New Potrace Feature

Sept 18, 2004 - At the suggestion of one of our fine users, new feature has been added that uses the code from Peter Selinger's potrace program to enable Inkscape users to convert bitmaps into SVG from within Inkscape. There are a few settings for controlling the threshhold, edge detection behavior, and so forth.

mod_rsvg 0.1

Sept 16, 2004 - Tom von Schwerdtner's mod_rsvg has been made available for download from the Inkscape file tracker. This is an Apache 1.3 module that enables server-side svg-to-png conversion.

Memory Issues

Sept 16, 2004 - Investigation into memory problems continue. The crashes seem to have all been resolved, but it's been noticed that there is some excessive memory consumption, perhaps due to a leak or error or misconfiguration in the new garbage collector.

Project Status 2004-09-15

Sept 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Sept 1 is posted.

New feature: "Transform with Object" Toggle Buttons

Sept 13, 2004 - The preferences that control scaling of stroke widths and rectangle corners, as well as transforming gradient and pattern fills with the object, are now represented by four toggle buttons in the selector's controls panel for easy access.

Gradients no longer behave weirdly when a path with gradient fill is transformed. Now gradients either transform with the object or remain unmoved, depending on the user setting (toggle button in selector controls). This setting affects grouped objects too.

Improvements in Commandline PNG Export

Sept 8, 2004 - Several improvements have been made to how the PNG export work when running inkscape from the commandline:

• You can now specify the background opacity (--export-background-opacity or -y).
• If no background color (-b) or background opacity (-y) specified, the values from the document (sodipodi:namedview) are used.
• You can now export an area corresponding to a single object by specifying the ID of the object with the --export-id or -i switch, for example: inkscape -e mypath.png -i path966 mydoc.svg
• When exporting with -i, you can add --export-use-hints or -t to tell Inkscape to use the filename and DPI export hints stored for that object when it was last exported from the GUI. For example, inkscape -i path966 -t mydoc.svg will export path966 to the PNG file with the same filename and resolution as you used for exporting it from wihtin Inkscape, so you don't need to specify them on the command line.

These changes (see the man page for full details) allow you to easily script exporting parts from complex documents and to better integrate GUI editing with command-line use.

New 'Select Under/Drag Selected' Features

Sept 5, 2004 - Select Under: In the Selector, clicking with Alt selects the object at cursor which is below (in z-order) the currently selected object at cursor; if the bottom object is selected, Alt+click again selects the top object. Thus, several Alt+clicks will cycle selection through the z-order stack at the click point. Combining Alt with Ctrl and Shift works, too. Note that on Linux, some window managers steal Alt+click, but Ctrl+Alt+click ("select under in groups") and Shift+Alt+click ("select under, add to selection") will still work. You can resize/rotate/skew the object that you selected by alt-click as usual with handles, and you can move it with arrow keys

Drag Selected: dragging with Alt in Selector moves the currently selected object(s) no matter where you start the drag, unlike regular drag that first selects the object under cursor. This is convenient for dragging objects that are behind other objects in z-order. On Linux you may have to disable dragging the window with Alt if you want to use this.

These new features are available now in the nightly CVS builds, and will be officially available in the 0.40 release.

New Frequently Asked Questions

Sept 4, 2004 - Bulia has added a couple new entries to the FAQ from questions that Inkscape users may be wondering:

• "Q: Inkscape and renderer X show my SVGs differently. What to do?"
• "Q: I'm having problems with non-Latin filenames on Linux - help!"

End of Code Freeze

Sept 3, 2004 - A working solution has been found to the crash bug on Win32, so we've stopped the code freeze and returned to regular development. The issue appears to be some weird interaction between DLL libraries that goes away when we statically compile everything. While not a perfect solution, it's at least sufficient to resume regular development. Further exploration of the issue can occur independently now, and hopefully the issue will be traced to root cause and properly solved by the official 0.40 release.

Project Status 2004-09-01

Sept 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Sept 1 is up for review.