Weekly recap — 29 October 2024

Week highlights: Dune 3D release, newly discovered projects for musicians and astrophotographers, an update on Scribus development.

Astra Lite and Electra Stacking

Astrophotographers who choose Linux don’t have a terrible lot of options. Mostly people use PixInsight (non-libre) and Siril (free/libre). So it’s even more exciting to find not one, but two new projects, both by the same developer, Denis Artyomov. Both programs have GUI (GTK3) and are written in Rust (you need this information in your life if you want to build them).

The first one, electra_stacking, is pretty much a DeepSkyStacker replacement. You combine bias, dark, flat, and light frames and you get a TIFF or a FITS file out of it for further processing. That’s all it does, that’s all it needs to do.

The second one, astra_lite, is a packed with features and looks more like PixInsight:

Screenshot courtesy by the developer

Some of the things it can do are:

• Live stacking with satellites and meteors track removal
• Darks, biases and defective pixels library
• Light frames quality filter
• Simple guiding and dithering by main camera
• Autofocus
• Sky map
• Plate solving
• Manual mount control
• PHD2 support for dithering
• UI for INDI devices control (requires the INDI server)

Only astra_lite seems to have builds for DEB-based Linux distribution and Windows, and electra_stacking doesn’t build out of the box for me (but astra_lite does).

Scribus 1.7 update

The team keeps updating the user interface based on the proposals from the Indigo UI project. One of the latest changes is the revamped New Document dialog that shows up when you launch the program. It defaults to showing page format presets (some international standard ones and some country-specific ones) with various options on the right. The rest in that dialog is pretty much the same.

The Image Properties panel has also been updated. It’s slightly clear and seemingly less verbose than the previous one. But because it’s typically grouped with the regular Properties panel, you get to see a bunch of blank space to the right of controls.

New designs are coming from Martin Reininger and implemented in code mostly by Craig Bradney. These two changes are actually from September, but I haven’t looked for a while, so there you go.

Fontmatrix archived on GitHub

In 2010, I met Pierre Marchand at the annual Libre Graphics Meeting conference and got involved with Fontmatrix, his brainchild at the time — a promising free/libre font manager. Except Fontmatrix transcended the typical font management feature set and went right into the type design study territory, which was lots of fun.

Pierre had a lot of great ideas and he was obviously willing to deliver on all of them. However, in 2012, he unexpectedly fell off the face of the Earth for some personal reasons and never resurfaced again in either Scribus (where he was a contributor) or Fontmatrix. It was right in the middle of a major UI revamp and an internal rewrite that was supposed to bring OpenType shaping support via an early version of harfbuzz. There weren’t any other active contributors, and the closest I got to hacking on the program was tweaking .ui files. And that was the start of a slow painful death of the project.

Eventually I moved the project from SVN at Savannah to GitHub to maybe get more contributors. But there wasn’t much talent willing to hack on the program. I think the largest external contribution was Frédéric Coiffier porting the program from Qt4 to Qt5 in 2020.

So earlier this week, I pulled the plug on the project’s repo on GitHub. It is now archived.

bcon24

Blender Foundation published videos from this year’s Blender Conference that took place on October 23-25 in Amsterdam. Lots of great talks to get lost in!

You can watch the videos on YouTube or Blender’s own PeerTube instance.

Dune 3D v1.2.0

Lukas K. released a new version of Dune 3D, his parametric 3D CAD program that is based on OpenCascade and the SolveSpace solver.

New in this version:

• Copy-pasting of sketches, even between documents
• Bezier curves
• Setting colors to bodies
• Text objects with OpenType features support
• You can now import a DXF file and treat its entities as a single one (it’s called cluster entities)
• Loft groups are now available
• Workspaces views are new and help switching between different representation of a project
• Every control in the viewport (e.g. a handle or a constraint indicator) now has a helpful tooltip

Lukas wrote neat release notes for this version, check it out.

DawVert

This is a whole new program by SatyrDiamond that converts project files between multiple digital audio workstations (FL Studio, Ableton Live 11, Reaper) and sequencers (LMMS, MusE Sequencer). It can also read projects from some trackers (FastTracker 2, Scream Tracker 3, Impulse Tracker) and will convert from and to DawProject (only supported by Bitwig and Studio One at the moment).

In the best *nix traditions, there’s a GUI version and a CLI version. I don’t really have projects from proprietary DAWs around and the program doesn’t support Ardour files yet, so I don’t have much of a personal opinion on this. All I can say is the initiative is definitely interesting and worth watching.

Artworks of the week

“The boat” by Lidia Goryachewa, painted with Krita:

“I see you made a new friend!” by Roykorpel, made with Krita:

“Hands of Greed” by Jan Rozanski, made with Blender, 3DCoat, Photoshop:

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