Inkscape at the Libre Graphics Meeting
12 April 2014, 2.57
The Inkscape team at LGM was comprised of nine people: Tavmjong Bah, Joakim Verona, Krzysztof Kosiński, Gémy Cédric, Sirko Kemter, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Ryan Lerch, The Adib and Martin Owens. The good attendance of Inkscape people was in part due to the generous contribution by the Inkscape Project helping pay for members to attend the event.
The Inkscape Meeting
A meeting was held on the third day, in the morning and directly after vital consumption of coffee and tea. A medium sized university meeting room with white tables and chairs in a large square configuration was organised in advanced to host the meeting.
Tavmjong chaired the meeting and a rough agenda was put together about different areas of the project to talk about. These are the highlights
- Efforts will be made to organise Inkscape's diverse resources for development and user documentation into fewer locations to reduce fragmentation.
- More frequent release schedules with predictable cycles are needed to keep users up to date with new features in Inkscape.
- Better web technologies to publish content and translate it are needed and will be developed into the new django website.
- Stimulation by funding developers was considered and the project is looking into ways of providing ways to contribute through subscriptions and/or single payment project fundraising.
- A library of extensions and other add-ons for Inkscape is required and easy ways to install them. This to help extension writers publish their work more quickly.
- Many other technical topics were covered which can be followed on the Inkscape Mailing list report.
Other Items
On Wednesday Tavmjong gave a talk about the process of developing SVG2 with the W3C working group and the new features in SVG2 we can expect. As well as some informal questions during the week from Inkscape developers interested in the new capabilities of SVG2.
On Thursday Martin ran a small testing group of users to list some of their highest rated concerns for Inkscape and especially issues with design. Some of these issues were then patched ready for the next release.
On Friday, Ryan gave an in depth tutorial of advanced uses of live path effects to produce some stunning artistic results with Inkscape. These should appear as videos on the tutorials page.
Many demonstrations of Inkscape's existing capabilities were done in the hacking space throughout the week.
