- Inkscape Board of Directors

Developer Meeting Notes; 14th June 2026
by Martin Owens 14 Jun '26

14 Jun '26

Hey Everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Mc, Martin, René, pbs, Vaibhav Next: Monday 22nd June; https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Marc managed to get access to the windows store and he will upload Inkscape 1.4.4 to the store as soon as he is free. René has been preparing the latest updates. Mason 1.11.x is the highest we can go, Mason 1.12 and above will require a python version which is not available for the macOS versions that we support. Has been investigating how to integrate all the deps, turbo jpeg is using graphics magick instead of image magick 6. PBS reports that capypdf is now available for his android CI which is useful. We want capypdf available for all our platforms and we can't make it available on macOS because of meson, and the C++23 requirements for the PPA and AppImage. We talk about graphics magic instead of image magic and the instability of upgrading Gtk which caused knock on effects. Martin says the icc jpeg profile function could be patched out if we wanted to restrict the version. Marc, René and pbs talk about build systems, windows, macOS and other platforms. Possibly using Nix, or Conan instead which already has a lot of packages available. But questions of it being invasive, although it might make sense for package building and CI. The only part of inkscape that requires image magic at all is a set of internal bitmap extensions; most of them could be either ifdefed out or replaced with internal functions. Philip would like to package caapypdf as a 3rdparty submodule to fix the C++23 and meson requirements which are easy to patch out and makes building for intel mac and PPA much harder. Martin asks that an issue be created upstream to let Jussi know about what we're action we're taking down stream and why. Philip asked Marc for PPA administration access. Marc says ok. The Gtk and Gtkmm versions are always out of sync on debian systems and this causes us problems. We talked about peel some more for the future upgrade path. Martin has been working on outputting images in the command line, for no real reason. Just playing. Thanks everyone for coming this weekend! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting: June 6th 2026
by Martin Owens 06 Jun '26

06 Jun '26

Hey everyone, Great meeting this Sunday Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: PBS, Martin, Elendil, Roland, René Next meeting: June 14th (Sunday) at the later time Link: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We talked about the CI building issues for windows briefly. We talked about the bug accelerator program briefly. Pbs asks about the capypdf static builds and the problem with debian and macOS older versions. We conclude that the best was to tackle it is to have the older versions detect C++23 and disable CapyPDF if not. AppImage tooling issues have cropped up, pbs looked at mterry's fixes. There's a OpenGL bug which causes AppImage to crash. There's a possible solution to include their own version of mesa which is bloated but might be able to fix it. AppImages are mostly used for testing. Roland suggests using DistroBox. Martin suggests using lazy AppImage building instead of building them for every MR. Elendil says that while not useful for every commit it is useful for merges into main for bisecting. René, asks about using CI to get access to macOS for testing with Roland, René will ask Roland in a few days to see how things are going. Martin noticed a pattern with CI pipeine failures for project members. PBS recommends using `git push -o ci.skip` to make sure your own GitLab CI never runs and thus fails. René reports he is burned out and will be taking a break for a few months. Wants to make sure he doesn't leave Max G. with unfinished packaging work, will message him in the issue. Elendil has been looking at the new poppler release, more ifdefs. We talked about the best ways of handling ifdefs in code, he's made compat functions for things like pointers. We talked about how to talk with poppler about a more long term solution with API breakge. Roland talks about the bug accelerator program. Locked in on two specific bugs right now, mterry is working on modifiers est at 10 hours. Seán is working on refactoring. The focus is on crashes and making inkscape 1.5 more stable. Collecting the Gtk4 related issues together for a sprint focused on that with things like menus, popovers and similar. We talk about the lot of Gtk3 issues that need to be closed. Should they be tagged as gtk3 so they can be filtered out. we talk about 1.5 being a special case, while pbs makes the case for closing already fixed issues. Martin talked about their rendering engine work. Pbs asks about rendering with Ints vs. Floats, martin says that having No color space will use Ints and using RGB color space will use floats; to be consistent with previous code. Martin says the code looks to be mostly working how it intends to with some minor differences in rendering output. Pbs and Martin talk about code generation and testing, bounding boxes for glyphs and making a new glyph drawing item for every single drawing object. There's a bunch of work we can do to make text much much faster. Pbs finally asks about the shape builder task Seán is working on; asks for any findings to be documented. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes; May 21st 2026
by Martin Owens 21 May '26

