Inkscape Feature Freeze

Nov 21, 2004 - This has been a lengthy run-up to the release, but we're finally ready to enter into feature freeze by the end of the day today. We're hoping that the Inkscape community's heavy attention to testing and bug fixing these past two months will pay off in a speedy final week. The plan is to complete the Feature Freeze phase within a matter of days (we basically just need to do a last pass through the bug list and catch any show stoppers), then do a Hard Freeze Day for a QA, and establish a Release Branch. Once the Release Branch is established, folks can start packaging. We'll give packagers a day or so head start, then put the release PR effort into action.

Inkscape Presentation at SF MOMA

Nov 16, 2004 - Jon Phillips will be on a panel discussion at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) for The Open-Source Paradigm, at 7:00 p.m. in the Phillis Wattis Theater on Thursday, November 18, 2004. Jon will be presenting about Inkscape and the Open Clip Art Library.

Inkscape Status

Nov 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Nov 15 is online for review. We're about ready to enter into a preliminary feature freeze (frost?) towards the release.

Inkscape at Universidad de A Coruna

Nov 8, 2004 - As mentioned earlier, Inkscape was presented at the Universidad de A Coruna recently. We've got a few pictures and videos of the event in our Coruna Report.

Object Properties: Hide, Lock, Label

Nov 7, 2004 - The object properties dialog has received some attention, adding Hide and Lock flags. This is expected to be handy for layer settings.

A new 'label' field is available for SVG objects, allowing the user to add descriptive names to objects where needed. Note that this is an Inkscape-specific feature so will be stripped out if you save as Plain SVG and won't be visible in other SVG apps.

Improved Calligraphy Feature

Nov 5, 2004 - Bulia found a way to enable flat nib mode for the Calligraphy tool, enabling creation of calligraphic text in Inkscape.

The screenshots page has been updated to show off a number of the new features.

Interview at KDE Dot News

Nov 5, 2004 - Bryce Harrington was interviewed for dot.kde.org regarding open source project management and Inkscape. The story was also picked up by gnomedesktop.org.

Project Status 2004-11-01

Nov 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Nov 1st is online for review.

Bug Hunt for Inkscape 0.40 Release

Oct 29, 2004 - Since the announcement to begin the release process, bug fixers have closed an impressive number of bugs: 7 high priority, 11 medium priority, and 10 low priority. This work brings us to a total of 159 points, attaining our bug-fix goal. :-) There's some additional work to be done in completing the implementation of the layers feature, but hopefully we can achieve most of that within a week or so.

Meantime, WE NEED YOUR HELP! Right now, please download one of the pre-release snapshots from the download page and play with it. Look for any bugs, performance issues, installation problems, and especially crashes, and report them to us. Continue this as you have time in the days leading up to the release; the more you review, the better Inkscape 0.40 will be.

(We also plan to produce one or two pre-release statically compiled packages, so folks that have trouble installing the snapshots may have better luck with these instead.)

Happy Birthday Inkscape!

Oct 26, 2004 - Has it only been a year?? Yup, today is Inkscape's first anniversary. This time last year we registered Inkscape at SourceForge. Nov 6th was the first announcement of the project, and Nov 10th was our first release on Freshmeat.

It's been an amazing year with the project. We've had five very solid releases, each a major advancement over the previous. Tens of thousands of people use Inkscape today! Most importantly, we've succeeded in building a wonderful community of prolific developers and friendly users.

For the year to come, I think we can look forward to gaining solutions to many of the features and issues we're worrying about right now like PDF, extensions, Gtkmm, etc. CSS will probably be a major effort, but one we'll gain a huge amount of benefit from. I think (hope) we'll see expansion of Inkscape's audience to include technical drawing in a big way. I'd like to put some effort into building up a healthy donation system since we already have users asking about that.

I also hope we can continue to expand the size of the development team and the userbase. We should continue to encourage users to peek under the hood and fiddle with stuff; I'm hopeful the extensions system will also provide an easy way for users to get involved. We would also do well to expand our efforts at demoing and presenting Inkscape at trade shows and conferences.

