Bug Hunt for Inkscape 0.45

December 30, 2006

The codebase has been put into a preliminary frost for our 'Bug Hunt'. Our goal is to close 300 points worth of bugs (9 pts for critical bugs, 6pts for med, 3pts for low.) We're at about 50 points currently. You can help us achieve this release by reviewing the bug tracker and submitting patches to help close open bugs.

Inkscape Website Issues

December 29, 2006

Apologies if you've recently experienced problems accessing inkscape.org. A bug in the Linux kernel's networking behavior was preventing it from "forgetting" connections quickly enough. Because so many people access inkscape.org each day, this was resulting in us hitting the maximum number of connections allowed. We were restarting the webserver about once a day to keep it online.

We've reconfigured things to make the kernel time out connections much more quickly, which seems to have completely resolved the issue. Hopefully one day we can upgrade to a new kernel that lacks this bug. Thanks go to Kees Cook for troubleshooting this problem.

Wiimote as a mouse for Inkscape

December 28, 2006

Check this out. Marcan42 figured out how the IR camera works for taking data from the Wiimote. In this video he shows how to use it to emulate a mouse for use with Inkscape and a few other simple activities.

Going Native on MacOS X

November 7, 2006

Derek Hinchliffe announced success building Inkscape against the native port of GTK on MacOS X. Shortly after Michael Wybrow committed a build script to the Inkscape SVN repository. We thank both men for their work on this important milestone. Native OS X Inkscape is still far from being ready for a stable release, but there is now a foundation for the community to build upon.

Faking Mesh Gradients

November 7, 2006

It is practically undeniable. No feature bridges the gap between raster and vector graphics quite like gradient meshes. Recently on the Inkscape developer mailing list, Bulia Byak explained his plan for creating gradient meshes in 100% valid SVG using Inkscape's newly supported blur filter and clipping paths. Check out this screenshot. The mathematical power necessary for automating this in Inkscape could be provided by lib2geom, a computational geometry framework being developed under the leadership of Nathan Hurst and MenTaLguY.

Linux Pratique Tutorials

October 2, 2006

Inkscape takes up the major part of the special number of the French magazine Linux pratique. This one, dedicated to Free Vector drawing applications, has 5 Inkscape tutorials, making up half the magazine! More at http://www.linux-pratique.com/index.php?Sommaires.

Creating book cover art with Inkscape

September 15, 2006

linux.com is running an article on using Inkscape to create book cover art.

Inkscape 0.44.1 Unleashed - Download Now

September 14, 2006

The Inkscape community announced the release of Inkscape 0.44.1 today. This version represents several weeks of work by the community in order to fix several crashes on windows, Mac OS X, and other packaging issues which have come up from our last successful release, 0.44, which introduced substantial features like graphical layers, clipping and masking support, and native PDF export with transparency.

For a full listing of changes, please see the Release Notes.

Please visit www.inkscape.org and see what you would like to help the project in solving, download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages, and see the community submitted screenshots.

"Drawing with Inkscape" presentation in Portland

September 5, 2006

Bryce Harrington will be giving a presentation on "Drawing with Inkscape" at 7pm Thursday, Sept 7th at Portland State University in Smith Memorial Center, Room 294, for the Portland Linux/Unix Group.

The presentation will include a lesson in creating a logo in Inkscape, an overview of both basic and advanced functionality, and a slideshow of some of the great work Inkscape artists have done over the years.

New french speaking user's list / Nouvelle liste d'utilisateurs francophones

September 2, 2006

A new Inkscape user mailing list for french speakers, inkscape-user-fr@lists.sf.net is now available. This new list is intended to assist users in using Inkscape's functionalities and grow its french speaking user community.

Une nouvelle liste de diffusion pour Inkscape est disponible pour les utilisateurs de langue française inkscape-user-fr@lists.sf.net. Cette nouvelle liste a pour but d'assister tous les utilisateurs d'Inkscape le mieux possible sur les fonctionnalités du logiciel et créer ainsi une émulation pour accroître la communauté des utilisateurs francophones !