21 May '26

Hi Devels! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Charlotte, Elendil, Mike Terry, Roland Tarlor, Seán Burke Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We have a backlog of 23 approved but unmerged Merge Requests which need to be dealt with. The windows CI is failing for most of these and blocking the ability to merge effectivly. Martin is tasked with talking with René and Marc to figure out how to solve this problem. Tav has been working on converting opentype to harfbuz, this is especially useful for variable fonts as harfbuz gives better results. We can remove a bunch of code we were using to cope with the lack of functionality. Martin asks about unit testing for the new code, Tav hasn't gotten around to it yet. One limitation is a conflict between font variations and style in file fonts. Eventually the inkscape-font- spec attribute should go away. Martin asked about font variation information being available in the poppler pdf import. Charlotte has been working on her own extension. Has a question about aprovals for merge requests and if the approver should be the one to hit the merge button. The general consensus is that they should for contributions from non-senior contributors, but not for senior developers generally. Though this isn't policy. Roland has given us an update on the first full week of the Bug Accelerator program 2026.1, has been working through the priority list and get down to a short list. Removing issues which have been kicked down the road but are not actually applicable any more. Developers are working on crashes as a priority for this week. Roland is giving usability blockers more priority to help with Inkscape's usability. The end of the month is the targrt for having a solid work list of priorities for the program. Elendil discovered a feature and wants to remove it. It's an obscure feature of the grid which allows incremental moves but was using the Alt key which was inconsistant with other features. The feature is removed as it's not useful and not documented anywhere. The keyboard bindings for some other items are updated too and Elendil wanted to know if the default should be in the xml or the code, Martin says the code unless the default should actually be "disabled". Martin talked about the color work and the new rendering engine. Giving a brief overview of where we are and what the direction of travel is for getting this merged into 1.5. The new static color functionality refactoring is all merged thanks to pbs for the review. The ongoing work to add test cases for the drawing code should prove that the display tree interface for the new rendering engine is the same as the old code and can be swapped out for testing. Roland gives Martin thanks for the PDF work which he's used on multiple projects so far. Martin is proud of the stability of the PDF output as it's been tested by more people and proven itself to be more dependable and faster than the old cairo output. Next meeting is the 29th May and is the earlier meeting. Thanks everyone for coming!

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Developer Meeting; May 13th 2026
by Martin Owens 13 May '26

