December 2003 - Inkscape Announcements

[Inkscape] Additional binary packages for Inkscape 0.36
by Bryce Harrington 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

A number of people have submitted packages of the 0.36 release for various platforms, including Fedora, RedHat9, SuSE, and more. Most are compiled for x86, but an Athelon-compiled Fedora rpm and a Sparc debian package is available. A Windows version is also available. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438 Bryce

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[Inkscape] Inkscape Status 2003-12-15
by Bryce Harrington 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

Project Status Monday, December 15, 2003 We have achieved the 0.36 release. A handful of users have expressed positive feedback on the work done. Judging from the quantity of downloads, we're serving a userbase on the order of 1500 people. We've unfrozen the codebase and already laid into some impressive new features for the next release including support for boolean operations, a feature long requested by users. A new color picker system is also in place. Also, as planned, we've committed to C++ by changing the build system to use g++ instead of gcc and by renaming all of the files from .c to .cpp. Statistics Nov 02 Nov 15 Nov 29 Dec 15 ========== ====== ====== ====== ====== Lifetime Rank on SourceForge: 6103 4391 3676 2452 (56.2%) (68.5%) (73.6%) (82.4%) Max Week's Rank on SourceForge: 6023 62 37 27 (56.8%) (99.6%) (99.8%) (99.8%) Total SF Page Views 200 * 50,000 86,000 Total SF Downloads 0 * 1700 3640 Total Freshmeat URL Hits 0 746 1121 2237 Total Freshmeat Subscriptions 0 16 19 28 Lines of Code in src/: 115,754 115,901 116,970 132,134 Code lines 100,549 Comment line 11,591 Blank 20,559 Lines of Docs in doc/: 1,135 1,135 2,100 2,225 Lines of content in website: 74 1,173 1,624 2,090 Size of the Inkscape wiki: 0 3,700 5,737 7,385 Hours since last ChangeLog mod: 90 6 2 21 Bugs open/total: 0/0 9/15 40/51 67/111 Features open/total: 0/0 18/18 23/24 40/45 Patches open/total: 0/0 1/ 6 5/20 6/25 CVS Commits (as per inkscape-cvs): 148 481 963 * Inkscape-devel membership: 4 49 61 64 Inkscape-announce membership: 0 9 14 16 * - Statistics unavailable

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[Inkscape] Inkscape 0.36 - "See, even a 5 year old can use it."
by Ted Gould 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

