I decided to decorate my office a little, and since I’ve always been a Slackware user I wanted to get a large Slackware sticker to put on my glass. I couldn’t find one, so I made it myself, here’s the result:

I had to construct the SVG file myself. I started from the Linux penguin SVG (available somewhere online) and a pipe from open clipart. Thanks to the guys at LinuxQuestions for helping me get started.

To combine the two I had to learn a little bit of Inkscape (the vector graphics editor for Linux), which was neat.

When I was done I took the file to the printer (who, unbelievably, started with “SVG? what is that?”) and finally printed it for me, but with the wrong font. I should have expected that (I teach my students about how the same fonts are not available on different platforms) but I had to ask him to fix it. To make sure it doesn’t happen again I had to convert the text in the SVG file to a path, and I’ve done that by selecting the text in Inkscape and then using the Path/ObjectToPath feature.

Unfortunately somehow I managed to lose the original file, so the one below has the path, not the text, so if you want to change the text you’ll have to start by deleting what’s there:

Because this was printed on a white background (the printer either couldn’t or didn’t want to print on a transparent background) I had to chop off the smoke and the shadow underneath, it didn’t look good over glass.

Also the line between the slack and ware turned out much skinnier than what was in the SVG. I wasn’t sure if that was a bug in the Inkscape I used or the Corel Draw the printer used or something else entirely.

Cost me 60$ or something to print a meter-tall sticker, pretty good deal I thought.