[Inkscape] Inkscape Status 2003-12-15
by Bryce Harrington
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
19 years, 9 months
[Inkscape] Inkscape 0.36 - "See, even a 5 year old can use it."
by Ted Gould
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/
19 years, 9 months