Clker.com - weblog

Finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s 4:21 AM and I’m very happy to reach this stage with the openoffice addon.

You can download it Openoffice.org addon for clker.com integration . Installation is very easy, from the tools menu in openoffice, select Extension Manager. Click add, and point to the file. You will need to restart openoffice for it to work.

This extension will show you the contents of your basket stored on clker, and will allow you to place any clipart image in the clipboard, then you can paste it in the correct place in your document.

Still there are some minor issues:

1. The addon parent is currently null, so an extra window will appear in the task bar
2. The way we place the picture in the clipboard is by loading it in draw, select all and copy then closing draw. There are better ways for doing this. You will notice that the screen will flicker especially if your using the ODG or the SVG formats since draw takes some time to render the vectors.

In case you wanted to play with the source, the addon source is here.

Technorati Tags: addon, uno, openoffice, gallery, clipart, online, clker

Many things happened over the thanksgiving weekend. First there’s a lot of work done in reading the svg metadata, parsing and using it. Now, all the tags inside the svg files are used as tags for the images. Also, the title of the clipart page first is obtained from the svg metadata. If the svg metadata did not have a title, then we make up a title from the original svg filename.

Over the search bar a bread crumb is now visible that shows where the user is, and how he is opening the tags and relative tags. Under the search bar, the most prominent tags are shown. This helps the user to fine tune his search.

Technorati Tags: clipart, clip, art, images, files, tags, tagging, svg, meta, data, metadata, title, keywords, search

I’ve been working since yesterday on an addon to openoffice.org , which will directly insert images from clker.com . The way it works is by searching for the images you want, adding them to my basket , then going to openoffice.org and hitting the addon button.

Just from few minutes I got the basic idea to work, and the addon is accessing the contents of the basket. I would now give the openoffice.org team a super thumbs up on the UNO implementation and the way it is designed - also to the netbeans team.

I’ve been out all day today, eating almost at every stop turkey, stuffing plus driving for more than three hours from Germantown to Ocean City - yet I’m so excited about this addon and still working on it. I’ll see how much longer I will last before collapsing :)…..

Watch the website after thanksgiving for the release of the addon - I’ll do my best to get it out by Monday if not before.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, open, office, org, addon, clipart, clker, turkey, thanksgiving, stuffing, ocean city, germantown

One of the SVG pictures that had troubles is the powered by Ubuntu logo. In an earlier post I described that I’m doing some SVG cleanup, and still to expect more cleanup in the future. One of the images that I was looking forward to is the powered by Ubuntu logo. So I’m up to some coloring for this night ! I will try to make a unified theme for both the website part, and the wordpress weblog part, and of course will incorporate the powered by Ubuntu logo, since this server is actually powered by Ubuntu.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, powered, powered by ubuntu, server, webserver, apache, wordpress, theme, css, style

More cleanup since yesterday. I found that some SVGs have bogus linked images, which makes inkscape show a big red cross saying “linked image not found”. I added a pre-filtering stage before the thumbnails are created in which the SVG is cleaned up. In that process, bogus image insertions are deleted, and non-ASCII characters are replaced by spaces. This is another issue that appeared with non us-english files. I found that there are characters over 127, but the XML file is assumed to be ascii, which again makes inkscape and other programs I’m using throw errors.

I ran the thumbnail regeneration script and lots of images are getting cleaned up. There are still some problems with ODG export, and little by little I’ll get all of the problems taken care of.

Technorati Tags: inkscape, odg, clipart, openoffice, openoffice.org, openclipart, openclipart.org, svg, png, export, cleanup, clean, up

Human beings are visual creatures. Pictures and eye sight is the second important way by which humans learn after hearing. Adding pictures related to your post will help visitors get your point. Exactly like adding pictures in a presentation, which help people understand the description made by the presenter.

Adding pictures to your weblog post will also help attract attention to your article, and increase the time your visitors stay. Pictures breaks the boring lengthy text of an article and gives the reader a break in the middle.

An important factor is then how easy is it to a) find a picture ad b) add it to your weblog?

Clker.com offers a huge collection of high quality cliparts. All cliparts are tagged with relevant words making it very easy to search and find the exact picture you’re looking for. You can directly copy the HTML code and paste it in your weblog’s page. All pictures can be easily embedded in any HTML source.

By default, all pictures are floated to the left making the text wrap around it without wasting your weblog space. You can manually remove the float and allow the picture to occupy a full horizontal area as shown above.

Technorati Tags: blog, clipart, cliparts, clker, Embed, find, HTML, pictures, search, weblog, wordpress

I’ve been searching for public domain clip arts for the previous week or so more for research purposes, just to see what are going on and who’s doing what. I stumbled across this article pointing to a library called wpclipart and it looks like the best raster public domain library I’ve found thus far. There’s lots of other sources of public domain images like the NOAA photo library , which actually is one of the libraries that I like to browse through some times. The problem with NOAA library is categorization. It was not meant to be a clip art library and that’s why it is hard to find what you’re looking for there, unless you really know where it is or the search is very obvious. Some images do not have descriptions or comments.

However, the NOAA photo library is a great source for those who want to trace image and create vector cliparts, or combine parts of those different images together as there is no copyrights for any of the images.

Technorati Tags: clipart, domain, library, noaa, photo, public, raster, wpclipart

Nice images now can be easily embedded in your weblog! It does not take much coding to do so, all you need to do is copy the code from the clipart page and paste it into your page source.

By default, embedded cliparts are floated to the left with no border so that the text wraps nicely around it. An example is shown in this page by embedding the small turkey image for the thanksgiving holidays.

The height of the picture will be resized in the page to fit the exact height of the clip art and text.

Technorati Tags: blog, Clip Art, domain, Embed, public, thanksgiving, turkey, weblog

Registered users can now share in tagging different images on the website. An edit box will appear in the image page only if you are logged in.

Fill in the edit box by typing in the new tags separated by spaces, and click the tag button.

Technorati Tags: images, registered, tag, users

Clker is a clip art project with a main of objective of integrating images inside different open source applications. An important application in our focus is openoffice.org. Openoffice.org will change the way we deal with office applications, and will provide us with lots of features and freedoms as it grows. There are a lot of applications that are in our focus as well including inkscape and koffice.

The first release of clker.com website includes most of openclipart.org wonderful collection exported to openoffice ODG format.

In order to insert an image from the website into your openoffice.org document follow these steps:

STEP 1, Copy the link location of the image you want to add. Use the ODG icon unless the image has no ODG version.

STEP 2, In your open office, select INSERT -> Object -> OLE Object

STEP 3, Select create from file, and paste the URL in the edit box and press OK

Openoffice will recognize the URL and will insert the clip art inside your document.

Happy clip arting :).