- Inkscape Board of Directors

Time sensitive vote: Inkscape Bengaluru Summit 2025 (India)
by Martin Owens 18 Jul '25

18 Jul '25

Dear PLC, This event is soon, so I'll close this vote as soon as possible. Ishaan and Vaibhav are putting together a small India based summit and they need fuunding for travel and hotels. We've been helping them put this together for a couple of weeks to get the details right. Attached is the full details, it's expected to be a 5 person event with a cost of $370 per person total, that includes a ticket to attend IndiaFOSS 2025 where they will have a booth. Venue is $655 for the 4 days. And there's a request for $70 to have a screen at the Inkscape booth at fossIndia. Total cost: $2575 Please consider approving the budget for this event in this vote. a) Approve the budget as given b) Amend the budget like this _____ c) Do not approve this request Thanks for your time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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VOTE: Mastodon Hosting
by Ted Gould 18 Jul '25

18 Jul '25

Background Inkscape has had it's account on Mastodon.art. Because of various moderation decisions there and elsewhere in the Fediverse having an account there has been more work, and has less reach than we'd like. Instead of choosing another server that may end up in the situation the proposal here is to create one using the the Inkscape.org domain and could host our news feeds. This would hopefully allow us to steer clear of politics in the Fediverse and provide an authoritative account at our domain. To do this we are suggesting using masto.host, a popular Mastodon hosting service that is used by a large number of services and is located in the EU. We reached out to the maintainer and he said with the number of followers and the number of servers we connect to, we would probably need the $20/mo option. We can adjust that in the future based on our usage, but this proposal goes with that recommendation. Assuming this proposal is approved the next steps would be to get SFC legal to review the terms of service from masto.host and ensure they are okay. Then have SFC setup the admin account and create the accounts that Vectors requests (or other teams?) for posting. Then we'll migrate the current Inkscape account to the new setup. Votes a) Approve SFC to setup a recurring payment to Masto.host for up to $25/mo for the purpose of Mastodon hosting on the Inkscape.org domain b) Approve hosting on masto.host but at the $_/mo level c) Approve switching to hosting on our own domain but think that we should maintain the Mastodon instance d) We should instead move our account to: _________ e) We should keep our Mastodon account where it is f) Something else: __________ Timeline Vote will be closed July 11th, 2025

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Inkscape Website
by Martin Owens 09 Jul '25

09 Jul '25

Dear Board, I would like to request a budget on behalf of the website/infrastructure team to pay for someone to perform and complete our website upgrade. # Background Now that the ~1.4.1~ 1.4.2 release is done, we can finally deal with a backlogged infrastructure issue. Which is that the website is not currently able to be updated¹. This has happened because the version of the website has been upgraded thanks to work by @pgcd² to move us to a much more modern version of django, django-cms, python etc. As well as fixing up the test suite from multiple mutations. But this work can't be deployed to our webserver. The webserver is also old, and part of the discussion with OSUOSL was upgrading this machine to something newer. They'd like for us to have a machine they control and simply have us deploy our code and data to the new machine. But this comes with a lot of extra hand holding to make sure the web server machine, and a lot of the configuration we've set up on live to cope with bad actors DDOSing our site. As well as doing all the necessary bits to make sure the site is actually deployable in a hands off way. We can't deploy any new fixes to the website until this is unblocked. (For example the recent request to make news articles set in the future, not appear to be published, when they are't (yet)). # Request I'd like to hire pgcd to finish up the work. Partly this step requires someone who can be trusted, to have access to machines, or data, and I'd prefer if that person was legally bound to do the right time. And this is the sort of thing that I'd ideally like us to pay for anyway. I haven't put together the scale of budget this might require. But I think $4k-$6k would be a useful amount to pay for hours necessary at the standard SFC rate. Including having the contractor talk with and coordinate with OSUOSL and cut out some possible bottlenecks when hopping through volunteers. I'd like the new site to go through Fastly CDN for all pages. Not just media pages. So coordination with a new configuration on Fastly will also be needed. Plus testing of a testing site. I'd also like to include the creation and testing of data backups. Something that scared the daylights out of me with our current situation. # Final Thoughts I haven't sent this as a vote as I think it needs a bit of mulling over before we bring it to a vote. So let me know if you can, I'd like to get this sorted out soon though as the target for a test website deployment shouldn't wait until we're in the middle of a new release. Thanks! Best Regards, Martin Owens ¹ Except for some small tweaks which are kept out of tree, Which I don't like doing. But were needed for the DDOS protections. ² See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-web/-/commits/master

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UX Proposal meeting
by Daniel Pono Takamori 04 Jul '25

04 Jul '25

Here's a poll for the UX proposal meeting: https://starbestfit.com/inkscape-ux-proposal-839429 Will check in Monday and send out a good time for everyone Monday evening (UTC-7). Thanks! -Pono

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Developer Meeting June 27th 2025
by Martin Owens 27 Jun '25

