Inkscape Summit Frankfurt 2025

5. Februar 2025 13:14

For the past few days, 7 Inkscape Members met up in Frankfurt, Germany to collaborate on various projects and get to know each other.

We were especially delighted to have two InkStitch maintainers, a major downstream project of Inkscape, join us. This way, we got to learn about the struggles and worries of projects using Inkscape better, and even built a new capability for extensions to interact with Inkscape during the event.

Marc, our release manager, cleared out our merge request backlog, reviewing and merging various contributions. He also set up a new web-based translation service, so that translators don't have to learn how to use git, and we hopefully see better Inkscape translations in many languages. He also collaborated with Vaibhav on getting the handles behave well when editing Text to Path.

Jonathan, extensions maintainer, enabled Inkscape to tell extensions in real-time about changes in the document (merge request), and even update the document in return. The new system works on all major platforms. This feature was requested by our InkStitch friends, who will use it to build a preview of the stitch pattern while the user is working on the document. Variations of this feature were often requested by extension authors, so we're excited what the community will use it for!

Tav was working on delivering color font support, and helped Martin and Vaibhav with a wide variety of text-related problems.

Martin wasn't able to attend in-person, but did join via Video Chat to work on PDF support and help answering questions with other people in Frankfurt. He got up at 3am his time to attend!

Ravi is one of our GSoC students from 2024, and we're happy that we got to know him better & to integrate him into our team! He is still working on the node-based filter editor, his GSoC project (merge request), and is hopefully finished soon.

Vaibhav also is a former GSoC student, but is contributing regularly since. He is currently working on improving Text on Path (merge request). Thanks to his work during the Summit, Text on Path now loops around on closed paths (an SVG2 feature)  and has correct and intuitive handle movement.

Kaalleen, InkStitch maintainer, helped us understand their packaging process and helped shape the direction of development on the extensions environment. Apart from that, she worked on various InkStitch issues, including support for long-arm quilting machines. Also, she gifted all of us beautiful bags with the 1.4 About screen stitched on (she also has a tutorial for this on the InkStitch website).

The beautiful embroidery Kaalleen gifted to the other participants (from the InkStitch Website).

After 3 days full of coding and enlightening conversations, we now take home with new ideas in our luggage, and look forward to the next meeting - May 2025 in Nuremberg, just before LGM.

The 7 participants of the Frankfurt Summit.