Congratulations and thank you to everyone that's helped us get this far, and look forward to seeing what Inkscape can achieve in 2005. :-)

Plans for Inkscape 0.40 Release

Oct 25, 2004 - We've decided that the time's about right for a release. We've completed a decent amount of the goals set for this release but not all of them. However, it's been a while since we did a release and there's a lot of cool new features we'd like users to be able to start playing with.

As of today, we've shifted focus to bug fixing and finalizing current work to prepare for the release. To track our bug fixing progess, starting today we've adopted a point system and are attempting to achieve 150 points - each fixed bug counts as 3, 6, or 9 points depending on its priority. Already today we've scored 42 points!

New tutorial

Oct 21, 2004 - Bulia has completed a thorough tutorial on the four shape tools, as he feels they've reached maturity. "Inkscape shapes are clearly ahead of the competition both in features and in usability, implement everything that I can possibly think of, and are virtually bugless." The new "Shapes" tutorial is more extensive than other tutorials and includes both detailed descriptions of the shape tools and types as well as tips and examples. A preview is available via webcvs.

Inkscape at Universidad de A Coruna

Oct 18, 2004 - The University of A Coruna in Galicia, Spain will be having a celebration of Days of Graphical Design with Free Software in the evenings of October 27-28. Adrian Perez will be presenting 'Vectorial drawing with Inkscape' on the 28th.

Project Status 2004-10-15

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

New Features: default gradients, master opacity, node editing

Oct 12, 2004 - Three new features have been added:

* When you switch an object to gradient fill or stroke, the new gradient is created with that object's previous fill or stroke color going from 1 to 0 opacity (instead of the hardcoded black-to-white fully opaque gradient as before). New objects do not share gradients now, unless you explicitly set two or more objects to use the same gradient via the Fill and Stroke dialog.

* The master opacity slider is moved from Object Properties to Fill and Stroke and can now work on multiple selected objects. It is now more convenient to adjust the transparency of objects with gradients or patterns.

* If a node has straight line path fragments on one or both sides, Ctrl+Alt+dragging that node in the node tool moves it along the direction(s) of these straight line(s) and their perpendiculars. This is an easy way to change the length of a straight line without changing its angle.

More on-canvas star interactivity

Oct 11, 2004 - The Roundedness and Randomization fields in the star controls panel are precise, but not very convenient. Now you can round a star interactively by Shift+dragging a star handle on the canvas, or adjust a star's randomization level by Alt+dragging a handle. Correspondingly, Shift+click on a handle zeroes roundedness, Alt+click removes randomization.

New Feature: Make bitmap copy

Oct 8, 2004 - The new command, "Make a bitmap copy" (Alt+B), exports a bitmap of the selected objects (hiding all other objects of the document), saves it as a PNG file in the directory of the document, and imports it back into the document placing it exactly over the original. This can be used e.g. to replace objects with gradients or transparency by bitmaps for printing or PS/EPS export, or for producing blurred shadows (see previous report).

New Feature: Blurred shadows

Oct 6, 2004 - Via prefs, you can specify an external filter that will be run on the PNG file after it is exported but before it is imported back. I use this for grayscaling and blurring the image to create a soft drop shadow for any object.

The script itself is share/extensions/inkscape-shadow.sh. It's not integrated into the extensions or plugin system in any way (Ted, I may need your help on this). The script requires Imagemagick 6.x to be installed.

Presently, to enable this requires a tweak to your preferences.xml (see bulia's Oct 5th post to the inkscape-devel mailing list for details). There are no plans currently for implementing a GUI, for various reasons, but for those who desperately need blurred shadows right now, this feature works well enough.

Python-based SVG-Utils package

Oct 4, 2004 - Daniel Taylor mentions that he's developed a library and some python scripts to help work with SVG files.

New Feature: Current style

Oct 2, 2004 - All object-creating tools can use the current style for new objects. The current style is the style that you last applied to an object (when changing its fill, stroke, transparency, etc). For example, after you paint some object black, new shapes you create will be black too. Alternatively, a tool can use its own style for new objects, which is not affected by document editing. The Preferences dialog lets you choose between using the current style (shape tools by default) and the tool's own style (text, pen, and pencil by default) for any tool, as well as to set the style of a tool from current selection. The "Apply to" list in the Fill & Stroke dialog is removed; this dialog now always sets the style of the selection.

