Inkscape Version 0.92 is Released!
4 Jan. 2017, 0.50
The Inkscape project announces a new version 0.92 of its popular vector drawing software. New features include mesh gradients, improved SVG2 and CSS3 support, new path effects, interactive smoothing for the pencil tool, a new Object dialog for directly managing all drawing elements, and much more. Infrastructural changes are also under way, including a switch to CMake from the venerable Autotools build system.
Exciting New Features
Mesh gradients are a powerful tool enabling artists to more easily create photo-realistic drawings - a feature we would love to see made part of the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard; if you find this feature as cool as we do, please request that your favorite web browser adopts support for it too!
Inkscape works closely with the SVG standards committee, and thanks to our many generous donors, the Inkscape project sponsors an engineering representative to attend SVG working group meetings over the past few years. A welcome outcome of this participation is the improvement and addition of over a dozen SVG and CSS properties.
Live Path Effects are proving to be a vibrant ecosystem in the Inkscape project, and many innovative new ideas have been percolating over the past couple years since our last release. Spiro Live, BSpline, and Roughen essentially provide new drawing modes. The Simplify LPE cleans up vector elements non-destructively by smoothing paths, shapes, groups, clips, and masks. Perspective/Envelope and Lattice Deformation 2 enable artists to interactively deform/transform drawing elements. Other new features enable interactive mirroring, interactive rotation of copies along an arc or circle, and dozens of other additions and enhancements.
The above barely scratches the surface of all the new stuff included in this release. For the full story, including examples, screenshots, and animations, please see our detailed Release Notes. For a short tour, watch the video for 0.92.
Important Changes
All software must evolve with the times, and Inkscape is no different. To maintain consistency with the CSS standard, Inkscape's default resolution has changed from 90dpi to 96dpi. Inkscape will detect files created with previous versions and offer to convert them. A number of infrastructural changes are in process to help Inkscape keep up with progress. For 0.92, we are changing to the CMake build system, which builds faster and is easier for developers to work with. (Future infrastructure changes include switching from bzr to git, shifting from Gtk2 to Gtk3, and moving to the C++11 standard.)
Get the Latest Version
If you're on Linux, you'll soon be able to install Inkscape 0.92 from your distribution via normal methods. We also intend to publish a distribution-independent snap file for Inkscape 0.92.
If you're on Windows, we have a set of packages that we hope will let you maximize performance on your platform.
For Mac OS X, no new packages are available -- our old (X11/XQuartz) packaging was long overdue to be updated to current standards and is no longer being maintained.
If you wish to compile Inkscape yourself, then of course, the Inkscape source code is also available from our website.
Contribute
The Inkscape Project thrives due to your support. We are a volunteer-driven community built from thousands of contributions of time, skill, and funds, to create a powerful open source tool that is made available for free to everyone in the world.
We invite you to join our community and participate in helping advance Inkscape towards new objectives.
Come help us chart out the new directions that Inkscape needs to take!
Inkscape is created by the community for the community.
Your donations also help further Inkscape's mission. You can donate to Inkscape's general fund, or target your donation to support our SVG Standards work or Hackfests.