Inkscape Translation Progress

August 9, 2006

Matiphas reports that we've received two new translations: Dzongkha and Bulgarian, and that the Danish and Nepali translations have been improved from 5% to 99% and from 3% to 91%! There are a number of other new languages currently undergoing translation work.

Most languages have dropped a few percent due to new development work currently underway, but the new and improved translations more than make up for this. Over the past 2 months we've gone from 38 to 49 translations, from 12 significant translations to 22 (!!), and increased the global average translation ratio from 55% to 56%.

AntiVirus False Positive with Trojan.Zlob

July 3, 2006

A few users are reporting that Windows anti-virus programs (Norton Antivirus and Symantec Scanner) are giving a false positive on the Inkscape Windows binary. These programs are erroneously giving indicators of Trojan.Zlob. It is thought that the NSIS installer we use for installing Inkscape on Windows was incorrectly listed as a trojan by the antivirus vendors, but this is not yet confirmed; others have reported that there were similar problems reported in other Open Source applications that use NSIS on Windows.

This problem appears to be affecting only some Windows machines. We don't know what the best work around is, but make sure to use the latest antivirus definitions (it may already been fixed).

First week's 0.44-stable download statistics

June 29, 2006

Just one week after the 0.44 release our software was distributed to over 54,100 users through the SourceForge download servers. The largest share was from the Windows users, who totalled nearly 38,000 downloads. The next highest number was from the Mac users with 9,115 downloads. The Unix/Linux users scored 7,104 downloads.

Inkscape Translation Progress

June 24, 2006

Translators have made serious progress this past month. Compare this to the May 28th numbers!

Welcome Slashdot!

June 23, 2006

Pardon the slow site, particularly the screenshots and wiki, but do please enjoy the newly released Inkscape. Some packages are just starting to become available. See our downloads page or head to the SourceForge file list for the latest uploads. Note that SourceForge has been a bit unreliable lately, so if the links aren't working, please keep trying.

Inkscape 0.44 Release

June 22, 2006

The Release Wardens have blessed the official Inkscape 0.44.0 release tarball. We will be making the official announcement once packagers have had a couple days to build the release packages, but if you're in a compiling mood, please feel free to download the source today! :-)

LGM report in Linux Format Magazine

June 9, 2006

JonCruz reports, "I just picked up the June issue of Linux Format magazine (Issue 80). Their cover this time is on 'Libre Graphics', and is coverage of the LGM. Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus and Xara each got two pages. Also, Inkscape people can be seen teeny-tiny on the pic of the lecture hall on the initial page, and then recognizable later on the Xara pages checking it out."

"Oh, and I was personally very excited to see it, as it's the first time I've really been interviewed for anything significant. :-)"

"Oh, and coming up, I hear that issue 81 will probably have a good article by Jon Phillips, covering many things."

Translation Status

June 8, 2006

Matiphas reports the current status on translations:

Translations have been quite improved :
Total number of PO files: 38
Significantly translated locales: (12 with a mean translation ratio of
98%)      ca cs de es fr hu it lt ru sl zh_CN zh_TW
Global average translation ratio has raised from 49% to 55%

Inkscape 0.44 pre3

June 6, 2006

Aaron reports: "The tarball for 0.44pre3 is now available at: at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre3.tar.gz?download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre3.sig?download

As they become available, binary packages can be found at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438&package_id=99112&release_id=422874

Let's give a round of applause to our prerelease packagers. Thanks for getting these packages up so quickly. We all appreciate your efforts."

Inkscape 0.44pre2 Released

June 3, 2006

ACSpike has uploaded a 0.44pre2 tarball to Sourceforge.

