Joe Lanman

Inkscape is one of the most successful and usable open-source applications around – it’s a drawing app, useful for designing icons and logos, or laying out posters and leaflets. I used it to design my pocket calendar cards.

I fired it up recently to design a leaflet for my Mum’s guest house, featuring lots of photos of the local area. I’d previously rotated them to some jaunty angles and needed to straighten them up. I couldn’t find anything in the interface to do this (boo) but then remembered that one great feature of Inkscape is that it stores the state of the document as an editable SVG file. Even if there wasn’t a way to remove the rotations in the interface, I could do it by editing the data directly (hooray!), it’s a sort of View Source for illustration/page layout.

1. Open the Edit menu, select XML Editor
2. Select the image you’d like to straighten on the page
3. In the XML Editor, click Transform attribute, and click the Delete Attribute button above

Boom – straight images.

Obviously, it would be nice to have a button to do this (maybe there is – feel free to let me know in the comments), but I like that the use of an open image format, and the tools to edit the data directly allows me to achieve what I need to do. Do you have any Inkscape tips?

Transport for London have recently started offering a very handy cycle journey planner on their site, great – but it’d be much more handy in interactive form on my Android phone. Here’s a quick guide on how to do that:

1) Plan your route, then click upload to GPS device (top right). This will give you a GPX file to download.

2) Download RMaps – this is what we’re going to use to view the route on Android, and its a fantastic map app to have anyway, its main advantage over Google Maps being it can cache maps offline for you – if you happen to be hiking out of mobile range for instance.

3) Transfer your GPX file to your phone. I used the Android Dropbox app, but you could just use USB, or a couple of floppies.

4) Open the route with RMaps – in RMaps, press Menu ->More -> Tracks. Now press Menu again -> Import, and select your GPX file. The route name should now appear on the screen, tap it to get a tick – it is now displayed on the map screen.

5) And you’re done – press Back until you see the map screen – if you zoom in you should see your route highlighted in purple.