Project Status for May 31

May 31, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for May 31 is online for review.

More Rect Improvements

The rect toolbar now allows you to set the horizontal and vertical rounded corner radii in absolute units (pt, mm, etc) instead of the radius/halfwidth and radius/halfheight ratios as before. These radii are always preserved when you transform the rect.

Rect Improvements

May 27, 2004 - The rect now has one more handle in the bottom right corner which allows you to resize the selected rect without switching to selector. Also unlike selector, resizing by this handle preserves the absolute values of the rounded corner radii (as opposed to the radius/width and radius/height ratios). The handles for rounding corners are moved to the top right corner.

Also, equal-radii rounded corners now always apply as such when new rects are created, as requested by RFE #933672.

Usability Enhancements

May 24, 2004 - Two usability improvements have been added to the CVS version of Inkscape:

The per-object selection cues can now be displayed in any tool, so that you can see what is selected at all times. You can switch these cues on or off for each tool in the Preferences dialog (the default is on for all tools). Also, the cues can now be displayed either as dashed bounding boxes or as diamond marks in the object's top left corner.

The dropper tool now works always (previously it only worked in conjunction with the Fill and Stroke dialog). Click to set the fill color of selection, Shift+click to set the stroke color. Also, dropper can pick either the visible color (without transparency) or the actual object color (including transparency), depending on a preference setting. It also displays the color under cursor in the status bar.

Interview with Everaldo and Jimmac

May 20, 2004 - Page two of an interview with a couple of the lead artists from KDE and Gnome includes a mention of Inkscape. Everaldo says, "I like Sodipodi and inkspace, I foresee a great future for both. I prefer the desktop of inkspace, it seems to me to be better organized."

Fill & Stroke

May 20, 2004 - The Fill and Stroke dialog has been made simpler and more usable by removing some obsolete options, shortening labels, using smaller and more descriptive icons, and adding mnemonic hotkeys and tooltips. The dialog now remembers and reactivates the color selector tab you were using last. The channel entry fields are switched from the 0..1 range to 0..255 range for increased precision.

Find Dialog

May 18, 2004 - The new Find dialog (Ctrl+F) selects objects by their text content, ID, style, attribute name, or object type (shapes, texts, groups, etc.). The search terms can be combined. An exact match is attempted first; if it fails, partial matches are selected if found (e.g. searching for "ff0000" in Style will select all objects that have this color anywhere in their style attribute).

Project Status 2004-05-15

May 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for May 15 is online for review.

Inkscape Demo at "FLOSS In Design" in Rotterdam

May 14, 2004 - Erik Dooper of the Open Source Software Lab, Amsterdam, will demo Scribus, SodiPodi and Inkscape in his talk on DTP and vector graphics applications at a seminar on "Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) In Design". The seminar will be held on May 19, 10.30-17.00 hrs at V2 Eendrachtstraat 10 in Rotterdam. The seminar will be streamed via http://www.v2.nl/live/. For more info, see https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/Seminars2/floss/. >

A Gentoo Ebuild for Inkscape

May 12, 2004 - At the bottom of our Compiling Inkscape page Dell'aiera Pol has written up about how to build the latest inkscape CVS using inkscape-1.0.ebuild.

Using Inkscape for Website Design

May 8, 2004 - Bryce has added a new area to the screenshots area to feature ways people are using Inkscape. First up is an example from Artemio on using Inkscape and Gimp for doing web design.

Dashes and Markers

May 7, 2004 - Marker previews are now automatically shown with their icons in the start/mid/end menus in the Fill and Stroke dialog. Simarilius has also written a short tutorial on how to create new markers; we plan to create a GUI facility to make this more convenient, but for the time being this'll give you a manual way to make use of it.

Also, a bunch of new dash styles have been added, some of them quite exotic. Try 'em out, they're fun!

"Follow Your Bliss"

May 5, 2004 - An article posted at the Indian site niyam.com explores the motivation that drives some people to work on open source projects: "No money, just fun." The article focuses on our sister project Scribus but also makes mention of Inkscape as another enjoyable project like Scribus. :-)

Code Cleanup News

May 5, 2004 - Mental reports, "Just a heads-up that I've removed the "private-fonts" private font installation facility.

"Anyone who had needed it in the past it will probably find their system's native font management facilities easier and more flexible at this point. Fontconfig has brought unix font management a long, long way.

"Also of note, libarikkei has been removed from the tree as it is no longer used."