[Clipart] Project Ideas

"Áki G. Karlsson" aki at akademia.is
Thu Apr 1 06:36:16 PST 2004


Hi

Do you think it would be useful to make a fundamental division between 
"clipart" (plants, animals etc.) and "symbols" (bullets, street signs 
etc)? I also think that "flags", and "maps" make up categories of their 
own...

StarOffice used to ship with maps of the world's countries, but this is 
not part of OpenOffice AFAIK. It could be an interesting project to make 
the outlines of the countries of the world available in SVG. One could 
start (like so many projects) with the CIA world factbook maps, or 
scavenge maps available in other vector formats... There is a small script 
provided on wikitravel that converts latitude and longitude points into 
svg projections. (http://phma.hn.org/Software/azimap.html). And there are 
probably other such useful scripts out there...

One thing I have been looking for on the web (and not found so far) is a 
comprehensive tutorial on how to create SVG maps using free tools. Could 
this be something for the Clipart wiki to do? SVG seems to me an ideal 
format for things like interactive maps on the web (should be much better 
than swf for example).

Anyway... that's just an idea. Great list btw. Just what I've been looking 
for :)

Best regards

Áki


> On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Jonathan Phillips wrote:
>
>> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:58:21 -0800
>> From: Jonathan Phillips <jon at protofunk.org>
>> To: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com>
>> Cc: clipart-list <clipart at freedesktop.org>
>> Subject: Re: Encouraging Coporate contributors?  [was Re: [Clipart]
>>     Contributors and moderation]
>>
>> I like the idea of having an initial clipart project drive to kick the
>> project off and to give it a name. I agree with you Bryce that it should
>> be something specific along the lines of the flag project which will
>> draw many people into and raise awareness of the project.
>>
>> KICKOFF PROJECT IDEAS: street signs, public symbols, universal icons,
>> posters, charts, (man flags are a good universal symbol that can be
>> easily generated copyright free), plants, animals, buildings,
>> skyscrapers, cars, logos, my brain is fried...more?
>>
>> another thing...are we considering fonts, or svg fonts, as part of the
>> project. Man, OSS font collections would be another good project for
>> someone (us in the future?) to setup.
>
> Plenty of those ideas are very good.
>
> I noticed recently that Kivio (like Visio) has some map shapes and I
> expect it should be possible to get public domain maps from somewhere
> (most likely America, given how the government makes so much data public)
> and vectorize them although I'm not absolutely sure how useful map 
> clipart
> would be certainly no one would want to see their country excluded.
> (While I'm thinking about Diagramming software I would point out 
> SmartDraw
> http://smartdraw.com/ which although proprietary has extensive 
> collections
> of clipart which might provide some inspiration).
>
> The things I see clipart used for most often is small ad's, househunting,
> computer for sale, bike for sale, party/celebration, and so on.  (I
> doodled something that looked like presents and baloons but it wasn't 
> very
> good).  Almost all of these are done using some part of Microsoft Office.
>
> Which makes me wonder about projects like OOExtras (they seem to be usign
> the LGPL).  I like the 'blue man' clipart and it would be great if we
> could find a way to cooperate with OOExtras.
> http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/
>
> Tieing in with OpenOffice seems like a way to get good exposure for any
> clipart collection but until they add SVG Import we are at a 
> disadvantage.
> If you have not already done so I encourage you to look at the following
> bug report which asks for SVG import in OpenOffice and perhaps add your
> coomments and perhaps vote for it (i just added 2 votes to it).
> http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2497
>
> Could anyone explain how this project (freedesktop.org clipart) fits in
> with the Sodipodi Clipart if at all?
>
> Sincerely
>
> Alan Horkan
> http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
>
> PS sorry for my inability to stick to one coherent idea, hopefully my
> brainstorming/thinking out loud will be useful and I'll try not to get
> carrried away.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Clipart at freedesktop.org
> http://freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/clipart



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