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Bug#130147: www.debian.org: xfig and gimp versions of logos are damaged



On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 10:44:46PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> Note also that there are other files that have this bad version:
>   openlogo-nd.xcf.gz
>   officiallogo.xcf.gz
> And probably their .fig variants (didn't check).
> 
> The swirl on officiallogo-nd.xcf.gz looks uglier than the one on
> officiallogo.pdf -- that should be replaced, too.

Yes.  (FYI, I was about to mail you saying "I can't check this because
you've already removed it from the web site", but then I found that
www.uk.debian.org hasn't been updated yet, so I websucked a copy from
there...)

I suggest updating officiallogo.xcf.gz and officiallogo-nd.xcf.gz
from officiallogo.eps and officiallogo-nd.eps in the same way
as for the open logo.  The appropriate resolution at which to
convert "officiallogo-nd.eps" appears to be about 1400 DPI.
For "officiallogo.eps", 990 DPI works nicely.

The XFig versions of the official logo are hideous -- even worse than the
XFig versions of the open logo.  On officiallogo.fig, the holes in the
"d", "e", "b" and "a" of "debian" have filled in with black.

I've been playing around with pstoedit and have found that, by default,
it introduces exactly the same brokenness that we're trying to get rid of.
However, a decent XFig representation can be generated by telling pstoedit
to convert curves to approximations formed from many short straight lines.
The corners become visible if you scale the result up really big, but
I think it's the best we can get.

The usual incantation to convert EPS file logo.eps to an XFIG file
logo.fig is:

pstoedit -f xfig -ssp logo.eps logo.fig

The "-ssp" prevents the insides of the "d", "e", "b" and "a" from being
filled in.  However, this leaves the results distorted in exactly the
way we are trying to fix.

This command converts logo.eps to logo.fig while flattening curves into
series of straight line segments:

pstoedit -f xfig -ssp -psarg -r600x600 -flat 0.1 -nc logo.eps logo.fig

Smaller values passed to "-flat" increase the accuracy of the
approximation.  Referring to the PostScript Language Reference Manual
and the pstoedit man page, "-flat 0.2" is the smallest value that has
effect; smaller values make no further difference. However, increasing
the resolution will increase the effect, so that's what I've done.
600 DPI seems sufficient to give files which look reasonably good.

I don't know which you'd rather do: provide .fig files which don't
scale up to huge sizes very well, or just tell XFig users to grab the
EPS version and import it as an XFig "picture" object.  Making the EPS
file into a picture object has the advantage of not losing scalability,
but it doesn't enable editing the logo.  Of course, this may be seen as
an advantage...

So, it's up to you.  I suggest you either convert using the second
command line above, or don't provide an XFig version of the logo.

-- 
Charles Briscoe-Smith             Hacking Free Software for fun and profit
Governing Law:
   This License Agreement shall be construed and governed in accordance
   with the laws of the State of Inebriation. 
                                    -- http://www.thalia.org/computer.html



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