Two other misc. usability enhancements have been added:

Double-clicking a tool button calls up the Preferences dialog open on the page of that tool.

The Preferences dialog remembers and reopens the page that was active the last time you used it.

Project Status 2004-10-01

Oct 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Oct 1 is online for review.

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.

Open Clip Art Library 0.06 Release

Aug 29, 2004 - Inkscape's sister project, the Open Clip Art Library, has posted the sixth release of their SVG art collection for download. This release includes over 1700 unique images, including materials for icon themes, presentations, stock gradients, and more. Bryce reports, "We've made much progress towards implementing metadata-based sorting of the submissions, and this is the first release we've been able to auto-sort using this mechanism. Given the growth rate of this project, it's a critical capability."

Since Inkscape now supports metadata, please take some time to contribute your own SVG images, and help make OCAL the Wikipedia of SVG! :-)

Scribus 1.2 Released

Aug 28, 2004 - Inkscape's sister project 'Scribus' has released version 1.2 of their Open Source desktop publishing application. They also report of the first commercial implementation of Scribus for commercial newspaper projection. "Last month, the premier issue of Twin Tier Times, a US weekly newspaper was launched using a production workflow centered on Scribus and other Open Source applications including GIMP 2.0, Inkscape and others."

Temporary Code Freeze

Aug 27, 2004 - Due to a thorny crash bug on Win32, we're temporarily doing a development code freeze until we can sort the issues out. If you're using Win32 nightly builds and want to help troubleshoot the issue, please join the Inkscape Development mailing list.

Garbage Collection code

Aug 22, 2004 - Just a heads up, MenTaLguY has added a bunch of code that takes advantage of the new garbage collector. This work is aimed at gaining control over memory leaks.

Gtkmm Conversion

Aug 21, 2004 - Bryce has started work on a top-down rewrite of the Inkscape user interface to convert it from Gtk+ to Gtkmm. The goal is to make it look and work the same as it does currently, but in much less code.

New Document Template

Aug 20, 2004 - The new empty document created when you launch Inkscape or use File > New is now based on a template instead of being hard-coded into the program. If you want your new documents to have different initial zoom, window size, page border, metadata, etc., just save a document with the desired settings (it may contain some objects, too) as default.svg in your share/templates directory (typically /usr/local/inkscape/share/templates on Linux, $INKSCAPE_DIR\share\templates on Windows).

Project Status 2004-08-15

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

Mental has also made good progress at implementing Garbage Collector code, simplifying SPRepr in the process, and Peter Moulder has been implementing some of the underlying code for shape connectors. Bryce has submitted a new Document Management System for SVG documents to CPAN. BrisGeek has started an investigation into The Future Techniques of Icon Design, and started a page on ApplicationIcons as a guide to gnome stock icons as applicable to Inkscape.

Knot Statusbar Tips

Aug 15, 2004 - Each knot (control handle, node, node handle, etc.) displays a tip in the statusbar when mouseovered, explaining the function of the knot and its applicable keyboard modifiers.

Randomized Shapes

Aug 14, 2004 - A new Randomization control for the Star tool lets you set the amount of random displacement of the star's tips and (for rounded stars) curve handles. A little randomization makes a star less regular, more humane and sometimes funny; strong randomization is a way to obtain a variety of crazily unpredictable objects. Unleash your imagination!

Technical details: Each point (x,y) gets its own unique 32-bit int (well, not truly unique of course, but unique enough for my purposes). This value is given as the seed to a pseudorandom number generator. The first step, random(seed), shifts the x coordinate; the second, random(random(seed)), shifts y; the third rotates the curve handles, the fourth scales them (thus curve points always remain smooth and the handles keep their proportion). So, the randomization of a star's tip is guaranteed to remain the same so long as the tip itself remains unmoved; only as you start to move it, it starts to "dance" erratically (try it, it's fun). However if you move or transform the entire star with selector, the tip coordinates used in the above calculations do not change, and therefore the star is not re-randomized. It is also not re-randomized when you change the roundedness value, because that does not affect the position of the tip. Finally, the control handles show the positions of the true points, not randomized.

Text Refactored

Aug 14, 2004 - Major work on the text system has brought new features, more power, and about 10% better performance. Backend functionality to support features like text-on-path and flowed-text-in-shape have been added, as well as some prerequisites for implementing text selection and styling of text fragments.