13 May '26

Hey everyone! First week with our new hires attending with us. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Seán Burke, Ishaan Arora, Mc, Mike Terry, René, Roland Taylor, Tav, Charlotte Next meeting: May 21st, later time, https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We kick off today's meeting with introductions of the new contract hires and all the volunteer developers. Martin explains how the developer meeting works, cadence, format and questions and what the developer team is. We now kick off into the meeting proper: René has been doing some infrastructure work for windows and macOS. An open merge request to look at. Has been packaging a different Gtk4 application to improve support for Gtk4 on macOS as a side quest so we don't have just Gimp and Inkscape using it. Martin has been continuing their work on the rendering engine. Has a new color API merge request which needs review. It allows the calling of internal functions for color conversion by the rendering engine much faster than the std::vector pathway as well as various other fixes. lcms2 is still slow though in comparison. Marc asked about windows arm support in the build system. René pledges to work on it during the long weekend. Marc says that the system might be a good option for x86 as well as arm. Ishaan asked about PDF export and if we will support cairo going forwards. Martin says that the plan is to support CapyPDF going forwards and not fix issues with the cairo export. Marc asked about 1.4.5 and if that was going to happen. ltlnx wasn't here to answer so Marc will proceed as if there will be no more 1.4.x releases wrt packaging maintenance. Marc has fixed some communication issues on the website as downstreams were packaging the arm build by default which was not great. Marc asked Martin about the website and creating a new platform for x86-64bit which is more specific that the current platform `64bit`. Martin says yes and redirects can be created, though only for one at a time. Charlotte wanted to look into py2geom, it's not ready yet. Decided to use the addon system in C++ instead of a python based system. Because of a deadline will put the python functionality to one side. Perceptual grouping, imported from pdf which can group based on them being together visually. Tav has been going down a rabbit hole with memory leaks in the color font; while searching found other memory problems in freetype. Rewriting using Harfbuz directly but then found an issue with the optical size values in variable fonts. Removing the fudge we have in the sizing for hinting actually makes us more consistant with firefox. Martin gives some instruction for the bug accelerator program and what it will look like and how people will be meeting. Ishaan talks about an issue with text alignment, where Inkscpe is now more compatible, but the user experience is now broken as we appear to be including extra spaces at the ends of lines which then result in ugly spacing. This certainly is a regression, but it can't be fixed by making Inkscape less compatible with other programs. So the xml we produce for text must be changed to remov the ugly spacing instead. We talked about the recent AI announcement by GitLab and what the risks are. Developers reported that they see the AI UX even though it's switchef off for our project. Members inccouraged to report the issue to GitLab. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's busy meeting! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape 1.4.4 is out!
by Maren Hachmann 06 May '26

06 May '26

Inkscape 1.4.4 ============== Inkscape 1.4.4 is now available for all three supported operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)! You can download it from: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.4 BUGFIX and MAINTENANCE RELEASE ------------------------------ Inkscape 1.4.4 is be a bugfix and maintenance release, which brings you 20 crash fixes, more than 25 bug fixes and performance improvements, a couple small new features, and comes with almost 20 updated translations. The most important fixes and changes in this release are: * 20 crash fixes, among them for three nasty bugs where Inkscape wouldn't even start * almost 20 other bug fixes * 6 changes that improve performance * a new palette * a new button for rotating stars and polygons into their 'neutral' or 'upright' position * 27 updated interface translations * 15 updated documentation translations * installation files for Windows on Arm See the release notes for more information (also about known issues): https://inkscape.org/doc/release_notes/1.4.4/Inkscape_1.4.4.html Like its predecessor, it is also a bridge release in the sense that it can be used to convert the planned Inkscape 1.5 multipage file format to the pre-1.5 multipage format. Versions lower than Inkscape 1.4.3 will not be able to interpret pages created in Inkscape versions 1.5 and upwards. Opening a document in Inkscape 1.4.3 and saving it will convert it to the current ('old') page format (MR #7608). Background: While the 'old' format of pages in Inkscape is a custom addition that only works in Inkscape, the new format will make use of the svg:view element, which is standardized and can work in other SVG viewers, too. Find more information about this in MR #7525. Report Bugs ----------- Please report all bugs you find in our Inbox bug tracker on GitLab! https://inkscape.org/report ----------------------------- Join an Inkscape project team ----------------------------- Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas: code, docs, translation, UX, bug triaging, or even outreach! The main ways to get involved are listed on https://inkscape.org/contribute/ and you can get in touch with us on https://chat.inkscape.org/ Thanks to everyone involved in this release! -- The Inkscape team

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Developer Meeting; May 5th 2026
by Martin Owens 05 May '26

05 May '26

Hey Everyone, No attendees for this week's meeting. Next meeting is the earlier meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ hope to see you all there, it's the earlier one. Best regards, Martin Owens

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Re: [Contact] CRITICAL/URGENT: Security Vulnerability Disclosure and Bug Bounty
by Ted Gould 02 May '26

