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

14. Juni 2011 19:16

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.