Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for Web Documents

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The Web Open Font Format (short WOFF; here using Aladin font) is several years old. Still it took some time to get to a point, where WOFF is almost painless to use on the linux desktop. WOFF is based on OpenType style fonts and is in some way similar to the more known True Type Font (.ttf). TTF fonts are widely known and used on the Windows platform. Those feature rich kind of fonts are used for high quality font displaying for the system and local office-and design documents. WOFF aims at closing the gap towards making those features available on the web. With these fonts it becomes possible to show nice looking fonts on paper and web presentations in almost the same way. In order to make WOFF a success, several open source projects joined forces, among them Pango and Qt, and contributed to harfbuzz, a OpenType text shaping engine. Firefox and other web engines can handle WOFF inside SVG web graphics and HTML web documents using harfbuzz. Inkscape uses at least since version 0.91.1 harfbuzz too for text inside SVG web graphics. As Inkscape is able to produce PDF’s, designing for both the web and print world at the same time becomes easier on Linux.

Where to find and get WOFF fonts?
Open Font Library and Google host huge font collections . And there are more out on the web.

How to install WOFF?
For using inside inkscape one needs to install the fonts locally. Just copy the fonts to your personal ~/.fonts/ path and run

fc-cache -f -v

After that procedure the fonts are visible inside a newly started Inkscape.

How to deploy SVG and WOFF on the Web?
Thankfully WOFF in SVG documents is similar to HTML documents. However simply uploading a Inkscape SVG to the web as is will not be enough to show WOFF fonts. While viewing the document locally is fine, Firefox and friends need to find those fonts independent of the localy installed fonts. Right now you need to manually edit your Inkscape SVG to point to the online location of your fonts . For that open the SVG file in a text editor and place a CSS font-face reference right after the <svg> element like:

</svg>
<style type=”text/css”>
@font-face {
font-family: “Aladin”;
src: url(“fonts/Aladin-Regular.woff”) format(“woff”);
}
</style>
…

How to print a Inkscape SVG document containing WOFF?
Just convert to PDF from Inkscape’s file menue. Inkscape takes care for embedding the needed fonts and creates a portable PDF.

In case your prefered software is not yet WOFF ready, try the woff2otf python script for converting to the old TTF format.

Hope this small post gets some of you on the font fun path.

Portable Float Map with 16-bit Half

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Recently we saw some lively discussions about support of Half within the Tiff image format on the OpenEXR mailing list. That made me aware of the according oyHALF code paths inside Oyranos. In order to test easily, Oyranos uses the KISS format PPM. That comes with a three ascii lines header and then the uncompressed pixel data. I wanted to create some RGB images containing 16-bit floating point half channels, but that PFM format variant is not yet defined. So here comes a RFC.

A portable float map (PFM) starts with the first line identifier “Pf” or “PF” and contains 32-bit IEEE floating point data. The 16-bit IEEE/Nvidia/OpenEXR floating point data variant starts with a first line “Ph” or “PH” magic similar to PFM. “Ph” stands for grayscale with one sample. The “PH” identifier is used for RGB with three samples.

That’s it. Oyranos supports the format in git and maybe in the next 0.9.6 release.

Reanimation of MacBook Air

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For some months our MacBook Air was broken. Finally good time to replace, I thought. On the other side, the old notebook was quite useful even 6 years after purchasing. Coding on the road, web surfing, SVG/PDF presentations and so on worked fine on the Core2Duo device from 2008. The first breaking symptoms started with video errors on a DVI connected WUXGA/HDTV+ sized display. The error looked like non stable frequency handling, with the upper scan lines being visually ok and the lower end wobbling to the right. A black desktop background with a small sized window was sometimes a workaround. This notebook type uses a Nvidia 9400M on the logic board. Another non portable computer of mine which uses Nvidia 9300 Go on board graphics runs without such issues. So I expected no reason to worry about the type of graphics chip. Later on, the notebook stopped completely, even without attached external display. It showed a well known one beep every 5 seconds during startup. On MacBook Pro/Air’s this symptom means usually broken RAM.