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre2.tar.gz?download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.43%2B0.44pre2.sig?download

We are hurling quickly toward final release. We would encourage everyone to sit down with this package for a good testing session. You can find binary pacakges for your system as they are created at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438&package_id=99112&release_id=422108

Inkscape Translation Status

June 2, 2006

Translators have recently improved the following: ko (8 to 40%), nb (6 to 34%) and nn (64 to 75%) are now ramping up , zh_CN has undergone a BIG boost (5 to 99%), hu is back in the race (72 to 76% and Arpad looks like wanting to commit some other things, but failed due to down svn), lt back in the race too (82 to 90%), and sk has maybe found a new volunteer.

Inkscape Trouble with Debian Unstable

June 1, 2006

A number of Debian Unstable users have reported major problems when using Inkscape. The symptoms vary but usually involve inkscape failing to start up. This appears to affect both Inkscape 0.43, and Inkscape compiled from SVN.

Wolfram Quester, Debian's Inkscape Package Maintainer, reports that currently there are two separate issues. Neither are technically Inkscape-specific nor Debian-specific but are due to related components.

The first issue is a libgc problem. Inkscape 0.43 dead locks with the new libgc 6.7; The new inkscape-pre1 simply segfaults. If you attach to the process using strace, you get millions of:

   futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL)  = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
   futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL)  = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
   futex(0x10679060, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL 
   Process 32245 detached

The solution for this issue is to downgrade libgc.

The second issue is seen by KDE users that have the gtk2-engines-gtk-qt package installed. Wolfi reports, 'The package is used for different theming of gtk applications under KDE. You have it if there is an item "appearance-->gtk styles and themes" in your KControl menu. It causes duplicate inclusion of themes via different rc-files. Yuya Nishihara found out that this leads to a crash if the theme uses the smooth engine of gtk. Other applications are affected by this, too.'

Inkscape 0.44 Hard Freeze

May 31, 2006

This past week has seen an intensive focus on bug fixing. After only a week's work, we've already surpassed our goal. The must-fix bugs identified for this release have been addressed.

Due to this achievement, we're now moving into Hard Freeze, in final preparation for release. Translators are hard at work bringing translations up to date, and the Release Wardens (Jon and Aaron) are coordinating final bug fixes and general spit and polish. We hope to have the final release out within a couple weeks or so.

Inkscape 0.44-pre1 Preview Release

May 30, 2006

A new preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. If you aren't already testing 0.44, you'd better hop to it! We're making fast work of our bugs and expect to have the final release within a week or two. At this point, we are especially interested in hearing of installation or packaging problems.

You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

Inkscape Translation Progress

May 28, 2006

Inkscape has now entered 'String Freeze' for the 0.44 release. This enables our translators to focus on bringing all the translations up to date without worry of strings changing at the last minute.

We'd like to give special recognition to Inkscape user Chrisjia, whose work has improved the translation status of zh_CN (Chinese) from 5% to 99%!

Inkscape is translated into many languages, but not all! Check if it is translated well into your language, and if not, please consider working on this. Translation is a very important way to help improve Inkscape, and directly benefits those who share your language. We have documented the steps to doing translation - you don't need to know anything at all about programming! We have an active, fun translation team, that we'd love to encourage other translators to join.

Average translated: 1067 ( 49 %), fuzzy:  458 ( 21 %), untranslated: 616 ( 28 %)

Total number of PO files: 38
Significantly translated PO file count:    9
  Average number of strings translated: 2052 ( 95 %)
  Significantly translated locales:      ca cs de es fr it lt sl zh_CN

Inkscape 0.44-pre0 Preview Release

May 25, 2006

A preview (beta) release of Inkscape 0.44.0 is now available. We're asking that users please download and test it out, and report any bugs they find, and encouraging packagers to provide packaged versions of this release. We're particularly interested in hearing about installation issues, crash or data loss bugs, or problems with any of the new features.

You can download pre-releases from our SourceForge Files Page. Check our Release Notes for details of what's changed, and our Reporting Bugs page for directions on helping to ensure Inkscape 0.44 is solid.

