochrome icons, this calls for editing colorful icons as well. We have received many suggestions on what kind of colorful style we should follow. I would like to extend that invitation.
If you have seen or created amazing colorful icons and would like to suggest that style for us at Plasma, send us a comment!
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
This week, we released KDE Gear 24.08.3 and we are preparing the 24.12.0 release with the beta planned for next week. The final release will happen on December 12th, but, meanwhile, and as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app.
Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world. So consider donating today!
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
It is now possible to open a context menu with Greasemonkey (Juraj Oravec, 24.12.0, link). Greasemonkey lets you run little scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content. Juraj also removed the advertised FTP support in Falkon as the support for FTP was removed from Chromium. (Juraj Oravec, 24.12.0, link)
Itinerary can now show you a map of the whole trip (Volker Krause, 24.12.0, link).
And display some statistics about your trip, for example the CO2 emission, the distance travelled and the costs (if available) (Volker Krause, 24.12.0, link).
Finally, the alignment of timeline elements in Itinerary is now much more consistent (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0, link).
When loading PDF files with Ink annotation containing an empty path, Okular won't crash. You shouldn't be able to create such annotations with Okular anyway, but some PDF files out there do contains such annotations (Albert Astals Cid, 24.12.0, link).
We also no longer hide the signing UI prematurely and now ensure it is visible until the signing process is actually finished (Nicolas Fella, 24.12.0, link).
Finally we fixed a small memory leak in Okular's latex support (Nil Admirari, 24.12.0, link).
Kalk will now correctly handle pressing the Esc key and clear the input field like many other calculator applications do, instead of creating strange characters in the input area (Devin Lin, 24.12.0, link).
The performance of displaying the build output has been improved (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0 link).
KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages
We addressed certain annoyances when working with the flatpak runtime. This included, for example, improving the handling of .flatpak-manifest.json files which we use in KDE for storing application's Flatpak manifest (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 24.12.0 link).
KMail and other PIM applications can now be compiled on Windows (Ingo Klöcker and Laurent Montel link 1 and link 2). Having KDE PIM applications work well on Windows is still in early stages of development. There is still a lot of work required to make Kontact a good experience on that platform.
Konsole now always creates a cgroup hierarchy when creating new process. This prevents entire applications getting killed in an Out-Of-Memory (OOM) scenarios when a tab consumes too much RAM (David Redondo, 24.12.0, link). David also ensured the subprocess of Konsole are correctly mapped to Konsole's .desktop file (link).
We improved the network proxy's config page look to make it more consistent with the other config pages (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link).
Joshua Goins and Olivier Beard improved the link preview. Now clicking anywhere on the link preview will take you to the linked webpage (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link). The separator shown to the left of the preview and quoted text also got stylish rounded corners (Olivier Beard, 24.12.0, link).
NeoChat now hides non-standard rooms from the room list as most of the time they are used exclusively for holding data (e.g. trip group information from Itinerary) and not meant to be interacted with (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link).
We also improved the way polls look (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0, link).
And made sending messages and inserting newline shortcuts configurable (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0, link).
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and
contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need
your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved.
Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog
in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things
you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them;
contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces;
translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your
local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary
contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries,
travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free
Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
We've released a new video! ..Templates! you can create them with Krita to save time in
your digital paintings and be more focused on your artwork. They are seamless, they are useful, and they are really easy to generate. So let´s go with another supercool feature of Krita.
Check out the video for download links for the templates themselves!
Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management
applications team. This report covers progress made in September and October 2024.
Since the last report, 24 people have contributed over 1100 changes to the KDE PIM
code base. We also released a two bugfix releases of the KDE PIM Suite with
the Gear releases 24.08.1 and
24.08.2
Please note this is the last bi-monthly blog post for KDE PIM. We will continue to work
on KDE PIM but weekly improvements to KDE PIM are now included in the
This Week in KDE Apps blog.
We covered a few topics and made plans. In particular we touched upon contributions blockers,
we hope the milestone system will help and also working on the amount of repositories which
are not part of KDE Frameworks. Things are progressing in the right direction but slowly.
Feel free to reach out to help!
Milestones
Talking about the milestones. You can see what we got in store on the Gitlab
board. Some of them are progressing nicely
like the resurrection of Kontact for Windows or the port away from QCA.
If you see anything you fancy and you would like to help, reach out to us on the
#kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!
Applications
Itinerary
Our travel assistance app Itinerary got a new two-level trip/timeline view, an
extended public transport location search, a new full trip map view and better
Android platform integration. Read more in its own bi-monthly update.
But that's not the only bugs which got squashed. It's now possible to
wake from suspend when using RTC wake
and a crash has been fixed affecting systems where the kernel supports alarm timers.
Last but not least, the GUI has been improved around the run mode options in the
preferences dialog.
Merkuro
Claudio has been busy fixing regressions and improving the stability of
Merkuro. Notably, maps are now displayed again (if the event contains
coordinates). Also, the collection combobox in the editors are now initialized with
a valid collection and filtering features have been repaired.
KAddressBook and KOrganizer
The general improvements to support Plasma Activities is still on going.
It is not enabled by default as it requires Akonadi Resources support to
become really useful and the corresponding changes are not there yet.
KMail
On the KMail front the search has been greatly improved. There is now
a custom syntax usable in the search text field. One can now use keywords
like subject:, body:, to, from, has:attachment, is:important,
is:replied and so on to make more precise queries.
For instance one could write "from:vkrause@kde.org to:kde-pim@kde.org is:important"
to get only the emails from Volker on the kde-pim mailing list which are also flagged
as important.
As you may know, Fedora KDE 41 was released a couple of weeks ago.
I wanted to talk about a special feature that our colleague @farchord (with support from upstream developer @Nate Graham) has brought to our Fedora KDE distribution:
Enabling Third Party Repositories With A Single Click!
Thanks to the flexibility of plasma-welcome we can offer this feature
Right after installing Fedora and on first login you will be presented with the Plasma Welcome window:
Before you click on Skip , you can go through the different slides to read about KDE and Fedora and also to decide whether you want to contribute with anonymous metrics or not (note: I personally do not):
Here is where the interesting part comes in, on the next slide:
With a simple click of a button you will enable the most commonly requested by our users Third Party Repositories like rpmfusion! (note: you will be asked for your administrator password)
Once the request is processed, the message will change to:
That’s it! You have successfully enabled Third Party Repositories without needing to modify any file or running any command whatsoever
Before you do anything with your system and your new configuration, I will strongly recommend to update your system via Plasma Discover :
Proceed with all the update and reboot to get the latest and shiniest from our repositories.
Finally, to verify that the Third Party software is available, you can check:
Has this ever occurred to you? The most joyful moments of your life got filled with sorrow, a grief of loss…
Let’s talk about the Ubuntu Summit first, my international conference and solo travel outside my country. Probably I am the first from my entire extended family to visit a European country. My parents, well-wishers everyone was so happy. Only person didn’t know much about this, my maternal grandfather, whom I called (yes, “called”, he left us on 27th October 2024) Dada. Let me tell you about the summit first.
rajeesh
@frdbr:kde.org
soumyatheman
GSoC