New Features since our last release

Normally we tend to post news items regarding what new features are showing up in our repository. As people can see, news has been a bit thin for the past couple months... but don't let this fool you. ;)

New Features or improvements added after 0.43 was released:

Outline mode - an oft-requested feature that allows toggling an alternate view mode to see only the outlines of all shapes. That would be as opposed to normal view mode which shows fills an strokes.

Selected style indicator - this indicator is a bit more powerful than implementations you'll see in other software. Inkscape's can give insight into more than color. It can tell you if it's a pattern, radial or linear gradient, if there are multiple styles selected, it can mix multiple flat fill colors, all opacity controls are right there, and much more.

Remove overlaps - a new function in the Align & Distribute dialog to do just what it says, remove overlaps from selected objects.

Snapping improvements - snapping is now more advanced and will allow snapping to paths and nodes. Additionally objects will now only snap to visible guidelines.

Connector improvements - you can now set the spacing value for objects that you designate to be avoided.

Swatches are being moved into the main interface.

Improvements to the Transformation dialog.

Retention of transformation rotation centers between sessions.

Rendering speed improvements, and too much more for us to continue listing.

To see the full list of changes since 0.43, please visit the following link in our wiki: http://wiki.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes

Switch from CVS to SVN

Bryce Harrington writes:

"For those of you not on inkscape-devel, note that we've just this morning switched over from using CVS to using Subversion (SVN) for source code management.

For those of you not already highly familiar with CVS, you should probably find Subversion a tad easier.

On the other hand, if you're familiar with CVS already but haven't tried Subversion before, you'll have a bit of retraining to do, but subversion is similar enough to cvs that you shouldn't find it to be too difficult.

Whichever case, you'll see several benefits to this change. With CVS, anonymous CVS checkouts were always delayed by an hour or more, but subversion will allow completely synchronized access. I suspect performance will also be a LOT better than with CVS. The web viewer is also a bit better.

There is a potential cost to this change, beyond the work we each have to do to adapt. This is an experimental service from SF, which means we can expect there may be some occasional outages or other temporary issues; SourceForge promises to be responsive to reports of issues, so please report issues to them. However, the value of switching to subversion is felt to be well worth this risk, so hopefully things will go smoothly and we all will benefit from the new capabilities."

One other piece of information; the SVN Access info SourceForge provides for our repository (if you follow the SVN link in our menu) is incorrect. The correct location is:
https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk

Happy New Year!

All of the Inkscape developers want to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Inkscape 0.44 is currently under development and will include many great new features, enhancements, and bugfixes.

Regarding development, we could always use more developers or other contributors. Whether you can program or not, if you would like to contribute to the project, we could use your help.

SVG Filters are one of the most requested features that we receive, unfortunately, implementing them is more than a one person job. If you are interested in assisting with this please read this message from our mailing list.