- Inkscape Board of Directors

Policy Discussion: Social Media and Inkscape's Presence in other spaces
by Martin Owens 03 Oct '25

03 Oct '25

Dear PLC, The vectors team are requesting guidance on the use of social media spaces such as Twitter which have become problematic. I believe that such guidance can be made into a generalisable project wide policy and present here a draft for what this might look like. Request for comment, since I've probably over thinking it: ======= # Inkscape Community Spaces Policy Inkscape is a project with a wide and inclusive community who participate in many places online. We do not wish to restrict what spaces people participate in as users, or even fan groups; but must be decisive about which spaces can be counted as official, use the inkscape trademark and brand identity and what rules must apply in those instances. ## Official Inkscape Community Space A space which is run by the Inkscape project must follow these rules to be considered an official Inkscape Community Space: 1. It must be run: 1a. On an Inkscape controlled infrastructure or Virtual Private server for example the inkscape website, chat room, forum, etc. 2b. On behalf of the project by a third party running Free Software server components. For example BigBlueButton, GitLab, Mastodon etc 3c. Be given a special exception by the Project Leadership Committee. 2. It must strictly follow the Code of Conduct: https://inkscape.org/community/coc/ 3. It must have a moderator, or moderator team that can respond in reasonable time to abuse. 4. If possible, it should use the Inkscape branding, mark, and domain name to associate itself with the project. 5. Should be linked directly from the Inkscape website as a core part of the community infrastructure. 6. May be private for contributors, special team members, project leads or users in general depending on the needs of the platform. ## Official Inkscape Outpost A space that is run on some other platform, which is used for outreach, advertising, news and to connect with the wider user community in the existing spaces where they have existing accounts. These rules apply to official outposts: 1. It must NOT be run by Inkscape, but must be in a third party website or service. 2. Must have an account or administrator which is ownable by the project where a copy of the required credentials to access the service can be maintained in the PLC accessible credentials repository. 3. Must not be used for contributions to the project: a. As a permanent store of code, merge requests, issues, graphics, or designs or canonical store of official documentation except where it is a published copy or clone for read-only accessibility. b. A singular place for user sentiment, such as polling and surveys, except where such a poll or survey is also available elsewhere AND the results are copied into the project's core spaces for record keeping once completed. 4. Must NOT act as a place where users believe they are talking with, reporting to, or filing complaints with the actual Inkscape Project. When users attempt to contact "The Inkscape Project" through an outpost service, the user should be redirected to official channels, issue trackers, website, mailing lists etc by a moderator. This redirection should be made available in the bio/profile text for clarity. 4. All participants must follow the Code of Conduct and where moderation and administration is possible, the code of conduct should supersede local rules. Where administration is not possible, blocking and block lists may be employed to moderate the spaces. 5. Must not be on a platform known for or owned by people intent on popularising, propagandising or otherwise supporting hate, fascism, terrorism, violence, sexual abuse, and other politically ideological wider communities. 6. Must NOT be linked from the Inkscape website. The outpost service is intended to support users who are already on those platforms, not encouraging new users to join them. But should include links FROM those sites or service profiles TO Inkscape and it's core community platforms such as the website and forums. 7. Should have activity at least once per three months to indicate its still in use and has interest in being maintained. 8. May use Inkscape's trademark and logo, but must try and communicate that it is for outreach, news, user community, etc and where it is a website that invites technical contributions should make it clear that the service is not being used for that an redirect people to the correct resource. ## Fan/User Run Communities Some communities are run by users who are not involved with the Inkscape project and are not bound by our code of conduct. So our rules are generally about the appearance of being official and the use of our trademark: 1. Are encouraged to use the Inkscape Code of Conduct as a way of managing their moderation. 2. Must not use the Inkscape brand or logo unmodified, in the same ways as the trademark policy specifies for Inkscape code and binary publications. 3. Must not use the inkscape name as a domain name, or an inkscape domain with a separate country level top level domain. Except where there is sufficient differentiation that it wouldn't be confused with being run by the project itself. 4. Must not be linked from the Inkscape website, etc. 5. May copy news, announcements, and participate in discussions about outreach where necessary. 6. Must not advertise themselves as official, or create confusion that posting, commenting, or sending private messages would be the same as communicating with the Inkscape Project. ---------------------------------------------------------- Sorry for the long read! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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PLC Status Meeting
by Ted Gould 03 Oct '25

03 Oct '25

Hello Folks, There is a PLC Status Meeting scheduled for tomorrow (Oct 3). Unfortunately I'm going to have to send my condolences again. This time at Texas Linux Fest, which has all of its graphics done with free tools (including a lot of Inkscape). Sorry to miss two in a row. Could someone else run the meeting please? Thank you, Ted

