Google Summer of Code 2011 is over

Three of four Inkscape students passed the final evaluation in the Google Summer of Code 2011 program. We already reported before that the project by Krzysztof Kosiński is already used in main development branch, so indeed his new code to speed up rendering will be available in 0.49.

The next project was about improving CSS support. The work was done by Abhishek Sharma who implemented checks for incorrect and not useful style attributes, removing those from SVG output. Our sample gallardo.svg file can be reduced in size by about 20% when using his code. Abhishek also became maintainer of libcroco and pushed some of our fixes to the upstream code. The project is ready for inclusion into 0.49.

The last successful project was to improve the situation with regards to JavaScript. The project was done by Fernando Lucches and his mentor Felipe Sanches. They implemented UI for dealing with embedded and internal scripts, adding events to objects, some other smaller features. The project looks quite complete. We'll see if it's ready for 0.49.

The project that unfortunately has failed was to implement KML to SVG converter. Even though it's not complete, there's quite a bit of useful code in gsoc_2011_kml branch, so we encourage those interested among you to study and finish it. The converter relies on XSLT.

The Inkscape Community Announces 0.48.2 Release

After 5 months of bug fixing and vacation delays out of our control, the Inkscape Community is proud to announce that Inkscape 0.48.2 is out. This is our second bug fix release for 0.48 and it contains over 50 bug fixes to improve stability and functionality on all platforms. Check out the release notes for a summary of some of the fixes and improvements, the milestone page for the full list of closed bug reports, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

We are also determined to make at least one more point release before it's time for 0.49. Stay tuned for more news!