A Book of Inkscape, by Dmitry Kirsanov

A very anticipated book on Inkscape called "A Book of Inkscape", written by Dmitry Kirsanov, finally hit the shelves. The book covers features of the upcoming 0.47 version, while explaining how to effectively use Inkscape for many tasks. Both novices and experienced designers will find the book a great help to start using Inkscape.

Inkscape 0.47pre3 is out

The presumably last prerelease of 0.47 is out. Please fetch the files, test and let us know about bugs you run into. Date of final version's release is currently estimated as two weeks away from now.

First Libre Graphics Day miniconf announced

There are several more possibilities to meet and discuss free graphics tools other than at Libre Graphics Meeting, so it was decided to organize smaller events under same name "Libre Graphics Day". The first one will be organized by Inkscape's developer Jon A. Cruz and held at linux.conf.au in Wellington, New Zealand, on January 18, 2010. You can submit a proposal for a talk till September 25. Read more at LGD's website and get involved, either as developer or user!

Google Summer of Code 2009 results

Google Summer of Code 2009 is now over and here are the results for Inkscape organization.

Krzysztof Kosiński has completely rewritten the Node Tool which now supports node editing for more than one path at a time and thus has a number of extra features. E.g. you will be able scale/rotate/skew a selection of nodes on-canvas and join nodes from different paths.

Arcadie Cracan has expanded the functionality of the Connector Tool. The Connector Tool now supports the adding and removing of user-placed connection points. The user can now toggle between either be polyline or orthogonal connectors. The connectors now support user-defined rounding of corners. Additionally there have been numerous other enhancements and bugfixes.

Felipe Sanches worked on better support for color management. The most noticeable changes are out-of-gamut display and color managed view in the Fill and Stroke dialog. Inkscape now checks whether colors picked in the RGB, HSL, CMYK selectors are in or out of gamut for a color space defined by a chosen color profile. There also are some changes with regards to how colors are stored internally.

Soren Berg has added a scripting API via D-Bus. You can read his older proposal to get an idea.

All these features and more will be added to 0.48.

New prerelease is available

It took us a while to prepare binary builds for another prerelease, but now Windows and Mac OS X (Leopard) users can test it too. Please fetch files and let us know about any bugs you discover. Thank you for being patient!