Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Have a whole bunch of ultra-high resolution images to upload to your website, but you don't have time to individually scale them to a Web-appropriate size in the GIMP? Imagemagick and bash to the rescue:

for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 70 $i scaled/$i; done

…hey presto! That  9½MB file is now 50% smaller (in pixel dimensions) and a mere 750KB (in file size), and the same goes for the other hundred-or-so images in that directory.

It's just been brought to my attention that the Coffs Coast Community College is offering courses this semester in OpenOffice.org and the GIMP, led by one David Bryant, a familiar face to ClubLinux regulars. Well done David! I would advise anybody interested to enrol ASAP.

What is a File Format?

A file format is essentially the set of rules for turning information into zeroes and ones and vice versa.

See Wikipedia's article on file formats.

Proprietary Formats

A proprietary file  format is one where this set of rules is not freely useable by everybody, for one or more reasons such as:

• Trade Secrets
• Software Patents
• DRM/DMCA

Document FormatsRecommended

• ASCII/Unicode text. Most applications will have an option for saving files as "plain text"; some will allow you to specify the character encoding used. ASCII is the oldest, simplest, and most widely supported (which is why it is the standard used by Project Gutenberg), although it's support for languages other than English is minimal. Unicode is a set of different plaint text character encodings designed to address this issue. ISO 8859 is another often-used character encoding that is generally considered to have been superceded by Unicode. Document formats which are based on plain text, such as SGML and XML document types, by necessity use one of these character encodings. UTF-8 appears to be the Unicode variant recommended for most purposes (anybody disagree?).
• PDF. An open standard developed by Adobe Systems. It's often called "Adobe Acrobat format", which creates the misleading impression that proprietary software is required to use it, so please avoid that term. Where in the past it would have been possible to recommend the use of PDF without reservation, it appears that Adobe is up to something with regards to licensing either non-standard extensions to PDF, or ideas in the standard PDF specification which may or may not be covered by patents.

The Official GIMP User Manual (PDF format).

Learn the GIMP from the basics to advanced techniques.