The RAM is soldered directly on the logic board. Replacing @ Apple appeared prohibitive. Now that I began to look around to sell the broken hardware to hobbyists, I found an article talking about these early MacBook Air’s. This specific one is a 2.1 rev A 2.13 GHz. It was mentioned, that early devices suffered from lead-free soldering, which performs somewhat worse in regards to ductility than normal soldering. The result was that many of these devices suffered from electrical disconnections of its circuitry during the course of warming and cooling and the related thermal expansion and contraction. The device showed the one beep symptom on startup without booting. An engineer from Apple was unofficially cited to suggest, that putting the logic board in around 100° Celsius for a few minutes would eventually suffice to solve the issue. That sounded worth a try to me. As I love to open up many devices to look into and eventually repair them, taking my time for dismounting the logic board and not bringing it to a repair service was fine for me. But be warned, doing so can be difficult for beginners. I placed the board on some wool in the oven @120 ° and after 10 minutes and some more for montage, the laptop started again to work. I am not sure if soldering is really solved now or if the experienced symptoms will come back. I guess that some memory chips on the board were resetted and stopped telling that RAM is broken. So my device works again and will keep us happy for a while - I hope.

Graphical profiling under Linux

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The Oyranos library became quite slower during the last development cycle for 0.9.6 . That is pretty normal, as new features were added and more ideas waited for implementation letting not much room for all details as wanted. The last two weeks, I took a break and mainly searched for bottlenecks inside the code base and wanted to bring performance back to satisfactory levels. One good starting point for optimisations in Oyranos are the speed tests inside the test suite. But that gives only help on starting a few points. What I wished to be easy, is seeing where code paths spend lots of time and perhaps, which line inside the source file takes much computation time.

I knew from old days the oprofile suite. So I installed it on my openSUSE machine, but had not much success to get callgraphs working. The web search for “Linux profiling” brought me to a article on pixel beat and to perf. I found the article very informative and do not want to duplicate it here. The perf tools are impressive. The sample recording needs to run as root. On the other hand the obtained sample information is quite useful. Most tools of perf are text based. So getting to the hot spots is not straight forward for my taste. However the pixel beat site names a few graphical data representations, and has a screenshot of kcachegrind. The last link under misc guides to flame graphs. The flame graphs are amazing representations of what happens inside Oyranos performance wise. They show in a very intuitive way, which code paths take most time. The graphs are zoom able SVG.

Here an example with expensive hash computation and without in oyranos-profiles:

Computation time has much reduced. An other bottleneck was expensive DB access. I talked with Markus about that already some time ago but forgot to implement. The according flame graph reminded me about that open issue. After some optimisation the DB bottleneck is much reduced.

The command to create the data is:

root$ perf record -g my-command

user& perf-flame-graph.sh my-command-graph-title

… with perf-flame-graph.sh somewhere in your path:

#!/bin/sh
path=/path/to/FlameGraph
output=”$1″
if [ "$output" = "" ]; then
output=”perf”
fi

 

perf script | $path/stackcollapse-perf.pl > $TMPDIR/$USER-out.perf-folded
$path/flamegraph.pl $TMPDIR/$USER-out.perf-folded > $TMPDIR/$USER-$output.svg
firefox $TMPDIR/$USER-$output.svg

One needs FlameGraph, a set of perl script, installed and perf. The above script is just a typing abbreviation.

