Libre Graphics Meeting

The Inkscape community is meeting in Montreal this weekend for the Libre Graphics Meeting. In addition to seeing each other face to face with some of us for the first time, we're also meeting developers from other projects like Scribus, Gimp, Krita, and Blender.

Sponsorship was provided to cover developers' travel costs by the LGM conference organizers. Six $250 subsidies for additional costs were provided by the Inkscape board from the funds from Google from last year's Summer of Code project, to Ted, Mental, Bulia, Jon Cruz, John Bintz; thanks go to Software Freedom Conservancy for taking care of the arrangements for this.

The Inkscape presentations at LGM include:

• Ted Gould - the SVG file format
• Bryce Harrington - Inkscape's history, current state, and goals Inkscape
• Alexandre Robin - An Inkscape overview (french)
• Jakub Steiner - Creating photo-realistic artwork based on photo reference
• Benoit St-Andre - An OpenClipart overview
• MenTaLguY and John Bintz - Creating Comics in Inkscape
• Jon Phillips - The Open Content Library: Overview of Open Clip Art Library and ccHost

Hopefully the face-to-face time will make it easy to collaborate on issues and hash through lots of ideas for fixes and enhancements!

"It's a free for all"

Alan Horkan points to an article listing the most essential open source downloads.

What does it do?
It's a vector graphics editor.
[...]
What is it undercutting?
[Adobe Illustrator] and [CorelDraw].
Both have steeper learning curves and larger feature sets than Inkscape.

Alan adds, "This is quite high praise, and the article mentions a little more about the strong focus given to usability, contrast it to the drubbing they give the gimp."

Apple's Top Ten Open SourceDownloads

JiHo reports that in Apple's list of top ten Open Source downloads, Inkscape came in as number 6. Congrats to Inkscape's OSX packagers!

Libre Graphics Meeting

Several Inkscapers will be giving presentations at this year's Libre Graphics Meeting, May 4-6 in Montreal. Users are highly encouraged to come! We'd love to meet you!

New Inkscape Features

Many users are just starting to enjoy our last 0.45 release, but already a slew of new features have popped into the development version of Inkscape.

A new Paint Bucket tool allows you to click in any area bounded on all sides and fill it with color. So now you can scan in a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill its cells with vector paint, letting you completely skip the bitmap tracing step.

The calligraphic tool has a new mechanism called Engraving for creating old fashion style black and white line art, like was commonly used by printers a hundred years ago with the Wood Engraving technique. This was a very labor-intensive process back in the day, but we've given you some shortcuts for tracing a guide path, tracing backgrounds, and thinning/thickening with the calligraphic pen that will let you make short work of it.

Touch Selection is a new feature for selecting objects by simply drawing freehand over the items to select. Our testers are already finding this handy for selecting objects intermingled with a bunch of others. To use this, hold the 'Alt' key while drawing a rubberband rectangle with the select tool. (Note, you might have to change your windowmanager keyboard shortcuts to not steal the Alt key).

Snapping has been seriously reworked, resolving a number of bugs; hopefully it will work more cleanly now. The Grids code has been reimplemented, abstracting the base capability so it should be easier for developers to create new kinds of grids.

For command line Inkscape users, new --verb, --verb-list, and --select options will allow a vast range of scripting potential open up, allowing users to automate many actions that used to only be achievable from the Inkscape GUI.

And plenty of other little featurettes and bug fixes are in. Please see our Release Notes for a complete list.

Google Summer of Code Projects

Google is sponsoring seven students to work on Inkscape as part of the Google Summer of Code. The following projects have been accepted:

• Text Improvements - by Gail Banaszkiewicz, mentored by Richard Hughes
• Native PDF import capability based on libpoppler - by Miklos Erdelyi, mentored by Jon Cruz
• Live path effects in Inkscape - by Johan Engelen, mentored by Aaron Spike
• 3D box tool for Inkscape - by Maximilian Albert, mentored by bulia byak
• UI for SVG Filter Effects - by Nicholas Bishop, mentored by MenTaLguY
• Raster Functionality in Inkscape - by Christopher Brown, mentored by Theodore J. Gould
• Importing from, and Exporting to, a remote ccHost instance - by Bruno Dilly, mentored by Bryce Harrington

The original proposals are in our wiki.

Happy Easter from Inkscape!

Hello Inkscape team,
Thanks for doing such a nice app. As an illustrator I have a lot of fun with it, and loved it from the first click. :) The amazing new blurring features let me stop using my pixel app for finishing. It kicked all my other illustration apps away too ;)
Here is my personal Easter Egg for you.
-- Nicole Riske