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.