More CAD applications support SVG

Would you believe it if we told you we love when developers add support for SVG in their applications? That really makes it easier to do various touch-ups of illustrations in Inkscape. For technical illustrations that often come in various DXF flavours it used to be a bit of a problem. Even though thanks to Alvin Penner and Christian Mayer we do have a working DXF importer, it is always desirable to work with SVG from the very beginning.

While use of SVG in GIS has been a usual practice for quite a while now, CAD industry is only starting to discover this standard. Last year newly released DraftSight by Dassault Systems featured SVG exporting. Later same year, in October 2010, it was joined by gCAD3D which also started supporting SVG exporting. And now we are glad to tell you that Bricsys have just released Bricscad v11.3.15 that features SVG exporting as well.

None of these tools is free software (as opposed to freeware), however they are recognized by the industry to a different extent, hence interoperability is a little less of an issue now. If you wish to improve interoperability between free CAD systems and Inkscape, we encourage you to explore LibreCAD and PythonCAD and consider contributing to them. Alternatively you could work on improving our DXF importer and exporter.

Work on type design features is resumed, nightly builds PPA is available

Two years ago Felipe Sanches did a Google Summer of Code project focused on support for SVG Fonts. He is now back adding more features. The outcome goes two ways so far.

First, Felipe started with several new extensions that assist in various stages of designing fonts: creating a template from user defined values, such as em size, X-height, ascenders and descenders; creating layers for glyphs and so on. This also led to implementation of a new feature: text labels for guides. You can now easily attach a text label to a guide via guide settings dialog. This might come in handy even in graphic design, if you work on a complex project with lots of guides in magnified view.

The other big feature is a whole new tool for measuring lengths and angles. The tool was added just last weekend, so it's in its infancy, but even so it's very promising, and Felipe has been actively improving it since then. There is a short demo available at YouTube, please have a look.

Last but not least we are glad to announce availability of two new PPAs for Ubuntu users: stable contains current stable release of Inkscape, and trunk contains nightly builds for those who are eager to try the latest and greatest of Inkscape.

Inkscape workshop rescheduled

Donna reports that the Inkscape workshop planned for June 14 in Carlton, Australia, is rescheduled to run later his year. We will reannounce it closer to the new date.