The Inkscape Community Announces 0.48.4 Release

Happy Holidays! We have a gift for everyone!

After quite a while since our last announced release (sorry about that, there was a lot of confusion surrounding it, and I fully accept responsibility for that), the Inkscape Community is proud to announce that Inkscape 0.48.4 is out. This is our fourth bug fix release for 0.48 and since we won't count the last one, it contains ~120 bug fixes to improve security, stability, and functionality on all platforms since 0.48.2. Check out the 0.48.3 release notes & 0.48.4 release notes for brief summaries of some of the fixes and improvements, or the 0.48.3 milestone page & 0.48.4 milestone page for the full lists of closed bug reports, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows or Linux.

At this time we also need to apologize that we are not officially packaging builds for OSX. This was the primary reason that 0.48.3 never saw an official announcement. Please know that we are still actively working on making the experience on the OSX platform better and are working towards native builds (no promises of if/when any will be available.) As a side note, MacPorts does already have 0.48.4 available, so a portion of our Mac users are not left out in the cold.

At this point it is very possible that we will have one more point release for 0.48 as we have a handful of bugs blocking us from releasing 0.49 (it will be well worth the wait!). Stay tuned for more news!

Inkscape Board elections, trademark update

A while ago the community of Inkscape developers voted for new members to enter Inkscape board — a committee that makes the most important decisions in the life of the project.

As the result, Johan Engelen and Tavmjong Bah have joined Bryce Harrington, Ted Gould, mental, Jon Cruz, and Josh Andler. Aaron Spike decided to resign as a board member due to his current inactivity in the project.

Aaron is one of the earliest contributors in the project, He's also the person who personally promoted the extensions system which many users now rely on for sophisticated modification of paths, creating rich content powered presentations, personal manufacturing and so on. We thank Aaron for being an invaluable asset in the project and a great friend, and we are not saying goodbye!

Both Johan and Tavmjong are an important part of our community. Johan is the person behind live path effects, axonometric grid, and other features. Tavmjong wrote the first complete guide to Inkscape and later became developer who seriously improved the Text tool. Tavmjong is also our representative in the W3C SVG working group.

On top of that there is some progress with the trademark. We didn't talk much about it publicly, but we thought it wouldn't be fair not to share this, after all.

In 2009 we asked Software Freedom Conservancy to file a request for us to register a trademark for Inkscape. The request was granted later same year. We are now working our way towards having a clear trademark policy that will be quite liberal. It won't impose any restrictions whatsoever on fair use of the trademark. You only need not to pretend to be us.

Further information will be posted once available.

Google Summer of Code 2012 Results

The Google Summer of Code 2012 program is now officially over. We’ve managed to have 3 out of 5 projects successfully completed by our awesome students.

• Jan Pulmann created Python bindings for lib2Geom, the computational geometry library we use in Inkscape.
• Samuel Chase made a lot of internal improvements to handling guides and to the coordinates system, making it easier to switch away from Cartesian system.
• Veronika Irvine created a new tool for on-canvas tessellation.

The code for 2geom library was written in the main development branch and hence is immediately available to all 3rd party developers. The changes to Inkscape have to be finalized before they can enter the main source code repository. Currently we don’t expect both of the new Inkscape features to be used in upcoming v0.49.

Inkscape at Google Summer of Code 2012

We are happy to announce that five Inkscape students will be participating in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program.

• Jan Pulmann will create Python bindings for lib2Geom, the computational geometry library we use.
• Samuel Chase will improve guides management in Inkscape.
• Veronika Irvine will create a new tool for on-canvas tessellation.
• Eugene Lezhnin will improve the way Inkscape works with text and implement some much desired features such as indentation and underlines.
• Cheng Zhang will convert more code to C++. namely SP Event Context.

We wish our students happy coding!

What's new in the development version in February

As you very well remember, we intended v0.49 to be a release that fixes all sorts of inconsistencies. Around January we got a new contributor, John Smith, who already has done quite a lot of work in that direction. For instance, he implemented saving the state of dockable dialogs across sessions, so that you don't have to start and rearrange them every time. He also made more dialogs dockable, like Export Bitmap, Text and Font and Spell Check, and rearranged buttons in two dialogs: the Layers dialog and the Path Effects dialog.

Inkscape also got a new dialog for importing for Open Clip Art Library (works on Linux only for now) from Andrew Higginson. Meanwhile Alex Valavanis and Kris De Gussem are continuing their work on clean-ups, and Johan Engelen is back to working on the Powerstroke LPE that allows controlling width of stroke along a path.

While at that, we'd like to remind you of an e-book in Spanish by Joaclint Istgud that explains basics of Inkscape as well as some advanced features via tutorials on creating some well-known logos..

Recent changes in the unstable version and a new book

We have to admit that out main communication channel has silently moved from the homepage to the Google+ page where we post news on development, co-projects, unstable builds, art created with Inkscape and so on. We also reclaimed the @inkscape account on Twitter, but, unlike G+, we are not making a full use of it yet.

In the past few months we've seen a slight increase in development activity. There have been too numerous changes to mention, but here is what comes to mind in the first place.

Diederik van Lierop implemented tangent and perpendicular snapping to paths which works for some tools as well as guides.

More work was done on cleaning up and porting UI code to GTKMM. That means, for instance, that the Object Properties dialog is finally dockable.

Tavmjong Bah continued his experiments with mesh gradients which are expected to be part of SVG2. You can read in more details about that on his blog. The feature is only present in a separate branch, of which there are no builds yet. Currently it's very unstable and we are not sure yet if it's going to make it to v0.49.

Meanwhile Packt Publishing released “Inkscape Starter” by Bethany Hiitola — a new book that introduces newbies to Inkscape. The book is a very short introduction and is available for Kindle.