02 May '26

Hello Mridul, Great! Glad to hear that you've found a way to make Inkscape better. We don't have a disclosure program but would appreciate it if you could file an issue on our bug tracker and mark it as a security issue: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/work_items Ted On May 1 2026, at 11:45 pm, Mridul Vohra <mridul.vohra19(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Team, > > I hope you’re doing well. > My name is Mridul, and I’m a cybersecurity researcher. During a recent assessment, I identified a critical security misconfiguration impacting Ink Scape. > I would like to responsibly disclose the full details of this finding. Could you please let me know if you have a bug bounty or vulnerability disclosure program through which I can report this and be considered for a reward? > Thanks and regards, > Mridul > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Contact mailing list -- contact(a)lists.inkscape.org > To unsubscribe send an email to contact-leave(a)lists.inkscape.org

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Inkscape Developer Meeting; April 27th 2026
by Martin Owens 27 Apr '26

27 Apr '26

Hey everyone, Big thanks to everyone who could make this week's meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Charlotte, Ishaan, Tav, Willy, René, Marc, Vaibhav Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ May 5th Tav has got his color font merge request ready, has put the run time check and make sure to keep the unit test separation with using flags instead of prefs. We talk about testing with fonts and the problems with testing with isolating fonts. There needs to be more leeway with visual tests and the tiny differences that don't matter. We want to push upstream to release Cairo, especially because 1.5 depends on it as a blocker. Tav will be working on namespace sanitisation and cleanup. He's found an interesting way to make an alias to help with compile issues. René has been busy working on the hiring committee with Martin. Martin worked on a small feature for Chris adding in an algo for nodes who's segments are invisible; thus removing nodes which are very close together. Tav and Martin talked about the removal of shape-inside from the SVG 2.0 specification. Martin doesn't like the way text shaping is now worse in 2.0 than it even was in SVG 1.2. Willy has been working on the 1.4.4 release; is working on the risks and advantages. Has a deadline of Thursday to get things together. Marc asked about a docs update; maren has made the merge requests for that and translations. The target date is May 1st. Ishaan reports about extensions not working on 1.4.4rc on macOS and asks René. René says he has a small window to be able to fix it. Ishaan reports the problem started in 1.4.3 so isn't a recent change. The release is scheduled for May 6th. Charlotte asks about the py2geom and the ability to have it available in inkex; she says she may work on getting it packaged for pypi and hopefully get a wheel made for various operating systems. Marc has mostly been working on release management tasks; cleanup up the architectures, but could do with more testing for Arm windows if possible. Updated the ppa so we're ready to update to 1.4.4 when we want. Vaibhav has been working on some performance and crash related issues. Happy to report that various open issues can be closed because they've been fixed in the meantime. Martin and René give a brief update on the status of the hiring process. They opened the floor for any questions the developer team might have had about the program, Marc asked if they were happy with the candidates and we had 38 C++ applicants and they were able to select really good candidates from that pool to interview. They are are about make a decision about who to hire. Have a good week everyone! Martin,

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Vote: show support for a German petition to strengthen recognition for open source volunteer work
by René de Hesselle 25 Apr '26

