Inkscape Summit in Nuremberg
1 ខែ មិថុនា ឆ្នាំ 2025, 19:34
From May 24-28, 2025, we hosted an Inkscape Summit in Nuremberg, Germany, just before this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. With 14 on-site participants, 2 remote participants and 3 external guests (Cedric, Elisa and Tiar), this was Inkscape's largest physical event yet, and a good sign the project is healthy and growing.
While we also got a fair amount of code done - 33 merge requests were opened over the course of the summit by its participants - the focus of this summit was on strategic planning and team discussions.
On Sunday, the team visited the ZAM Erlangen makerspace to observe and try out what Inkscape is used for in the wild. We had fun stitching logos, lasercutting coasters, or drawing on eggs with an EggBot.
Inkscape team members observe an egg being decorated by an Inkscape-operated EggBot at ZAM Erlangen
This event was made possible with community funds, i.e. your donations. Thanks for your generous support!
Below is an account of the meetings we had during the summit. Many of those pointed to strategic improvements in the project's direction. Help with these is greatly appreciated - if you want to contribute towards any of them, do get in touch!
Future of Live Path Effects
Marc proposed a redesign of the Live Path Effect system. In short, the proposal aims to enable procedural, non-destructive effects in Inkscape, with inspiration drawn from Blender's geometry nodes and Graphite. This would enable many workflows which now need either scripting (extensions) or are impossible to achieve, and make the entire path effect system much more robust.
The custom additions to the SVG file format would be designed and specified, code sprawl of LPE-related code reduced and test coverage increased.
We agreed on a set of changes for a prototype of this system.
UX Quality Initiative
Henrique presented his UX research; in dozens of hours of work, he had categorized all UX / UI related issues in our bugtrackers and localized areas most in need of attention.
During the summit, a team consisting of ltlnx, Yoti, Adam and Henrique condensed it into a proposal to hire a UX designer and a developer as contractors; after a period of UX studies, the designer would come up with actionable changes and the developer would implement them. This proposal will be iterated upon and then be submitted for a vote to the Project Leadership Committee (PLC).
Roadmap / Project Priorities Working Group
Martin presented a proposal to form a Roadmap Working Group. This group would comprise of representatives from all of the project's subgroup, and its task would be to maintain a list of priority areas in the project (without explicitly promising them to users).
This list would then inform decisions such as hiring and project selection for Google Summer of Code or Outreachy; it could also serve as guidance for contributors looking for inspiration.
While the team maintained that we are in no position to attach dates to the roadmap, such a working group would be useful as a forum, and would tie in well with other initiatives, such as the Grants program.
Martin plans to finish up the proposal and submit it for a vote soon.
Quality assurance
Despite a small number of automated tests that check against regressions in the Inkscape code, most of our test coverage is proved by manual user testing.
Rafał presented his recent work towards improving the quality and stability of Inkscape by providing a good infrastructure for unit testing, in particular by providing a solid CMake infrastructure, mock objects and example unit tests.
Good unit testing will become a focus in our code review process.
Steam Release
Our guest Tiar from the Krita team presented to us how Krita successfully released on Steam, and how they generate a significant amount of revenue from this channel. She showed us the most important rules for a successful Steam launch: from number of Wishlist items to Daily Deal, from discounts to the importance of good screenshots.
The Inkscape PLC had recently decided to enable a Steam release; the necessary paperwork is currently under review by the SFC, our fiscal host. Vaibhav will coordinate the process of releasing on Steam.
Developer Documentation
Our developer documentation is currently spread around in many places: some is on the main website (with outdated translations), some is in the Wiki, some in the git repository.
We formulated our requirements for the documentation and decided to migrate it in the main repository (except for short-lived or work-in-progress). Outdated Wiki information will be removed. Max already made progress towards this by moving our build instructions to git.
Selected parts of the documentation may be auto-deployed to inkscape.org. Unfortunately we had to disable indexing of most of our website because AI crawlers quickly overwhelm it otherwise, so the last word on documentation remains to be spoken.
Node tool improvements
Rafał presented his plans to refactor the node tool with a number of architectural changes of the backend. These changes will not be visible to uses at first except for some outstanding bugfixes, but will enable better control of path-like objects in the long run - from his work on manipulating arc segments to control points for B-Splines, Spiro curves or κ-curves.
Extension packaging
Triggered by Mario's experience of maintaining a large set of extensions (MightyScape), we discussed how to make the process of packaging, submitting, reviewing and presenting an extension more efficient and transparent. Drawing inspirations from projects like OctoPrint and Typst, which have a healthy extension ecosystem around them, we came up with a process that now needs to be discussed with other extension stakeholders and finally implemented.
Finishing up the GTK4 migration & releasing Inkscape 1.5
In the last year, Inkscape has successfully migrated to GTK4, and the GTK4 version (master) has become the basis for all other development work.
Nevertheless, there is a number of outstanding problems, especially on Windows and macOS. Many of those issues require fixes in the upstream GTK framework.
During the summit, Jonathan, PBS and ltlnx came up with a proposal to hire contractors - both from within the Inkscape project and outside GTK experts - to finish up the work, targeting a 1.5 release early next year.
The 2025 Inkscape Summit Nuremberg particpants in front of the venue (Youth Hostel Nuremberg, Germany).
After the summit
Most of the team will stay for the Libre Graphics Meeting, held directly afterwards in Nuremberg, which even features two Inkscape-related presentations: Henrique will again present his UX initiative, and Daniel Schneider will give a talk about InkStitch. Looking forward to the next Inkscape meeting!
Adam, Henrique, Ishaan, Jonathan, KrIr17, ltlnx, Marc, Mario, Martin, Max, Mike, PBS, Rafał, Tavmjong, Vaibhav and Yoti
