New book on Inkscape is available

In early July 2008 a joint Inkscape and FLOSS Manuals project held a book sprint in Paris sponsored by Google. Half a dozen of contributors from Netherlands, France, USA, Australia and Russia participated at the sprint to create a new user manual in English.

We were asked to do 14 chapters, but we did 35 chapters. The book is now available on-line free of charge from FLOSS Manuals and for a small fee as hardcopy from Lulu. The income will go to FLOSS Manuals project that provides the infrastructure for collaborative work on documentation and to Inkscape's documentation team for funding future book sprints.

The documentation team is determined to update the new manual frequently and invites you to participate at both improving English version and translating it into other languages.

We thank Google for funding the book sprint, FLOSS Manuals for providing great infrastructure that finally made collaborative work on the manual a sweet reality, and organizers of Open Translation Tools 2007 conference for bringing FLOSS Manuals and Inkscape face to face!

Inkscape project at SVG Open 2008

SVG Open is an annual conference where SVG comittee members, software developers and artists meet to talk to each other and present their most recent work. This year Jon Cruz from Inkscape project participates at the conference. He will do two talks: a basic introduction to Inkscape and a talk on color management in SVG. On the last day Jon will participate at a workshop.

You can still register to attend the conference which will be held on August 26-29 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Google Summer of Code interim results

Here are results of midterm evaluation of five Inkscape's projects at Google Summer of Code 2008 program.

• SVG Fonts, by Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches. Thanks to his work Inkscape can already render glyphs that are decribed using the d (path description) attribute, but not those described by arbitrary SVG fragments. Glyph kerning is also supported now. Cairo user fonts feature is used for rendering on an auxiliary GtkWindow, since libpango still does not support the user fonts feature. That is a current blocker for on-canvas rendering. The next half of Felipe's SoC project will be more focused on user interface for the SVG Fonts.
• Lib2geom integration: path representation, by Johan Engelen. Results aren't so visible and most work is under the hood. He has finished converting the basic path handling to 2geom. This has resulted in much more readable code and has stimulated 2geom development where functionality was lacking or could be improved.
• lib2geom development, by Marco Cecchetti. Marco made elliptical arc class compliant to SVG standard with methods implemented natively, created point-curve nearest-point and distance routines specialized for all curve types, added some technical drawing routines and more.
• Tech Drawing Abilities for Inkscape, by Maximilian Albert. Maximilian wrote a number of live path effects (LPEs) to simplify geometric constructions and at the same time considerably expanded the underlying LPE framework to make user interaction much easier. Notable enhancements are: handles for parameter adjustment, custom helper paths. This also led to the addition of long-timed anticipated vector brushes to pen and pencil tool.
• Test Suite, by Jasper Joris van de Gronde. Jasper has made new unit tests for a number of files related to reading/writing svg's and rendering, and converted any remaining old-style unit tests to the CxxTest framework. And you can now also build the tests on Windows. At the moment I'm working on rendering/verb tests and getting the new tests to build on Linux.

Notably, almost all work work is done in main development branch (trunk) of either Inkscape or lib2geom. Thus most of the new features are likely to be seen in the 0.47 version.

Book Sprint in Paris

Google has generously sponsored FLOSS Manuals and Inkscape to run a Book Sprint in Paris, July 5-12. We have people coming from France, Netherlands, USA and Russia to work on a new book on Inkscape.

If you are in Paris at this time and willing to participate, please join inkscape-docs@ mailing list and introduce yourself. Of course, you can help us being located in your hometown in just any part of Earth. We have also established an IRC channel (#booksprint at irc.freenode.net) to make remote communication easier.

FLOSS Manuals and Inkscape project first met at Open Translation Tools 2007 conference in Zagreb. We are happy to bring our collaboration with FM to this level and expect seing translations of the new manual rapidly appearing.

Inkscape in Hackontest 2008

Inkscape project is hoping to participate at Hackontest — a 24 hour programming contest between three teams of open source software projects. The competition is taking place at OpenExpo on September 24-25, 2008 in Zürich, Switzerland. Winners get prizes .

What we need is more ideas and more programmers willing to participate. Here is the current list of ideas. Feel free to register, login and vote, add an idea and/or volunteer to implement a request.

Inkscape at Google Summer of Code 2008

This monday work on Google Summer of Code projects officially began. This is the fourth time we participate at GSoC and this year we have five projects:

• SVG Fonts support, by Felipe Sanches;
• lib2geom: convert Inkscape's internal representation of paths to a lib2geom type, by Johan Engelen;
• lib2geom: little interactive applications showing off the power of lib2geom, by Marco Cecchetti;
• Tech drawing abilities for Inkscape, by Maximilian Albert;
• A test suite, by Jasper Joris van de Gronde

We wish our students and mentors success in their work!