Unbound RGB with littleCMS slow

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The last days I played with lcms‘ unbound mode. In unbound mode the CMM can convert colours with negative numbers. That allows to use for instance the LMS colour space, a very basic colour space to the human visual system. As well unbound RGB, linear gamma with sRGB primaries, circulated long time as the new one covers all colour space, a kind of replacement of ICC or WCS style colour management. There are some reservations about that statement, as linear RGB is most often understood as “no additional info needed”, which is not easy to build a flexible CMS upon. During the last days I hacked lcms to write the mpet tag in its device link profiles in order to work inside the Oyranos CMS. The multi processing elements tag type (mpet) contains the internal state of lcms’ transform as a rendering pipeline. This pipeline is able to do unbound colour transforms, if no table based elements are included. The tested device link contained single gamma values and matrixes in its D2B0 mpet tag. The Oyranos image-display application renderd my LMS test pictures correctly, in opposite to the 16-bit integer version. However the speed was decreased by a factor of ~3 with lcms compared to the usual integer math transforms. The most time consuming part might be the pow() call in the equation. It is possible that GPU conversions are much faster, only I am not aware of a implementation of mpet transforms on the GPU.

Image Editing with 30-bit Monitors

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Payable hardware for professionals is capable of 30-bit throughput since quite some years. And costs continue to go down. This means even budget setups are possible with this kind of gear. So lets follow the question why, who and how monitors capable of displaying 30-bit alias 10-bit per red, green and blue channel can be used. This blog article will first touch some basics, followed by technical aspects below.

Why is it useful to display graphics on a 30-bit monitor setup?
It is essential for graphical editing, to see what effect a editing step has. It is pretty common that low resolution monitors impose a barrier to reliably predict the intended output. This is true for geometrical resolution like for colour resolution and for gamut. The rule of thumb is, the graphics editor needs the most information available to do here/his job and spot artefacts and issues early in the process. This principle is deployed for print, web, film and video editing to reduce costs. You know, redoing something costs time and is part of the jobs calculation. More image information means as well more certainty to reach a graphical result. The typical artefact caused by low colour resolution is reduced tonal range. Colour conversions can reduce the tonal range further. So a sRGB image will look different on a 8-bit per channel monitor with a native gamma close to 2.2 compared to a pipeline with 10-bit per channel. The 8-bit output imposes a bottleneck resulting in loosing some tonal steps known as banding, which must not necessarily be present in the observed sRGB image. One very often read argument against higher bit depth is, that editing hardware shall be as close as possible to customers ones. But that is a illusion. The wide diversity of media and devices makes this nearly impossible. But simulation of end customer hardware is of course an issue and many graphics software has implemented simulation capabilities to address that concern.

Who is most interested in 30-bit colour editing on Linux?
Graphics professional and ambitious users closely observe Linux since many years and deploy it. Many block busters are produced and rendered on Linux machines. Web graphics is well supported since years and camera raw programs implemented a impressive level of features in the last years. So Linux is a potential content creation platform beside content consumption. The typical work flow for content creating people is to generate and edit their art work in high geometrical and colour resolution and down convert to lower resolutions as fits for the job, be that web, print, catalog previews and more flexible high quality delivery depending on actual contract. For instance many photographers archive their shootings in the cameras native format to preserve all available information for later editing or improved rendering. This is a important investment in the future for non short lived work, where old files can shine in new light. Motion picture productions are often rendered and color graded in floating point space by using the OpenEXR intermediate file format and output to 12 bits per component for playback in a cinema. Video production uses in parts raw workflows for advertisements. Medical-, scientific- and archival imaging are potentially interested too and require in parts 30-bit setups like in the DICOM standard. The benefit of 10-bit per channel versus 8-bit does not matter to everyone. Most consumers will not spot any difference while watching web video. But in more demanding areas it is a small but helpful improvement.

How to deploy 30-bit displays on Linux?
That feature was implemented by several companies starting on low level software components like X11, Cairo and pixman. However desktops where pretty slow to adapt software to the new needs and fix bugs. That was in part of the initially higher costs for the hardware. Only few developers in the open source community had early access to suitable gear. I do not write here about suitable graphic cards and monitor combinations. You should consult the web for this. Search for 30-bit monitor. Many early adopters observed psychedelic colours, not working graphics areas and more. Here the state on the well known KDE X11 desktop in release 4.11 on a openSUSE-13.1 . The login screen colours are broken. The splash screen after login looks correct and after some period the desktop becomes visible with again broken colours. To manually fix most of that, one have to tell that Qt shall use native colours. Create following text into a file called ~/.kde4/env/qtnative.sh .