Pretty much everything still works as it used to, however a few things have been temporarily broken:

• letterspacing adjustment from keyboard does not work
• kerning adjustments from keyboard does not work in non-latin text
• keyboard movement in non-latin text is wrong (2 arrow keypresses needed to move one char)
• the End key jump in the last line is off by one char

These issues are being tracked and intend to be fixed soon. Please test out the text editing and report problems ASAP so they can be addressed.

Documentation and Overviews

Aug 12, 2004 - The documentation is getting more detailed. Please notice that the User Documentation and the Developer Documentation have been put onto their own pages. On the User Documentation page two new overviews of Inkscape are available. The handout is in SVG and utilizes the new textFlow implementation. NOTE: We still need people to help write a full manual. We strongly believe that it will be published (by some company) once completed.

Linux Format Article

Aug 9, 2004 - Inkscape has received its first published review in Linux Format magazine issue 57. Pick it up at the newstand and send feedback to the author of the article. It was an overall positive review. Inkscape received 8/10 rating and the reviewer had many positive things to say. The majority of the complaints have already been addressed in our current relese 0.39, as he reviewed version 0.38. Still, further criticisms have been addressed in what we working on for release 0.40. There will be many more articles and reviews in the future, so it is great to get off on the good foot with our global publicity.

Project Status 2004-08-01

Aug 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for Aug 1 is online for review.

Siggraph Inkscape Presentation on Mon, Aug. 9

August 1, 2004 - Jon Cruz and Jon Phillips will be hosting an Inkscape Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting Monday, August 9 for the annual Siggraph conference. Our BOF meeting will be from 4 - 5 PM at Holiday Inn City Center near the Los Angeles Convention Center in the Santa Monica room. For those of you that have not been to Siggraph before, it is ACM's graphics conference (the largest computer graphics conference in the world). We will give an overview of the project and mainly spend time chatting with attendees about how all interested parties' interests overlap.

Inkscape's Support of SVG 1.2's Textflow

August 1, 2004 - Fred has added SVG 1.2 based TextFlow support and Bulia has applied Fred's patch to support this oft needed feature. It allows for text inside a shape! Also, this feature allows for text to overflow from one shape to another. This feature will be polished for our next 0.40 release that our developers are actively working on. Come join the team and help us implement more text-support! We need help implementing SVG Fonts and Text on a path.

Gnomefiles.org

July 30, 2004 - Inkscape is the number one best-voted application on the newly implemented Gnomefiles.org site. Head over there and vote for your favorite SVG vector editor!

Scribus and KDE: Real World Publication Production

July 22, 2004 - Mrdocs will be giving a presentation on Scribus at the 2004 KDE Community World Summit Aug 28 in ludwigsberg.

Announcement of Inkscape 0.39 Release

July 20, 2004 - Inkscape 0.39 is released and announcements sent out. A variety of packages are available, so if you've been holding off installing it, now's the time. :-)

Inkscape 0.39 Released

July 15, 2004 - We have completed the Hard Freeze and created the 0.39 release branch. A tarball is now available from our downloads area, and at this time we would ask all packagers to please begin generating packages for platforms. We will put out the general announce in a couple of days.

Project Status 2004-07-15

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

Hard Freeze for 0.39 Release

July 13, 2004 - We are now in 'Hard Freeze' in preparation for the release, during which time changes should not be committed to the codebase. We have established a Change Control Team: Mental and Bulia. They will review and apply patches necessary to fix any final remaining issues or add any last minute translation work.

We have cut a pre4 package that you are highly encouraged to download, compile, and test out. If you notice problems (especially build issues), please report them to the bug tracker.

Feature Freeze for 0.39 Release

July 10, 2004 - The Inkscape codebase is now considered closed to new features, and work is focusing on bug fixing. We intend to focus on addressing as many 'critical' bugs as possible; this means, bugs that lead to crashes or that significantly undermine the usability or performance of the application. We identified 21 such bugs that we're working on.

Due to the timing of the freeze, certain features such as the recently mentioned layer capability, will be available only in limited form. Once this release is out the door, work will resume at completing those capabilities.

layercake layercake baker's man...

