March 2026 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Vote: budget for Windows CI evaluation
by René de Hesselle 07 Apr '26

07 Apr '26

Dear PLC, the developer team wants to evaluate cloud provider Clouding.io <http://clouding.io/> as a more powerful and flexible compute backend for Windows CI. This evaluation is scoped to a fixed budget of 150 € that we assume to last for 3 months of Windows CI (pay-as-you-go compute minutes, depends on development activity). That will give us enough time/jobs to make an assessment afterwards. I ask you to vote for either: a) Approve budget request for 150 € b) Disapprove this budget request c) Other, please explain Background: We are looking for a scalable solution to provide ephemeral Windows runners that is more powerful than GitLab's fleet and that does not rely on community members sponsoring hardware and utility bills. The evaluation will be managed and the budget spent by me (there will be a regular invoice to be reimbursed). Thank you, René

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Vote for LGM travel support.
by tavmjong＠free.fr 29 Mar '26

29 Mar '26

Committee members, your response is required: a) Approve this proposal. b) Disapprove this proposal. c) Change this proposal. Background: We have been sending people to LGM for many years. It is the premier open-source conference for graphical design software. This year's version takes place in Nuremberg from April 22nd through 25th. It's a great place to network with other open-source graphics software people. https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2026/ This proposal is to provide support for members of the Inkscape community to attend this event. In the past we have held Inkscape Hackfests/Summits before or after the event. I did a quick survey and there wasn't enough interest to hold a Summit this time. (It was rather late to organize such an event.) Proposal: - Allocate funds of up to $1250 per person to cover travel expenses to attend LGM (transportation, accommodations, meals, misc. expenses). (This is half of what we've allocated in the past for attending a combined Inkscape Summit and LGM.) - The total reimbursement for this event will be limited to $7500 on a first come, first serve basis. Attendees must contact Tavmjong in advance with an estimate of their expenses. Attendees must make their own travel and accommodation arrangements, subject to SFC rules. - Authorize Tavmjong to approve applications for travel support.

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Developer Meeting Notes, March 26th 2026
by Martin Owens 26 Mar '26

26 Mar '26

Dear Devels, This weeks meeting was quite interesting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Lola Egherman, Mikekov, ltlnx, Vaibhav Ted introduced Lola Egherman to Inkscape at SCaLE; they are a worker for a non-profit which helps people get into Free Software projects and learn to code. Has joined us to learn about how to contribute to Inkscape to hopefully guide people into contributing. We talked about all the conferences in the world like SCaLE, FOSDEM, the difference between cultures in various places and the interesting people who work on FOSS. Martin points to the python extensions as a good introduction to contributing and we talk about the various ways in which you can get into inkscape and how difficult various types of contributions are. Mikekov has been working on the same sorts of things. A paint widget refactoring which uses the SPObject directly was a mistake and this caused Mikekov to have to rethink the solution to the problem. The issues with the style system as a whole was discussed. Martin talks about the problems with getting merge requests approved and merged and we talked about the problems with a lack of senior developers involved in the project as we've had a big attrition this year. Martin has been working on text inside shape and text on path and gives a little demonstration. There's some refactoring and some ancient bugs which have cropped up need fixing but it's fairly nice to use. Vaibhav has been working on speed problems, flame graphs and things are improving. Running individual test units multiple times to get data for speed testing. Ltlnx has been working on some design work and is impressed by the speed of 1.5 compared to 1.4. Has been working on fixing 1.4 issues for 1.4.4. Next meeting is April 3rd, thanks everyone for coming! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, 18th March 2026
by Martin Owens 18 Mar '26