$ kwrite ~/.kde4/env/qtnative.sh

#!/bin/sh
export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native

With the above variable the desktop should look reasonably in KWin, which is really great. Automating that in Qt would be appreciated.

However 30-bit monitors typical aim at high quality setups. Beside colour resolution they often enough offer a wider gamut than usual monitors. This results in partially heavily saturated colours, which burns in sensible eyes. Those people who do colour grading or photo editing are mostly affected, otherwise they can not easily play this work. So desktop colour correction is an other important feature to enable here. KWin supports ICC based colour correction through KolorManager, which would be useful for the colour saturation. But KWin disables all effects for 30-bit OpenGL visuals. The alternative Compiz-0.8 series has the CompIcc colour server plug-in, which provides the same ICC colour correction feature. To make use of it, one needs to install following packages: compizconfig-settings-manager, CompIcc-0.8.9. Unfortunedly the KDE decorator is no longer available. So use the Emerald decorator from X11:Compiz with the 30-bit-shadow.patch in order to avoid artefacts in the shadow code. Compiz can be used as a default window manager application. Use the system settings to switch to Compiz. Use ccsm to switch on Color Management if not done automatically. And voila the 30-bit desktop should be ready to explore.

What works and what not?
The Plasma desktop is fine including all menus. Dolphin, KWrite, and other applications work. Thunderbird shows some artefacts due to not properly supporting the R10G10B10A2 pixel format. The same is true for Firefox, which lets in parts shine through content behind the Firefox window. Gwenview and ShowFoto work fine within their 8-bit drawing. Only the preview is broken in ShowFoto. Krita supports with the OpenGL backend even native 10-bit per colour component. Menus in Sketch are black. Krita shows minimal artefacts through twice colour converting from image to sRGB by Krita and from sRGB to the monitor colour space by CompIcc. But this effect is much lesser visible than the improvements through its 30-bit support. Applications which try to code 24-bit colour themselves are broken like Konqueror. Gtk and hence Gnome applications with graphical areas do not work. They show black areas. VLC works fine. So daily work should be fine in with 30-bit in the KDE application family depending what you do, with some minor glitches. Valuable Gtk applications as is like Inkscape and most Gtk applications are unusable in a 30-bit setup, with Gimps drawing area being a exception. Thunderbird/Firefox are guessedly affected by the same Gtk bug for which a patch was created some time ago. A patched libgtk-2 is available for testing on openSUSE, which appears to have fixed the problem almost for me.

Beside the need to exchange a windowmanager, to patch a few components and do some manual settings, Linux appears almost there in support of 30-bit setups. Polishing of that feature needs testing of patches and finally acceptance for distribution. Your feedback about bugs, tests and patches can make a difference to developers.

Magic Lantern @ LGM in Leipzig

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… on Wednesday April 2nd. Their talk will begin 18:30 o’clock local time in the New Paulinum of the University of Leipzig.

Magic Lantern was started in 2009 by Trammel Hudson to bring professional video recording and advanced photographic features to Canon EOS DSLR cameras.

The project expanded and its feature set. Custom video overlays, raw video recording, time lapsed video, manual audio control and more belong to it. With these tools Magic Lantern greatly improved useability in many areas upon bare Canon firmware and is now daily used by many professional photographers, journalists and movie makers.

2013 Development Updates

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In presentations I like to use colourful graphics. Some of those graphics are generated automatically by the Cairo based oyranos-profile-graph 2D grapher tool. In git that tool obtained a option to show black body spectra based on kelvin. The spectra are scaled for better illustration.