July 3, 2004 - Mental has been madly implementing basic layer support for this release, and has gotten the following working:

• We've retired the inkscape:groupmode attribute as it has served its purpose
• You get Sodipodi-style "enter group"/"leave group" commands on the context (right click) menu which can be used to switch to using a group as a layer, or switch back to that group's parent
• when a group is in this "layer" mode, the drawing tools create shapes within it and you can drag and select its objects directly

Here are the items that are still needed:

• The "group mode" setting needs to be per-NRArena key, and persist across hide/show cycles (currently, the change in event handling behavior is global, even though layer activation is per-SPDesktop)
• Some sort of visual indicator of the current layer would be nice. Mental has provided an SPDesktop (SigC++) signal for this purpose, which can be connected to via SPDesktop::connectCurrentLayerChanged()
• should e.g. "Select All" etc be influenced by the current group?

EPS Import

July 2, 2004 - Ted has implemented EPS import support in CVS. Basically, this uses the toolchain: EPS-to-PS-to-Sketch-to-SVG. "Kind of convoluted, but most users won't have to see that. To see this work you'll need to have pstoedit, ghostscript, and Sketch installed. If other people could look at this and comment that would be great. If you have those installed, all you need to do is open a bunch of EPS files."

Project Status 2004-07-01

July 1, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for July 1st is online for review. We're now in the initial stages of the freeze process on the path to the 0.39 release.

Windows Scroll Bug Fix

June 24, 2004 - Carl has worked out a fix for the infamous crash that occurs when moving items to the canvas edges, as has been plaguing Windows users for quite some time. This is arguably the worst bug Inkscape has ever had, so saying this is a critical bug fix is a major understatement. Thanks Carl!!!

Pattern Fills

June 23, 2004 - Similarus has added a UI for pattern fills for shapes. *Very* cool. Bryce has posted a screenshot.

Rounded Stars

June 22, 2004 - Today Bulia was in a mood to do something fun...

A wild variety of central-symmetric curvilinear shapes, including softly rounded stars and polygons, can be created using the new Roundedness control on the options panel for the Star tool.

The value is a ratio of the length of Bezier control handle to the length of the corresponding polygon side. Values of 0.2 to 0.3 give normal smooth rounded corners. Most other values (negatives are permitted too) deliver tons of sheer excitement.

Enjoy!

Here is a screenshot of some examples of this new feature.

Beta Testers Needed for Inkscape 0.39

June 20, 2004 - We're closing in on being able to complete Inkscape 0.39 and we need your assistance testing out the new features to help ensure the quality of this release.

Please download one of the nightly compiles to try out on your system, or feel free to compile from CVS if you're comfortable with that.

We would especially like you to test out the new text rendering code, as we've completely switched over to a new library called Pango, and want to make sure it hasn't broken anything. Look at letterspacing, kerning, non-ASCII text, localized font names, Right-to-Left text (Hebrew, Arabic), Bidirectional mixed text (BIDI), contextual letterforms, and vertical text (esp with Chinese and Japanese text.) Please check on as many different operating systems/distros/configurations as possible. Look for anything with text rendering that looks really bad, wrong, and/or ugly.

There are also many other new features and bug fixes that could use your review. Please see the preliminary Inkscape 0.39 ReleaseNotes for details of what's new and worth testing out. Also, see Reporting Bugs for how to report issues.

timetable2svg

June 19, 2004 - Trent Buck shares a C program he wrote for making his school timetable in SVG out of a plain text definition. The code is available at http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~trent/src/mktable/

Inkscape Artists

June 16, 2004 - Check out these examples of work by several Inkscape artists:

• Simon Debelem shows some amazing vector drawings.
• Brisgeek provides a new screenshot of Inkscape in action, along with several of his recent pieces of work.
• David Bellot provides a set of SVG playing cards, available for user under the LGPL.
• Aleksandar Urosevic shows off a number of vectorized logos and cartoon characters
• And many more on our Gallery page. Be sure to add a link to your gallery there too!