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, Oct 1st 2025
by Martin Owens 01 Oct '25

01 Oct '25

Hey Developers, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Youstena, René, Tav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Martin starts off with a quick introduction, and a short update on the website updates and the downtime people may have experienced. René looking into windows CI, it felt so bad that he felt he had to work on it. The goal is to make it faster and usable as being so slow sucks the joy out of everythig. The 7z archive builder is now running on a persistant runner which René said he would never run one again, but it was required to make it much much faster. The mechanism for depedancies was switched from 7z packaged, to a Microsoft based format which has advantages which can mounted and doesn't need to be 'extracted' as well as being more windows native. There's a bit of work more to do which is how easily it is to build depedencies, moving the config back into the main CI builder itself. Martin Martin talked abut Gtk and the need to keep the version we are building with and targeting for 1.5 will have to be a future version because of the known bugs that will have to be fixed in time for release. Martin's work on filter rendering and unit testing and is currently working on Light sources after completing the ConvolveMatrix work last week. A lot of tricky decisions will have to be made about interpolating in other color spaces but the new code will give us the flexibility to choose. Some backwards compatability will be needed for Integer calculations too. Tav has been working on CSS Color parsing and some of the found bugs, checking over our support introduced by Martin in 1.5. The Lch color conversion was wrong and has now been fixed, case insenstivity, and a range issue on Lch. Tav has questions about the color picker, we're currntly using Luv in the color picker. Martin and Tav had talk about color, rendering, document color space. Talking about how to achieve backwards compatibility and various other issues between Inkscape and SVG for color support. Youstena is a student from Egypt who is interesting in contributing to open source and introduced themselves. We asked around if anyone still needed to claim from the SFC, Tav was waiting on something but he'd put it in later too. We may want to make sure per-deim and travel between events where there is more than one event happening should be in the next vote. Thanks everyone for coming!

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, Sept 15th 2025
by Martin Owens 15 Sep '25

15 Sep '25

Hey everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Tav, Martin Mikekov has been working on some beautifcation projects, various things like the roller, gradient editor etc. We collectively talked about the failures at the SFC regarding reimbursements and people who are still waiting on reimbursement for items months and months ago. Tav would like to get into fixing the LPE dialog and converting polylines and lines to paths. Martin is working on filter mechanics involving a new cairo surface image access class with unit testing. We reviewed some merge requests. Short meeting this week, Thanks everyone.

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Inkscape Meeting, Sept 7th 2025
by Martin Owens 07 Sep '25

07 Sep '25

Dear Devs, Another week and another great developer meeting: Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Tav, Martin, PBS, ftOmara, MikeKov, Rafal, Ishaan Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ PBS asks Martin abou the page manager, we talked about manager objects, selected pages, and the intention of the manager and it's relationship to sp-page objects. The manager is designed to encapsulate the state of the selected page so most calls shouldn't need to know the selected page directly. PBS has been working on the GSoC project to recolor artwork project. There is a live preview mode which needs to be sorted out. the conflict between the SPObject, xml tree and the display tree. A big discussion erupts between many developers have input into how the functionality could be done. We talked about the way the xml tree and sp object tree works together. This created a debate about about abstractions and various other internal core elements for Inkscape. The general consenus is that we'd like the preview functionality split out into it's own merge request. Martin will ask Adam about the design implication of having the preview change in multiple places or just in one place at a time. Mikekov has been doing some UI beautifucation projects. And we talked about the missing event problems in macOS that might be something we need to get that reported upstream. Martin has continued to work on the rendering engine work. A long term project to improve the capabilities of the rendering engine color support. Ishaan reports that the all four people are going to India FOSS event. There's concerns about how long the process has taken with the SFC as friction continues between us voting to pay for events or materials and people getting reimbursed or getting travel booked in time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Contributor hardware request
by P BS 06 Sep '25

06 Sep '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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PLC Status Meeting
by Ted Gould 05 Sep '25

05 Sep '25

Hey folks, I'm travelling this week and Internet has not be as available as I'd like, I missed another meeting today as I didn't have Internet. Can someone else run the status meeting? Sorry for the late notice. Thanks, Ted

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VOTE: Website Upgrade
by Martin Owens 31 Aug '25

31 Aug '25

Dear PLC, For your consideration is the budget for hiring the SFC's website contractor to help coordinate with the OSUOSL, deploy a new machine and deploy a new version of the website. The estimated costs are $1,200-$1,600 for the work, I'd like to budget $2k to cover any unexpected costs. (see attached) VOTE: a. Approve the use of $2k for website work. b. Something else c. Do not approve Best Regards, Martin Owens

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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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