Most of you might have heard about the sudden “death” of the airline Spanair. I had never known of an airline stopping its planes on the same day it announces it’s rupture.
Several colleagues of mine in Igalia were affected by the events and guess with whom some of us (mostly Igalians based at Coruña) were flying to Brussels? That’s right…
Fortunately yesterday we bought new flights and decided to try to get the reimbursement for the cancelled ones later.

This means that thanks to Igalia:

I had two presentations in each of the last two editions of FOSDEM but I didn’t really have something new to show in this year’s so I’m attending only as a participant which doesn’t make it less exciting for me.

I have already some arrangements planned, as in having a beer with some folks, and you’re invited too if you wanna talk about Igalia or the projects I’m involved in.

See you in Brussels.

You might have heard/seen that there are quite a few Igalians in this year’s Desktop Summit.
What you might have not noticed is that we also have a booth in here. The booth is only set during breaks since we all are attending or giving talks and the reason you might wanna pass by is to try some of the cool things we work on in Igalia or to get some free FOSS stickers (WebKit, Epiphany, MeeGo, Grilo, Orca, …).

You can see some of the stickers in this crappy photo:

Just in time for the Desktop Summit 2011, I’ve released the 0.7.6 version of OCRFeeder.

The new interesting stuff in this version is that OCRFeeder can now export to PDF. When exporting the pages to PDF, users will have two choices: “a PDF from scratch” or “a searchable PDF”. The PDF from scratch means that the text part of what will be exported will be written in the PDF using ReportLab whereas the searchable PDF means that the PDF will present the whole original picture but with invisible text overlaid in order to make it searchable.
The PDF exportation still needs some polishing but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible for the people who need it.
Check out these examples:

(page loaded in OCRFeeder and recognized automatically)

(exported PDF from scratch)

(exported searchable PDF with selected text)

This version also fixes issues when recognizing grayscale pictures as well as the mouse cursor that was being changed when it was over a page’s right margin.

I’ve also added separators to divide the Document’s submenus so they are grouped correctly and I’ve made ODT the first choice in the list of exportation formats, which had been mistakenly changed.

As usual, the incredible team of translators is doing a great job and apart from the updated translations, OCRFeeder now comes in Catalan (with the Valencian option as well) and in Greek.

DesktopSummit

No, once again, OCRFeeder’s talk wasn’t approved by the Desktop Summit’s organization. If you think that I’ve presented it some well known conferences (LinuxTag, GUADEC ES and twice in FOSDEM), it makes me a bit sad that I couldn’t yet present this unique project in the conference of the desktop it targets, but let’s hope it makes it next year.

Still, Igalia is sponsoring me again to attend the DesktopSummit, so, if you’re interested in OCRFeeder or other projects I’m involved, let me know!

See you in Berlin!

That’s right, Igalia is sponsoring me to attend LinuxTag so tomorrow I’m flying to the wonderful city of Berlin.

I am also giving a presentation about OCRFeeder in there and I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out because much of the feedback I got about OCRFeeder is from German users.
Another Igalian, Diego, is also presenting NavalPlan in there so if you need a project planning and resource management software be sure to attend his talk.

We’re usually also friendly people so if you wanna grab a beer and currywurst let us know!

That’s right, once again I could count on Igalia‘s kind support to be able to go to this great conference one more year.
Just like last year, I’m giving two presentations:
* Making the printed world accessible: A11y in OCRFeeder, in the Accessibility DevRoom on Saturday at 11:00;
* Grilo: Integration of Multimedia Contents in Applications Made Easy, in the CrossDesktop DevRoom on Sunday at 13:45.

This will be my fourth time attending FOSDEM and every year I love it more. In what other conference can you attend presentations about: GNOME, MeeGo, Django, Accessibility and much, much more. And let’s not forget about the Friday Beer Event, that allow us hackers to socialize while sipping on the finest beers on earth. And of course, to some of you, I don’t need to tell again how much I like Brussels, and Belgium in general.

By the way, this year there is a new, more Maemo-ish, FOSDEM Maemo app called Sojourner which will help you schedule the talks you wanna attend, so, be sure to install it in your N900. (I’ve contributed with a couple of patches last Friday, which are pending integration )

Other news from my part is that since last week I am a member of GNOME Foundation. It’s been a year since I started developing OCRFeeder under GNOME’s infrastructure and I finally decided to apply for membership. The process was really easy and I thank the folks involved. It’s good to be around such good hackers.

Hope to see you all FOSDEM next weekend!