A Few Recent Changes

June 16, 2004 - Bulia reports several more changes to the codebase:

• The rotation/skew axis crosshair in selector remains where you put it for as long as you have the object(s) selected; to reset it to the center, deselect and reselect. Also the crosshair is only displayed in rotate mode, not in scale mode - this makes it easier to drag small objects.
• You can reverse the direction of selected path(s) either via Path > Reverse or by pressing 'r' in node tool (useful for markers and combining paths).
• In the Fill and Stroke dialog, Stroke Width can use the % unit for relative stroke width changes. When several objects are selected, using the percent unit changes the stroke width of each one relative to its previous value (unlike absolute units which assign an average width to all objects).

Project Status 2004-06-15

June 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for June 15 is online for review. Lots of progress has been made the past couple weeks!

SVG::Metadata

June 12, 2004 - Bryce has created a new Perl module for parsing and validating metadata in SVG files, called SVG::Metadata. Included is a script svg_validate that analyzes directory trees of SVG files and extract those with valid RDF metadata.

Open Clip Art Library - Release 0.03

June 12, 2004 - The first official release of the Open Clip Art Library has been posted to that project's Downloads page. This release includes SVG as well as PNG versions of each image, with metadata embedded in the SVG and included in a TXT file. The library consists of nineteen UK Road Signs by John Cliff.

Pangoification Patch

June 11, 2004 - Fred has implemented a huge chunk of the libnrtype-to-Pango font renderer conversion, and posted a patch to the Inkscape tracker. While it is not finished, it brings us close to the end of the 0.39 release objectives. Once it has been integrated and finalized, we will feature freeze and begin the release process. It is hoped we may see a June release for 0.39.

Patterns

June 8, 2004 - Several improvements made for Patterns:

• Now there's a Tile command (Alt+T) that creates a rect with pattern fill out of the selection.
• The Fill and Stroke dialog lets you select any of the patterns defined in the document for any object (done by Sim).
• Bulia changed the default back to import bitmaps as <image>s. Those who prefer it to be bitmaps however can change the setting in Preferences (Misc tab). Also you can select any <image> and Tile it for the same result.
• Preferences>Transforms tab: there's now a setting to transform or not transform the pattern fill with the object. When it's off, you transform objects but their pattern stays unmoved; when on, they're transformed as a whole. Works the same in both Optimize and Preserve modes.

Orphan Collection

June 7, 2004 - Mental has implemented an "orphan collection" capability that cleans up leftover gradients/markers/patterns when the objects using them are deleted. This measure is intended to help prevent accumulation of unnecessary 'def' items in SVG documents.

Inkscape Article

June 2, 2004 - Bryce Harrington has written an article about Inkscape published at OSNews. It describes the process of how Fred's Booleans patch was incorporated into the codebase, and provides a lite introduction to the tool. The article has been picked up on FootNotes, Slashdot, xsvg.org, and other sites.

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."

Improved Compilation

April 30, 2004 - Peter Linnell has successfully tested compilation of the codebase with the final release of GCC 3.4. "The code clean-up by mental and others has resulted in much faster compiling and far fewer warnings - even with -Wall switched on. CGG 3.4 seems faster compiling c++ code, but is much more strict about c++ code."

Clones Tamed

April 25, 2004 - Bulia has changed the clones code to allows selecting how a clone reacts when its original is moved. In the Inkscape Preferences dialog, Misc tab, you can choose between:

• Moves in parallel: Clone is translated by the same vector as its original.
• Stays unmoved: Clone preserves its position when its original is moved.
• Moves according to transform: Clone moves according to the value of its transform= attribute. For example, a rotated clone will move in a different direction than its original.

Until now, the last of the three options was the only possible one. Now the default is the "moves in parallel" option. This makes handling clones much more intuitive and convenient in design.

Clone Feature & Menu Reorganization

April 22, 2004 - A new feature called 'clone' has been added to Inkscape by Bulia Byak. This permits creating copies of a shape that mirror the original as it is changed. For example, if the original object is resized, all of the clones will resize identically. This command is available via the 'Alt+D' shortcut. 'Shift+Alt+D' permits unlinking the clone.

A clone is the Inkscape term for the svg:use object. This is similar to a duplicate, except that it's linked back to its original. You can move/scale/rotate/skew/flip each clone independently, but all other aspects (fill, stroke, path, etc) of a clone are dynamically updated from the original if the original is changed. For example, you can draw a petal, create several clones of it, position them into a flower, and node-edit the original petal - all the clone petals will be updated automatically so that the flower remains symmetric at all times.

