Monday, February 5, 2007

Glyphs and TextPath, Open Office

Got some good tips from the batik users group mailing list on how to solve my pattern along a path problem. One tip involves using glyphs and textPaths thanks to Andreas Neumann. Here's an example. Played around a bit & have gotten the basic idea working, need to tweak it though as far as glyph spacing. The other tip involves markers. Haven't tried it yet though. SVG is very cool. There's a ton of stuff you can do with it. One bad thing is you can't link to an external svg element. Say you have a moon defined in one svg. You can't link directly to that moon element from another svg. SVG is still evolving though, so maybe in a future release that will be supported.

When I get my income tax check, I'm planning on buying myself a laptop. Not sure yet what I'm going with though. My desktop is a Dell I bought a little over a year ago. Adding Microsoft Office was an extra couple hundred dollars. I was on a budget, so I went with Microsoft Works Suite. That includes Microsoft Word. The spreadsheet program doesn't support tabbed worksheets though. For me, that's a problem. I decided to look into open office. It's free, I think open source too. That is a great product. It includes programs which are similar to word, excel, power point, access. The spreadsheet program also supports tabbed worksheets. These imitation programs seem to do pretty much what the more expensive programs do, so when I get my laptop I don't think I will even bother with Works Suite. I'm just going to download the latest free, version of open office and save myself some money. Some of the best software is free. Stay tuned for links to other useful free software.

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