18 Mar '26

Hey everyone, Attending: Tav, Martin, Vaibhav, Mikekov, ltlnx Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Vaibhav has been working on speed, producing flame graphs. Martin and Vaibhav talked about making speed tests for unit testing, with cmake and CI integrations which could be optionally run. Tav is working on Inkscape again and has got their merge requests up to date. Tav and Vaibhav talked about search improvements, especially with speed problems. It's creating a new widget by loading a glade file for every action in the search. Causing significant delays. Tav says there newer widgets that would be useful, Martin says theres ways to use widget tree as a template. For 1.4 it could just be brought into C++ instead of using glade at all. We talk about using ListViews and other such constructs. Martin has been working on a small feature improvement to the Measurement Tool to take a break from all the engine work. It allows angles and curve length to be measured in a more useful way and has involved a bunch of users and designers testing everything. Mikekov has worked on the Document Properties dialog. Now the object properties is more featureful it's useful to rename it to maybe just "Properties". Martin suggests that speed issues would be increasing important as the dialog's main design requires and suggest it should be always open. And thus is should never cause speed issues. Vaibhav did some speed testing already which we reviewed in the meeting. It's building all the patterns, even when patterns aren't being used. Tav and Mikekov talk about tspan updating issues with position and what it all means. Martin tested the issue with x,y coords being ignored in tspans and we narrowed it down to sodipodi:line attributes which cause our svg rendering to diverge from the way the svg would be rendered anywhere else. Ltlnx has been starting the work for 1.4.4 and organising the point release. There's some things to backport. He's negotiating a date with the vector, documentation and translations. This should get these fixes out by end of May. Thanks to everyone who could come to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting March 10th 2026
by Martin Owens 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Hey everyone. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Vaibhav, Tav, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Tav hasn't done much programming but did conclude there wasn't enough people interested in an LGM adjacent event to warrent a seperate event. Instead he'll make a vote to allow contributors to go to LGM itself if they want to. Vaibhav has some questions about how to attend. Vaibhav has been fixing some speed issues trying to learn about flame graphs, profiling and finding out why certain things in Inkscape are so slow. Mikekov and Vaibhav talk about the tooling. Mikekov has been finishing up work on the Object Properties dialog for Text support to allow users to access text properties from the omni data access design¹. He's also looking at information for the document properties. the goal for the document properties is to allow it to be docked on the side without taking up too much space. Martin has been working on removing SPStyle from drawing-rendering, the libNRType is already split out in a new MR so that's waiting to be merged. Last night they added a feature for the measurement tool to measure line segmentss in paths. Thanks everyone, sort meeting this week! Martin, ¹ https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7784

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Developer Meeting Notes 2nd March 2026
by Martin Owens 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

Dear Devels, Another week and another great developer meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Martin, René, Tav, Peyton Murray, pbs, Vaibhav Next event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ René starts with his CI improvements project for windows. He's made a project at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7796 the main problem for GitLab GI is that it's a type of headless windows system which doesn't have the graphics stack needed event to run -- version. To current solution is René is running a machine in his parent's basement which is unsustainable. He's found a provider who can solve this issue for us. But it will cost us money to run this. We discussed how much compute time we would need and René will make a vote with the plc for a 3 month trial for 150 euros to get a sense of the resources needed. The developer team is in agreement. Tav wants to organise people to go to LGM and maybe meet up beforehand. Martin recommends creating the budget and assessing interest so we know who would like to go. We talked briefly about the hotel costs. Mikekov has been working on a text panel for the object properties which is different from other style properties in it's complexity. Thinks he may have to make a new style handler. Martin talked about the engine work, they are working on separating out the drawing item layer into unit testing involving the SP-Style and NRType interactions. The only issue is pixbuf use in FontInstance which they're working on splitting out. The work on unitising more of inkscape code to improve our ability to maintain the project. Phlip asked about the marker work, is continuing his work on recovering Rafael's marker refactoring code. Tav was asked about the specification for svg for marker. We talk about context style. Refactoring is part of that work which needs to be extracted out. Vaibhav has been finishing the Refactoring LPE Mask branch and would like testing. Is working on the flowed text speed differences between 1.4 and 1.5 there are only small differences. We talk about the best practices for logging and preformance testing. Peyton talks about looking at issues to fix. We talked about the trace bitmap functionality. We talk about the milestones, and the gtk migration and the dificulty of editing ui files now that Gtk no longer. We briefly coverage support and performance testing now we have units. Thanks everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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