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.