CIE D65 and black body radiation SPDs for 6500 Kelvin

CIE D65 and black body 6500 Kelvin spectral power distributions (SPD)

 

Some other work in Oyranos went on with the device mapping to JSON serialisation, as is useful to store device configurations using the Oyranos API. Through JSON files it is possible to support new device classes without to worry about creating a native Oyranos device module. The basic idea is to let users bring in a OpenICC device description and a weighting description. Oyranos is then able to find matches inside its DB and weight the resulting properties according to the provided weighting file. The example code is inside oyranos-test-device and needs still some polishing to become a stable tool. For instance more integration with the frontends and UI parts is needed, to make sure everything gives a nice user experience. Raw images can now be rendered better in image_display and do not show the artefacts from table based conversion of linear camera space to gamma encoded monitor spaces.

During spring 2013 I decided to abstain from public activities and paused coding completely. After some months I was mentally able to enjoy work on self contained stuff. That was first without any community involvement. Months later I contacted some people to explain that situation and want to thank here all those friendly souls who directly encouraged me. After what happened in the last years, I learned, that it can be pretty healthy to not to stay in public light and become involved in highly controversial discussions. Especially the later can become easily burning. As a result of that personal lesson, I skipped 2013 LGM and other meetings and outside activities. Now after around 9 months I feel really better and hope to become slowly more involved. Still I am learning how to keep others opinions at arms length. And that lesson appears key for me to stay welcoming and focused. Well, time will show how well .

Oyranos supports Elektra-0.8.4 in git as a result of friendly behind the scene discussions later in 2013. A new image filter, called “scale“, is currently used inside the image-display example viewer. It does so far no interpolation, but it might become useful for other applications as well, in order to select only a subset of unaltered image pixels. ICC named colour list reading was added. More changes happened around documentation, building external modules and use of threading inside the image-display application.

Wayland/Weston on oS-12.3

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After Richards recent patch about adding a colour management system to wayland, I was interested to build a Oyranos CMS connection module for wayland. The patch is in a initial stage, but might get to a similar level like what is already in CompICC and KWin colour servers.

First I substituted all openSUSE-12.3 distro packages with the adequate packages from tobijk and obtained a version 1.0.6 . Keeping the distro Mesa package resulted in a missed EGL Wayland extension and some crashes. On the Wayland website are some instructions on how to setup the environment. Especially the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR variable needs attention. I skipped the part of adding a special weston-lauch group and run the application simply by root. However the a symbol in cairo was missed “cairo_egl_device_create”. After cloning and building pixman and cairo following the Wayland instructions everything went fine. Here a simple ~/.config/weston.ini file to start with:
[wayland-desktop-shell]
locking=true

[launcher]
icon=/usr/share/icons/oxygen/32×32/apps/utilities-terminal.png
path=/usr/bin/weston-terminal

Weston launches on my system into a multi monitor setup with nouveau. There is still heave tearing, while moving the terminal. After Strg+Alt+Entf (Ctrl+Alt+Del) weston quits.

Firefox-19.0 Colour Management

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Firefox detects since version 17.0 the Linux system profile, which is a great improvement for the operating system. While colour conversions on all platforms still default to on for ICC tagged content, they can be enabled for all other colours. Untagged colours will then default to sRGB instead of omitting monitor compensation for them. To do so go to the famous about:config URL and change gfx.color_management.mode from “2″ to “1″. Then use the installed CMS, e.g. on KDE KolorManager, to set a system monitor profile, and it will be detected after restarting Firefox.

For Android there is no CMS available. That means the ICC monitor profile must be set manually or sRGB will be assumed instead. The settings name in about:config is gfx.color_management.display_profile. Enter into this string the file name with full path, if you are on Android. That procedure is somewhat inconvenient compared to desktops. However the OpenICC group has published some specifications for implementation. This might be even possible for students inside the rewarding Google Summer of Code 2013 program.

For comparison, the Chrome web browser does support colour management on some desktop versions but unfortunately not on Android.

The below false colour test image should look correctly with ICC profile enabled browsers. Look at the colour gradients and then at the colour names and compare.

False colour test imageEnjoy cross platform colour management.