Final Summer of Code Projects

May 22, 2006

Thank you to all the students who sent proposals, and all the mentors who volunteered to participate! Google has announced the final selections based on our rankings. As you can imagine, the selection was tough to arrive at, but we feel these projects will have a transformational effect on Inkscape's power for users:

 Application                                Student            Mentor
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 SVG Filter Effects #1                      Niko Kiirala       Bulia
 Inkboard Protocol Spec / Lib Conversion    Dale Harvey        David Yip
 PDF Export with Cairo                      Mikos Erdelyi      Ted Gould
 Memory Optimization                        Marina Diezler     MenTaLguY
 SVG Filter Effects #2                      Hugo Rodrigues     Bulia

One of the SVG filter effects projects will focus on implementing the effects in the renderer, the other will focus on the backend SPObject/XML portion.

Status for Inkscape 0.44 Release

21 May, 2006

The latest Inkscape Release Status shows that we are nearly ready for Feature Freeze. We have fixed the date for freezing to the 23rd; there's several efforts that need to wrap up, but hopefully this will give sufficient time.

Next, we will be generating a "Must Fix" bug list, and producing a -pre0 release for people to test. Due to the huge number of new features, we really need to ask the community for help banging on the codebase and looking for issues.

    Apr 23rd - Development continues on the ~24 items identified
               For non-0.44 feature work, please use branches
 
    May 18th - Achieve completion of at least 50% of the items.
               Work continues on the remaining 12.
               Work ceases on any other features.
               Notification to translators
               Begin focusing on bugfixes.
               Identify preliminary "must-fix" buglist
 
    May 23rd - Feature Freeze
               All feature development work ends
               Finalize the "must-fix" buglist
               Issue pre-release packages for testing
               Focus on bug fixes, translations, & docs

   ~May 27th - String Freeze
               All tutorial work finished
               No further changes to internal text

    June     - Hard Freeze
               Translation work finishes
               Final resolution on all "must-fix" bugs
               Issue one or more release candidates
 
    Jun/Jul  - 0.44 Release

New Site Design

15 May 2006

Inkscape.org has a new look. The new site design is based on AJ Ashton's winning entry to the 2005 website design contest on Deviant Art. Special thanks to Josef Vybiral and Dale Harvey for their work crafting the design in CSS and HTML.

Summer of Code Project Ideas

April 30, 2006

The Inkscape team has posted a list of ideas for the Google Summer of Code project.

If you're a student and would like to have a summer job working on Inkscape for pay, this is a great opportunity! You can sign up send in your proposal through the Summer of Code site.

New Translators Mailing List

April 28, 2006

The Inkscape translators have started a new inkscape-translator@ mailing list. This list will be used for discussing translation/localization of Inkscape and its documentation.

Planning for Inkscape 0.44 Release

April 23, 2006

The Inkscape team has started the process of producing the next release. It is expected that it will take us a month or two to work through the process, which means that you can expect 0.44 to be officially released in the early summer.

Here are the milestones to look for in our release process:

    Now      - Development continues on the ~24 items identified
               For non-0.44 feature work, please use branches
 
    May 1st  - Achieve completion of at least 50% of the items.
               Work continues on the remaining 12.
               Work ceases on any other features.
               Notification to translators
               Begin focusing on bugfixes.
               Identify preliminary "must-fix" buglist
 
    May 15th - Feature Freeze
               All feature development work ends
               Finalize the "must-fix" buglist
               Issue pre-release packages for testing
               Focus on bug fixes, translations, & docs
 
    TBD      - Hard Freeze
               Translation work finishes
               Final resolution on all "must-fix" bugs
               Issue one or more release candidates
 
    TBD      - 0.44 Release                 

If you have some time to contribute to Inkscape, you would be more than welcome to join in the making of this release. There are many places you can lend a hand: Certain new features still need some development work. If you good at breaking software, you can be a big help by experimenting with each of the features listed in the 0.44 Release Notes. See if you can find and report defects.

Translation (and updates) to documentation are also very important, so please see our Translation Information and our Tutorials And Help pages.