25 Apr '26

Dear PLC, sorry, wall of text, but it's on purpose so that you are well-informed. We have the opportunity to show our support for a German petition (https://www.ehrenamt-opensource.de/en/) that aims to strengthen and enable official public recognition for volunteer work in open source projects. Germany already has legislation that recognizes volunteer work in more traditional areas like fire fighters, social work, caring for the elderly etc., so this petition is about to broaden that circle and provide more equality among volunteer workers. On the one hand the government already recognizes the importance of open source by advocating its adoption and running more and more initiatives to replace proprietary software with open source, but on the other hand it is often only enjoying the benefits of this ecosystem without contributing much back/ensuring its survival. This petition wants to influence German lawmakers so that volunteer work in open source is no longer at a disadvantage compared to other areas. What is a petition in Germany? - It's the first of many steps how the German populace can exert its democratic rights to get the government to concern itself with a given topic/request. This is done by getting people to sign a petition to reach a certain threshhold as German law dictates "if you have at least xyz signatures, the government needs to concern itself witih this". In other words: this is not some random person's personal endeavor, this is an official and public democratic process according to German law. What would happen if this petition succeeds? - It makes open source volunteer work more attractive. It opens the door to various government programs, tax benefits, boasting about it on your resume. It will turn "a hobby for nerds" into "a good cause for the public good" over night. This will be huge in the long run. What does supporting this petition mean for Inkscape? - This is a marketing thing (compare it with our sponsors page), there are no other obglitations, there is no cost (I have confirmed this with the organizer). The petition runs a website with a section where it collects and shows logos of supporting organizations (same link as above, scroll down a bit) in order to emphasize/show off how many people feel this to be of great importance. Inkscape would officially allow them to show our name/logo, basically putting our reputation behind this. We will be mentioned in their social media. And Inkscape would publish an accomodating news article on our website, declaring our support for maximum media coverage. Why should Inkscape support a petition that is local to Germany? - Because of the big picture. Strengthening the public recognition for open source is something we need to rally behind, no matter where it originates. Today it's Germany, tomorrow it might be somewhere else. The open source community as a whole does benefit from local improvements. Just how we iterate over our code, every improvement helps. There is also the promise of creating precedence and of creating a domino effect. How did we come across this? - Media coverage in Germany. This is a well-known thing for open source developers in Germany. I'd like to manage this. Not that it has to mean anything, but the petition's organizer lives in my area (20 minute drive). Who knows, could be useful. Please vote: a.) allow the petition to show our logo/name and mention us on social media and we publish a news article ourselves b.) do not support the petition c.) other/I have questions René

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Inkscape 1.4.4 release candidate available for testing!
by Maren Hachmann 25 Apr '26

25 Apr '26

Inkscape 1.4.4 Release Candidate ================================ Inkscape 1.4.4rc is now available for testing for all three supported operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)! For the first time, we also provide packages for Windows on Arm. Being a pre-release, this version is not intended for production use, but to help us smooth out any issues that should not show up in the actual release which is due in less than 2 weeks from now. You can download it from: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.4rc BUGFIX and MAINTENANCE RELEASE ------------------------------ Inkscape 1.4.4 will be a maintenance and bugfix release, which brings you 20 crash fixes, more than 25 bug fixes and performance improvements, a couple small new features, and will come with more than 25 updated translations. See the release notes draft for more information: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.4.4 Like the previous version, Inkscape 1.4.4 will also be a 'bridge release' in the sense that it can be used to convert the planned Inkscape 1.5 multipage file format to the pre-1.5 multipage format. Versions lower than Inkscape 1.4.3 will not be able to interpret pages created in Inkscape versions 1.5 and upwards. Opening a document in Inkscape 1.4.3 and saving it will convert it to the current ('old') page format. Background: While the 'old' format of pages in Inkscape is a custom addition that only works in Inkscape, the new format will make use of the svg:view element, which is standardized and can work in other SVG viewers, too. Find more information about this in MR #7525. KNOWN ISSUES ____________ * On macOS, if Inkscape has been started from the command line, extensions will not work (both in the graphical user interface as well as when only using the Inkscape commandline). Many import / export file formats provided by Python extensions are also affected. This is a security feature added in 1.4.3 for official macOS .dmg files, which fixes CVE-2025-15523. Learn more about it in our bug tracker at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/6047 * On Wayland (display server), depending upon the Gtk version your system uses, a crash may occur when moving a docked tab, or closing a floating dialog. Trying to undock a dialog may result in the wrong dialog being undocked (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/6013). Report Bugs ----------- Use at your own risk, and please report all bugs you find in our Inbox bug tracker on GitLab! https://inkscape.org/report ----------------------------- Join an Inkscape project team ----------------------------- Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas: code, docs, translation, UX, bug triaging, or even outreach! The main ways to get involved are listed on https://inkscape.org/contribute/ and you can get in touch with us on https://chat.inkscape.org/ Thanks to everyone involved in this pre-release! -- The Inkscape team

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