Inkscape Release 0.36 "See, even a 5 year old can use it." This is the second release of Inkscape and there has been a tremendous amount of work that has been done on the project. Many patches and ideas that had been 'waiting in the wings' have now been applied to the codebase. Now Inkscape is easier to use for users as the interface is less complex and more intuitive. In Brief: * Main GUI has been significantly redesigned * Usability of dialogs, keyboard shortcuts, and mouse is improved * Preliminary support for layer grouping, path markers, and extension modules * Much more user and developer documentation - doxygen, docbook, man page, wiki, diagrams, & more * Many bugfixes, minor enhancements, and usability tweaks What is Inkscape? The Inkscape application is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, node editing, svg-to-png export, grouping, and more. Enhancements * CSDI interface has been traded for an SDI one: Now each document window has its own menubar at the top and its own detachable toolbar at left. This increases Inkscape's compliance with the GNOME HIG and decreases confusion for the majority of users. * A secondary (horizontal) detachable toolbar is introduced for operations and controls specific to each tool. At the moment this toolbar is mostly empty but we have big plans on how to fill it with all kinds of useful things for convenient access. * Dialogs now always stay on top of the document window (even if you have several document windows open). They are easy to open or activate (using shortcuts displayed in their title bars), close (Ctrl+w), or defocus (Esc). Moreover, dialogs remember their size and position across sessions. * New commands: Paste style (apply the style of the copied object to the current selection), Fit page width to window. * Introductory layers support. There is now code in the code base to start handling layers. GUI elements to follow - watch this slot! * Arrowhead and marker support. A much requested feature which increases the usability of Inkscape for everyday tasks. * Using mouse is now less painful thanks to the increased mouse tolerance (you don't have to be exactly over an object to grab it) and introduced drag tolerance (very small drags, which are usually accidental, are now considered clicks and do not move anything). * Undo is now unlimited (that is, limited only by available memory). * Lots of new keyboard shortcuts. Notably, Esc now consistently deselects, cancels selection, and cancels drag or transformation of any kind (so far only in selector and node edit). Arrows, Ctrl+a, and Tab/Shift?+Tab act on nodes in node editor exactly as they do on objects in Selector. There are at least two ways to activate each tool, one with an F<number> key (Corel Draw style) and another with a single letter (Adobe Illustrator style). Space toggles between Selector and your current tool. Dialogs are consistently activated by Ctrl-Shift-<letter> combinations. * There's no lower limit on the size of exported PNGs anymore. You can use Inkscape to create even 1x1 PNG images. * The standard xml:space attribute on text objects is now honored. For newly created objects it has the value of "preserve" which means all whitespace characters are shown exactly as typed. * Enhanced modules system. Now modules can be defined using external files so no C coding is required for an extension. * Mac OS X and Windows build fixes. These builds are getting more mature and working better. * Increased code documentation. Come check it out, the Inkscape codebase is getting more readable every day. * Numerous bugfixes and usability improvements. Infrastructure * The web presence of Inkscape is dramatically different than with the last release. If you haven't already, you should check it out at: http://www.inkscape.org. * Many people have been contributing to the Wiki, which has a sizable amount of content today: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl. * Doxygen documentation builds are now happening on HEAD nightly: http://www.inkscape.org/doc/doxygen/html. * CVS snapshots are taken on a nightly basis: http://www.inkscape.org/cvs-snap/. What lies ahead * More useful stuff in the secondary toolbar - all kinds of controls that are relevant to a specific tool will be put into that toolbar for convenient access. * A new, extensive Preferences dialog. Lots of settings that are now hard-coded will be settable. * Dialogs reorganization: less dialogs overall, with their functions more logically grouped. * More precision, maximum zoom of 256x or more. * Complete keyboard control for node editing, including editing control handles of a node. * GUI selection of arrowheads for path start/end/mid markers. Known problems * At least on KDE, floating dialogs may not stay on top when you switch between maximized document windows. You may need to click on the window's title bar to bring the dialogs to top. (See src/dialogs/dialog.events for a possible workaround and comments, feel free to suggest a patch.) * Also on KDE, detached toolbars do not stay on top. (This is a KDE problem.) * On Windows, dialogs do not stay on top of document in this version. * Some keyboard shortcuts (e.g. arrow keys for nudge) do not work if your mouse pointer is not over the document window. * When using Copy/Paste? (or Paste style) commands, you cannot copy gradients or arrowheads from one document to another. Workaround: use the XML editor to copy the content of the <defs> element from the source document to the target document, then copying gradients and arrowheads will work. * Pasting text directly into a text object on the canvas does not work. Workaround: open the Text dialog (Ctrl+Shift+t) and paste into the text editing area there, then click Apply. * 'warning: failed to load external entity "glade/icons.svg" - This is not a fatal problem, but merely an indication that Inkscape could not locate its icon images. This problem can also be detected when some of the button icons show up as random noise. The usual fix is to go through the 'make install' process so that the icons.svg file gets copied to the expected location. * 'colinear!' - This is a libart warning. The original libart intersector has all kinds of numerical problems, and it is believed that this warning is emitted if it tries to find intersection of two almost parallel lines. Robert Crosbie recently noticed this still occurs when using the Calligraphic tool. More information at: http://www.inkscape.org/

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[Inkscape] Inkscape 0.36 pre-release 1
by Bryce Harrington 09 Dec '03

09 Dec '03

A pre-release version of Inkscape is available for review and testing in source and RPM forms here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438 Please download, test out, and report any significant problems you encounter to the Inkscape bug tracker. We anticipate releasing 0.36 soon, unless any show-stopper bugs (such as frequent crashes) are discovered. Thanks, Bryce

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