2018 Boston Inkscape Hackfest
22. května 2018 9:12
We're back from Boston! Thanks to the generous donations of our community and the hospitality of Red Hat, project contributors from around the world were able to meet to make Inkscape better and more accessible. Attendees included Bryce Harrington, Martin Owens, Tavmjong Bah, Alex Valavanis, Máirín Duffy, Felipe Sanches, Ryan Gorley, Matthias Clasen, Valessio Brito, and David Cantrell.
Areas of focus included:
- Variable Fonts. This exciting new font format allows for unparalleled control over the appearance of fonts. Enabling variable fonts to be used and customized within Inkscape was a large part of the work of Tavmjong and Felipe.
- Migration to GTK+ 3. GTK+ governs much of what can (and cannot) be done with the user interface of Inkscape. Replacing the current GTK+ 2 code with GTK+ 3 is a massive task, with significant promises. This was the focus of Alex, with the generous help of Red Hat employee and GTK+ maintainer Matthias.
- Refactoring of Extensions. Extensions are an important and accessible way for developers to contribute to Inkscape. Housekeeping and refactoring of extensions allows them to continue to serve their many uses as Inkscape improves. Work in this area was a focus of Martin Owens.
- Website Revisions. Recent efforts have been made through the Inkscape Vectors to help more people recognize the creative opportunities available to them through Inkscape. Ryan, the organizer of this effort, worked with Máirín, Felipe, and Martin to explore how the website could serve this cause by telling the story of the project and its users better.
- Project Infrastructure. Inkscape cannot serve its users if the website is inaccessible or contributions cannot be made. For this reason, Bryce Harrington and Martin Owens dedicated a good share of time addressing core infrastructural needs for the project. Many of these improvements are made possible because of the generous donation of computing resources by CloudScale.ch.
- 1.0 and Beyond. Planning and prioritization went into the forthcoming 1.0 release, but the vision of the future didn't stop there. Early work has already started on exciting new features such as multi-page support, laying the groundwork for future development during and between Hackfests.
Much more could be said about the work performed during these days. Fortunately, this article is just the beginning. Get a closeup view of the event by watching the three video recordings taken during the event:
- Day 1 Summary - https://youtu.be/4stNumKreTc
- Day 4 Summary - https://youtu.be/IqQI2Y1PR38
- Day 5 Roadmap Discussion - https://youtu.be/Gl2gvvBNJ10
Our gratitude goes out to those who made the effort and sacrifices to attend, to Chris Rogers for designing the event sticker, to Red Hat for hosting the event, and to the incredibly generous community of users who funded this event. Because of you all Inkscape will continue to enrich the lives of artists, designers, makers, and others around the world.
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