We've also removed the Dialogs menu, with its contents shifted to other menus; each dialog is now close to other commands that deal with similar aspects of the program.

Introduction to the Inkscape 0.39 Pango Rearchitecting Effort

April 16, 2004 - The principle focus for the 0.39 release is slated to be "Pangoification". While we expect that there's going to be a number of new features, bug fixes, code cleanups, etc. our project's top objective for this release is to replace libnrtype with Pango.

"Introduction to the Inkscape 0.39 Pango Rearchitecting Effort" provides a basic introduction to this work, explaining what we currently have, what Pango does, and the what/why/how of the conversion.

Project Status 2004-04-15

April 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for April 15 is online for review. We've reached number 31 on the SourceForge Most Active list. :-)

Inkscape 0.38.1 Officially Announced and Released

April 11, 2004 - The focus of this release has been our Bug Hunt. Of the 57 open bug reports at the time of our last release, only 12 remain; of the 107 bugs submitted during this bughunt, all but 17 are now closed; the ratio of open to total bugs went down from 33% to 10%. Of the 285 bugs reported since the inception of the project, fewer than 30 remain. In total, over 135 bug reports were closed during the Bug Hunt. Countless other bugs were discovered by the developers and exterminated on the spot without ever going into the tracker. We are especially appreciative of the many users who have helped us identify the various bugs and verify the solutions.

Aside from bugfixes, a good deal of new features and usability enhancements went into this release:

• Text and fonts: full kerning and spacing support, better installed font detection, better alternate font matching, better usability
• Path operations: new commands to cut paths, less distortions, better usability
• Gradients: full support for multi-stop gradients, bugfixes
• Shape tools: polygons, dramatically better usability with the top panel, bugfixes
• Libinkjar: a library for compound document support of packaged SVG and PNG files
• Pure usability: canvas autoscrolling, accelerated scrolling, inversion for visibility, more intuitive cut-and-paste, per-object selection indication, save dialog, new icons
• Paraphernalia: new and expanded tutorials, clipart, translation updates

For more details, see the Release Notes for 0.38. Also see, the Screenshots Section and don't forget to Download your packages (Linux and Windows)

0.38.1

April 10, 2004 - Two serious bugs were introduced into 0.38 in the flurry of last-day activity... luckily, our users reported them at once (thanks!). So we decided to do a bugfix release immediately, before 0.38 really took off. The 0.38.1 release is now the latest and best Inkscape available from Sourceforge. Binary packages are starting to appear, too, including a Windows package.

0.38 Release Tarball Available

April 7, 2004 - The 0.38 release has been finalized and the official tarball is available for packaging. Over 130 bugs have been closed in this release, plus a range of new features. For the details, please see the Release Notes. The tarball and packages can be downloaded from the Download Page.

We will allow a couple days for packagers to create the RPM's, Deb's, and EXE's before we make the formal announcement of this release. If you'd like to assist in packaging, please join the inkscape-devel@ list and let us know.

Goals for 0.38 Release Achieved

April 2, 2004 - We've achieved the goal set forth for the 0.38 release. The ratio of open-to-closed bug reports has been reduced from 33% to our goal of 10%, representing over 160 bugs closed during the 0.38 development cycle. Of the total of 285 bugs registered against Inkscape since the project's inception, fewer than 30 remain.

Project Status 2004-03-15

March 15, 2004 - The bi-monthly status report for March 15 is online for review. Basically, we've just got a couple handfuls of bugs left to fix for the 0.38 release and are really looking forward to seeing it out the door!

Cluster of New Features & Fixes

March 7, 2004 - Although the main priority presently is the bug hunt, various developers have been adding features left and right. I'm going to cluster-list several new features that have been, or are being implemented currently: autoscroll, inverse handles on the selection of objects and nodes, Mental's new abstract syntax tree (AST) code, NJH's text in a shape, addition of new controls in the 2ndary toolbar, further transcending from C to C++, and last but not least, DIVISION and CUT PATH -- two of the most requested features to date.

Coming soon will be the implementation of our extension system. Another, important groundbreaking release will be the extraction and consolidation of the 2D SVG clipart/graphics library which will be hosted at freedesktop.org.

