Kiel, the capital of Germany's northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, hosts the annual "Kiel Open Source and Linux Days" (KieLux). In view of the city's somewhat marginal location, in contrast to LinuxTag or the Libre Graphics Meeting, this is a rather family event, 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 a request from one of the co-organisers of KieLux, Maren Hachmann (Inkscape project), asking me if I could name potential speakers from the LibreGraphics field who might be available for lectures or workshops in Kiel. Since I know Maren and her husband (also a co-organiser) personally and consider Schleswig-Holstein to be the most beautiful German state, I, shameless as I am, put myself forward for two talks 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 was not 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 focusing on Inkscape, Scribus and free colour, and shortly after the atlas, fans and other "take-away" material were laid out, attendees stopped and asked questions - colourfulness (in the common language sense) does attract people. The booth proved to be very useful as Maren was able to direct visitors who had questions about transferring vectors from Inkscape, LibreOffice and other programs to Scribus for printing 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" on the stand or outside it covered an unexpectedly broad spectrum, from legal problems to pre-press, car painting 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.
