August 2025 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Contributor hardware request
by P BS 25 Aug '25

25 Aug '25

Dear all, I'd like to request a Windows laptop under the Contributor Hardware Policy https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/50757/hardware-policy-2024.pdf which I would like to use to * Fix various deal-breaking bugs in the upcoming 1.5 release on Windows * Otherwise polish and speed up the Windows version, which needs it the most * Improve GTK4's cross-platform support, helping inkscape and other downstream users * Improve the developer experience to avoid turning off potential new contributors * Explore better Visual Studio integration * Investigate the Windows-specific phenomenon of "hard crashes" - no backups saved! * Switch the app to the UTF-8 codepage Estimated maximum cost: 1500 USD. Best regards, Philip

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Developer Meeting Notes; Aug 22nd 2025
by Martin Owens 22 Aug '25

22 Aug '25

Hey Everyone! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, Philip, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Martin is eliminating direct access to the cairo surface raw. Philip and Martin talked at length about the Surface API, how to render CMYK, how to deal with speed problems and some different parts of the code and functionality. Some ways in which the cleanup will hopefully open us up to replacing cairo, but maybe not, it depends. Philip has been porting UI extensions to GTK4, including Extensions manager and clip art importer, there's been some issues with the CI which needs to be updating. And working on the start screen lifecycle manager, it's currently held up with testing. He wants to ask Adam for testing but Martin is happy with the testing so far. Mikekov has been looking into the object properties dialog for text, which is a lot more involed than expected. Marc has been looking at the launchpad builds and why they seem to fail. There are test for the cms profile test. The team spend the rest of the meeting investigating the test failures so we can keep things moving. Philip wants to know if the Linux CI job, he wants to to merge it with the AppImage job to save space and CI time. Marc says that the Linux job is a normal build and the AppImage used to have some special sauce, Philip wants to check if this is still true. One builds in a debug and the other builds in release mode. We have decided to remove the linux build. The website releases app will be updated when it is done. Thanks for reading. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer's Meeting; August 6th 2025
by Martin Owens 06 Aug '25

06 Aug '25

Dear Developers, This week's developer meeting notes are below. Big thanks to everyone who was able to come. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Carlotte (cfcurtis), Martin, Tav, Ishaan, Jonathan, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Martin talked about his work on the rendering engine getting cairo surrfaces with multiple color space rendering. A lot converting, memory management, pre-multiplication, understanding lcms2 input and output limitations an doing a lot of test trials to work out how to effectively test the changes in the engine's handling of Cairo surfaces. Jonthan has been mentoring on the google summer of code project. He's been tracking a number of 1.5 issues which are upstream issue but don't have the required issue in the upstream project. There are some examples needed to be able to replicate the issues more easily for an upstream developer. Mikekov has been looking for various fixes to keep busy. Working on object attributes dialog related features. Tav asks about the speed problems with the Object dialog and being able to backport the fix to 1.4 if it's fixed in 1.5. We talked about node editing and making sure that we're not doing inefficient things. Charlotte haven't done a ton of work, but looking at PDF related issues for import and export. Tested the odf support in capypdf. Martin talked about a gradient export bug in capypdf. Jonathan asked if she's interested in PDF files which don't import cleanly. Ishaan has been working on selections and discovered that some things are not working on master, holding ctrl for example. And some inconsistancies with Alt. We talked about various selector issues. Martin and Mikekov recommend making event systems robust against order of events where possible. Tav has been back bug fixing for 1.4, Jonathan asked about releasing a 1.4.3 after the last blocker is fixed and we are in agreement. We have at leas 35 bugs fixed a bunch of things that are to be backported for 1.4.3 on our todo this. Martin asked Ishaan about the Indian event. They are ordering of travel arrangements and he will be meeting with pono to get the accommodations paid for tomorrow. We did a small tutorial for updating submodules and keeping things correct, sharing commands. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting. See you all next time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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