Coordination with Scribus

March 5, 2004 - A little while ago, developers from Inkscape and the Scribus project, an open source desktop publishing tool, took time to have a nice chat-based meeting to discuss several points. The good news is that our teams are working on implementing support for similar colorspaces as well as pushing our development so that SVG between both applications looks the same. We also came to an agreement to support XMP Metadata inside our respective document types. Please see the wiki page to read meeting notes.

Win32 build and Inkview

March 4, 2004 - After considerable tweaking, the Win32 build, which has been broken for a couple of days, is OK again.

In addition, src/Makefile.am has been cleaned up a bit to make it clearer, and to allow Inkscape and Inkview to more cleanly use the same base code.

Kerning, Scale/Rotation, and Auto Scrolling Features

February 23, 2004 - Bulia has added screenshots for two new feature enhancements: The scale/rotation arrows have been modified to use inversion so they're more visible on a cluttered background, and support has been added for letterspacing and kerning, controllable through hot keys.

Bulia has also implemented a usability improvement to to automatically scroll the canvas when an object/node or a rubberband selection is dragged beyond the edge of the canvas.

txt2svg & pod2svg Scripts

February 22, 2004 - Bryce has written a couple scripts for converting text files and manpage input files (POD) into SVG. Ted has added the txt2svg script to Inkscape as a module so that text files can be loaded into Inkscape.

Come Help Out on the BUG HUNT!

February 20, 2004 - With 0.37 happily out the door, we're ready to kick off the event you've all been looking forward to - yup, the BUG HUNT. Over the past few releases we've closed an insane number of bugs. Out of a total of 187 bugs that have been submitted, only 61 remain open. Particularly, we've been very attentive to close any bug that leads to a crash.

No matter how obscure the bug, we don't want Inkscape to crash-ever! But there's a lot of smaller bugs that don't cause crashes, that are no less important to get fixed. Our goal for this release is to close a lot of bugs.

Come Help Out on the BUG HUNT!

February 20, 2004 - With 0.37 happily out the door, we're ready to kick off the event you've all been looking forward to - yup, the BUG HUNT. Over the past few releases we've closed an insane number of bugs. Out of a total of 187 bugs that have been submitted, only 61 remain open. Particularly, we've been very attentive to close any bug that leads to a crash.

No matter how obscure the bug, we don't want Inkscape to crash-ever! But there's a lot of smaller bugs that don't cause crashes, that are no less important to get fixed. Our goal for this release is to close a lot of bugs.

Inkscape 0.37 Official Release

February 15, 2004 - The 0.37 release of Inkscape is now available for download and use.

• New functionality: boolean operations on paths, dynamic and linked offsets, path outlining, standalone SVG viewer, drag-and-drop, letter-spacing.
• More convenient editing: top panel, new color widget, 256x zoom, snapped rotation with Ctrl everywhere, selecting within groups, lots of new shortcuts, and more.
• Interface and usability: saving view with the document, zoom history, fullscreen, hide/show all open dialogs, smarter export dialog, helpful statusbar, and much more.
• Inkscape internals: built with C++, brand new classes for points, rects, matrices, and URIs, massive cleanups.
• Last but not least: tutorial for new users, keys and mouse reference, Inkscape User mailing list, hassle-free Windows builds.

For more info about this release please see the 0.37 Release Notes.

Feb 15 Status Report

February 15, 2004 - The status reports and metrics for Feb 15 are now available.

Inkscape Tutorials

February 14, 2004 - Those of you who have already installed 0.37 will notice a nice new feature in the form of a tutorial created using Inkscape itself! This provides an interactive walk-thru of a range of Inkscape's basic features.

Daniel Taylor has also created a tutorial for creating icons in Inkscape. This includes an introductionary explanation of gradient editing and node editing, too.

Calling Clipartists

February 14, 2004 - Myrkraverk and Simarilius have kicked off the Inkscape clipart effort by each contributing some SVG graphics under the Public Domain for use by other Inkscape users. These are available in Inkscape CVS currently and will be distributed in the 0.38 release.

We've also set up a Wiki page for info on ClipartContribution. If you'd like to help create clipart collections please visit that page regularly, and join in the discussion on the Inkscape-user@ mailing list!