Interview with developers and GSoC2007 students

A while back Inkscape developers and Google Summer of Code students were interviewed regarding the new 0.46 release and future plans. Read it here.

Inkscape 0.46 Released!

The Inkscape community today is announcing the release of the newest version of its open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape 0.46 is a major update that introduces native PDF support. The implementation of PDF support in Inkscape provides an easy, open source solution to editing PDF documents.

Tons of new features and performance improvements are included in this release. Dialogs now have the ability to be docked to the editing window. Gradients can be edited completely on-canvas. The new Paint Bucket Tool fills bounded areas with color. A new 3D Box tool helps create perspective-correct drawings. A new Tweak tool provides an intuitive method for editing paths and painting objects. The new Live Path Effects feature can create "brushes" and various organic effects on paths. Improvements to color management include support for color spaces other than sRGB. Most SVG filters are now implemented, and a new powerful UI is provided for editing filter stacks.

Downloading Inkscape 0.46

Inkscape 0.46 is already included by default in Ubuntu Hardy so just install it normally. Ubuntu Gutsy users can install by adding the following to System : Admin : Software Sources : Third-Party Software:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main

Mac OS X users can download a universal package for either Leopard or Tiger from our SourceForge site.

Windows users can download an Installer or 7z compressed file from SourceForge.

The Inkscape team do not currently provide official packages for other platforms. There are, however, several unofficial packages available. Fedora 8 or 9 packages are available here. Suse has rpm packages for 11.0, or 10.3. Debian users may find useful information here. Please let us know about packages for other platforms or distributions, and we will add them as we receive information.

For more information, see the Complete Release Notes for 0.46, or our Community Contributed Screenshots.

Translation Statistics

Here are the final translation stats for Inkscape 0.46. We managed to achieve 26 languages at 80% or better - just one short of what we achieved in 0.45.

Inkscape 0.46-pre3

Our third (and probably final) pre-release of Inkscape is available for download.

Unfortunately, we've found that the remainder of our release blocking bugs are Windows-specific issues, but there aren't enough Windows-based developers to solve them all. If you are comfortable programming C/C++ on Windows with Ming32 and are interested in helping ensure the Inkscape Windows port is as stable as on other platforms, we can sure use your help! Review our bug tracker for windows bug priorities and to submit patches. For more information on Inkscape development on Windows, see our Win32Port wiki page.

Translation Statistics

24 languages have achieved 80% or higher translation ratios. We've nearly met the 27 languages translated for 0.45. Special note goes to br and eo, which are new in 0.46 and have surpassed the 80% translated mark.

Inkscape 0.46 Hard Freeze

Last night we've officially established the release branch that will become the Inkscape 0.46 release once we're confident of its stability. Along with this, we've declared Hard Freeze and String Freeze on this branch, and thus will be focusing on finalizing translations and bug fixing.

Consequently, the SVN main head has returned to free active development on the path to 0.47. For 0.47 a particular focus will be a cleanup of the codebase, refactoring for improved consistency and elimination of duplicate or obsolete code.

Translation Statistics

We now have 19 languages at or over 80%.

Inkscape 0.46-pre2

Our latest pre-release of Inkscape is now available for download. Please test it and report bugs to our bug tracker. Ubuntu users can get it through our ppa (see earlier news for detail).

Inkscape 0.46-pre1 Preview Release

The latest preview of our upcoming 0.46 release is up for download. Please help in testing this by installing it and reporting bugs not already known.

If you've followed the earlier directions for setting up Ubuntu to download releases from PPA, you'll be able to simply do a regular update to get it.

Translation Statistics

Several translations have received updates, increasing the number of languages at 80% or higher from 12 to 13, and our average from 48% to 51%.

Inkscape 0.46-pre0 Preview Release

A preview of our upcoming 0.46 release is now available for download. Please help in testing this by installing it and reporting bugs not already known.

Note that Ubuntu Gutsy users can easily follow our alpha release cycle by simply adding the following to System : Admin : Software Sources : Third-Party Software:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main

(Hardy users can do similarly, replacing 'gutsy' with 'hardy' in the lines above.)

Inkscape 0.46 About Screen Contest

The About Screen Contest is within a few hours of its end! Be sure to get your submissions in ASAP. Also have a browse through all the excellent submissions made so far!

UPDATE 2008-01-08: Submissions are complete, it's voting time!

UPDATE 2008-01-23: We have a winner!

Translation Statistics

The number of translations at 80% or higher has increased from 10 to 12 over the past week. Still quite a bit of work to go to get our average translation ratio up!

Inkscape SVN snapshot - Ubuntu .deb's

For Ubuntu users that would like to get a preview of the new Inkscape, here is a development snapshot of SVN HEAD, as of Jan 4th: Inkscape 0.46~svn20080104 for Gutsy, and Inkscape 0.46~svn20080104 for Hardy.