Interview with Tom Lechner

Please, introduce briefly yourself and your projects.
I am an artist, and also the creator of Laidout and the Laxkit. The Laxkit is the windowing library that Laidout uses. Laidout itself is rudimentary desktop publishing software that I wrote to help me produce cartoon books quickly.

Trying to make artwork is definitely what drives the creation of my software. As such, my goal with Laidout is to make a powerful yet minimal interface for the purpose of desktop publishing, with an emphasis on unusual and creative constructions. A lot of emphasis is on having easy access to the artistic content, and fast ways to manipulate that content. If you have to navigate giant menus, or huge dialogs pop up and obscure whatever you’re working on at the moment even for simple, common tasks, then something is wrong.

You attended Libre Graphic Meeting 2010. Do you enjoy working “libre”?
My background is in art and science, both creative pursuits, and both value freely sharing ideas and information. The open source software movement is very much in that spirit.

What are advantages of open source software compared to usual software?
There are no easy to use imposition solutions in the open source world, and perhaps over time Laidout will get smooth enough to fill that need in part. Open source imposition solutions exist, but they almost all involve manually constructing configuration maps which are in no way “easy to use”. This is a common curse and sometimes a blessing of open source software. The scope of any one program might not be very wide, but it will often do what it was designed for quite well.

Closed source programs historically tend to have more polished interfaces, but often get very overloaded with mostly useless features, while open source programs tend to have more lower level power. For desktop publishing, the classic example of this is TeX, which is extremely powerful, more sophisticated and adaptible that just about everything, at least for documents made mainly of text layout, and technical math text in particular. TeX is also very difficult to use, because you have to learn a whole coding language, rather than just plopping down stuff on a canvas.

Closed programs that are both easy to use and powerful tend to cost thousands and thousands of dollars. This is terrible for artists, who are almost all very poor. Open source art software certainly helps to mitigate that.

You are very active in all kinds of art. For example you draw cartoons. Where do you get your inspiration? And time? Or is it relaxing for you? You also take photographs.
I have no idea why I make the kind of artwork that I do. Sometimes it’s relaxing, sometimes it’s frustrating. All I know is that I have always been compelled to make artwork. I simply pursue what seems interesting or provocative at the time, and express it through cartoons, painting, woodwork, photography, or whatever else is available.

Have you ever tried to sell your artwork? For example via stock agency?
I sell enough artwork to buy more art supplies, but I certainly don’t make a living from it. I sell cartoon books, and sometimes sell small spherical panorama balls, I don’t sell much in a very organized fashion. I really should spend more time investigating benefits and disadvantages of using microstock or other agencies to distribute photos. Marketing and distribution is really something I spend almost no time on because it is a huge pain.