Full-day workshop on Inkscape and GIMP in Carlton in a month

The rescheduled workshop by Donna Benjamin that introduces Inkscape and GIMP to beginners is taking place on September 14 in Statewide Resources Centre, Carlton, Australia. If you know people in the area who'd love to dive into vector graphics and Inkscape, but need a guided introduction to get going, let them know about the event. You can read more about the workshop here.

Synfig Studio compatibility is being taken care of

One of the recent releases of Synfig Studio, an excellent free 2D animation editor, already featured a basic SVG importer. Since then the Synfig's team has changed their mind, and now Nikita Kitaev is working on SIF exporter for Inkscape that will functionally replace the SVG importer in Synfig. If you are interested, fetch the extension from Github and tell Synfig developers how it worked for you.

Performance gets a boost

In July our GSoC student and active contributor Krzysztof Kosiński made a significant step in making Inkscape more snappy for complex work. He merged code from his past and present Google Summer of Code projects.

The code from the 2010 project implements Cairo based rendering for shapes which makes rendering of flat and gradient fills up to twice as fast, and the second part of that project is threaded rendering of SVG Filters. The code from his 2011 project adds some smart caching to Inkscape. Now actual document's content is rendered separately from things like mouse pointer and selection cue.

We expect this work to be part of v0.49 which focuses on fixes and improvements rather than new features, but right now we are planning to roll out v0.48.2 — another bugfix release.