If you are interested in packaging or providing a mirror of our download areas, these are also excellent ways to help. The Win32 and OSX packages are the most active; please join the discussions on the inkscape-devel mailing list

Icons with Inkscape

April 4, 2006

Dmitri Joukov has written a blog post about using Inkscape for creating Icons.

Graphics Art School uses Inkscape

April 3, 2006

Newsforge is running an article about a graphics art professor that switched his class over from proprietary to open source graphics programs. Beyond just reducing lab fees, this also had the effect of really empowering the students.

One concern raised was that the students were not learning "industry standard" tools. Yet who can say what the industry standard might be in 5 or 10 years?

Libre Graphics Meeting

February 26, 2006

Please everyone in the Lyon, France, EU area come and attend the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting March 17, 18, and 19, 2006. This conference is going to be an excellent place to meet Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library artists and developers (as well as artists and developers from other creative applications).

I (rejon) am presenting primarily about Open Clip Art Library and Creative Commons and will touch upon Inkscape throughout the talk.

Stay tuned for times as well when there will be an Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library meet-up during this conference on March 19, 2006.

New Features since our last release

January 21, 2006

Normally we tend to post news items regarding what new features are showing up in our repository. As people can see, news has been a bit thin for the past couple months... but don't let this fool you. ;)

New Features or improvements added after 0.43 was released:

Outline mode - an oft-requested feature that allows toggling an alternate view mode to see only the outlines of all shapes. That would be as opposed to normal view mode which shows fills an strokes.

Selected style indicator - this indicator is a bit more powerful than implementations you'll see in other software. Inkscape's can give insight into more than color. It can tell you if it's a pattern, radial or linear gradient, if there are multiple styles selected, it can mix multiple flat fill colors, all opacity controls are right there, and much more.

Remove overlaps - a new function in the Align & Distribute dialog to do just what it says, remove overlaps from selected objects.

Snapping improvements - snapping is now more advanced and will allow snapping to paths and nodes. Additionally objects will now only snap to visible guidelines.

Connector improvements - you can now set the spacing value for objects that you designate to be avoided.

Swatches are being moved into the main interface.

Improvements to the Transformation dialog.

Retention of transformation rotation centers between sessions.

Rendering speed improvements, and too much more for us to continue listing.

To see the full list of changes since 0.43, please visit the following link in our wiki: http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes

Switch from CVS to SVN

January 15, 2006

Bryce Harrington writes:

"For those of you not on inkscape-devel, note that we've just this morning switched over from using CVS to using Subversion (SVN) for source code management.

For those of you not already highly familiar with CVS, you should probably find Subversion a tad easier.

On the other hand, if you're familiar with CVS already but haven't tried Subversion before, you'll have a bit of retraining to do, but subversion is similar enough to cvs that you shouldn't find it to be too difficult.

Whichever case, you'll see several benefits to this change. With CVS, anonymous CVS checkouts were always delayed by an hour or more, but subversion will allow completely synchronized access. I suspect performance will also be a LOT better than with CVS. The web viewer is also a bit better.

There is a potential cost to this change, beyond the work we each have to do to adapt. This is an experimental service from SF, which means we can expect there may be some occasional outages or other temporary issues; SourceForge promises to be responsive to reports of issues, so please report issues to them. However, the value of switching to subversion is felt to be well worth this risk, so hopefully things will go smoothly and we all will benefit from the new capabilities."

One other piece of information; the SVN Access info SourceForge provides for our repository (if you follow the SVN link in our menu) is incorrect. The correct location is:
https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2006

All of the Inkscape developers want to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Inkscape 0.44 is currently under development and will include many great new features, enhancements, and bugfixes.

Regarding development, we could always use more developers or other contributors. Whether you can program or not, if you would like to contribute to the project, we could use your help.

SVG Filters are one of the most requested features that we receive, unfortunately, implementing them is more than a one person job. If you are interested in assisting with this please read this message from our mailing list.