27 Jun '25

Dear Developer team, Meeting: June 27th https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Adam, Ishaan, Mikekov, Philip Next Meeting: July 5th 2025 https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Mikekov has been working with Willy (ltlnx) to test and fix bugs in his MMR (mega merge request) for the object properties dialog and worked with René to fix a macOS issue with Gtk. Adam asked Fatama to test the branch too but was not able to run it on macOS. Philip has been working on building support for Inkscape and some Gtk and OpenGL bugs. Ishaan has been learning some more C++ this week. Adam has been guiding their Google Summer of Code project, it's working pretty good and are at the stage of deciding the user experience. Martin and Adam have a brief talk about color management and color experimentation workflows and how the two bits of work can fit together and hopefully build on each other. Martin has been working on the color interpolation and Cairo color rendering planning. Which is taking some time. Philip asked Mike what the estimated time of arrival for the properties dialog, no timeline specified, following the testing results. We talk about how to manage a large change and deciding on when to merge vs polishing it up later. For example the spin buttons and if they should be changed for all existing spin buttons. The project's experience is that updates should be done as globally as possible to avoid technical debt building up over time with half-implimentations and good intentions gone to waste as the project moves forward without the improvements being examples for new contributors. Thanks to everyone for coming! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Request for funding for marketing materials stash for India and Germany
by Maren Hachmann 19 Jun '25

19 Jun '25

Hi PLC members, Vectors in Germany and India (specifically, Ishaan and myself) would like to order marketing materials for distributing / using them in upcoming conferences. Ishaan (India) calculated that he would need 8300 INR (~ 100 USD, see details below) to order a rollup banner and stickers. I would like to refill the 'German' stash with stickers, business cards, and keyboard cheatsheet handouts for about 115 € (~ 130 USD). In summary, we would like to ask for 270 USD (included some wiggle room for price changes) for marketing materials. On behalf of Ishaan and myself as members of the Vectors team, Maren Details: -------------- India: * 1000 stickers on silver foil ~ 3750 INR (~ 45 USD) * 800 beverage/landscape stickers ~ 2600 INR (~ 30 USD) * 1 banner (+ rollover standee with stand) ~ 1900 INR (~ 23 USD) for IndiaFOSS 2025 (https://platform.fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025) and future events --------------- Germany: * 250 foldable business cards 30 € * 350 stickers on white background 33 € * 220 stickers on silver foil 30 € * 40 keyboard-cheatsheet handouts (1/2 A3) 20 € for Kielux 2025 (https://kielux.de) and other events in Germany

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Developer Meeting June 3rd 2025
by Martin Owens 03 Jun '25

03 Jun '25

Dear Devs, Here is the meeting notes for this week's meeting: Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Charlotte, Marc, Jonathan, Mikekov, Tav, Willy, Vaibhav Next Meeting: June 11th https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Tav at the summit he spent most of his time getting the right to left text working which has three different bugs. Everything from aligment, to the wrong buttons and a third unnamed issue. Also reproduced the windows bug with the grid flashing in and out but hasn't fixed it yet. Martin worked on SPCSSAttr and he wants to refactor it away, a small discussion on doing that. PDF input extension having it's own preferences and getting them to use the standard set of preferences. Also worked on the UX policy for toolbars and focus on click, making sure we can test our UI and help future developers keep things consistant. Mikekov, still working on the object properties dialog taking new designs from Adam and Henrique in the UX/UI team. There was a good preentation at the Inkscape Summit. Martin recommends doing more UX research on a more grand redesign that involves repositioning all the toolbars, Mikekov will be doing a smoke test with the internal community to find out if there's anything massively wrong with it before continuing. Charlotte, introduces themselves and has been poking around the PDF import and try and make the import process so groups reflect the PDF. Martin talked about PDF too. Marc talked briefly about LGM and it will be a discussion for the next LGM, the meeting is on June 11th. Willy hasn't been up to much because of the exams, but is involved in the discussion about PNG comments which have attribution. We talked briefly about if this feature is desired and the consensus is that we don't really want to allow the user to export a PNG without Inkscape attribution, even from the command line. Jonathan has a meeting on Thusday with the Google Summer of Code students open to all. Jonathan reports about the meeting to get 1.5 released, which will include external help to fix issues in Gtk4 especially for macOS and windows. Jonathan asked Elendil if we should have a 1.5 alpha just on Linux to get more test coverage. Has a proposal which needs some more work and will be brought back to the developer team next week. Vaibhav, has been working on context menu taking a long time to open but can't reproduce. And working on the adding stop color in gradients tool. The developer team expresses that only contiguous nodes should have new stops added. Some discussion of our steam contract and following up with the SFC. They are looking into it as they now realise how important it is to Krita and how important it could be for us. Thanks for joining everyone! Martin,

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Vote: Create Steamworks account, authorize Direct Fee
by Jonathan Neuhauser 26 May '25

26 May '25

Dear Board, == Background == Since quite some time, Krita is available on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/). They are "selling" Krita there to support the project financially, while clearly stating in the description that everyone can download it for free on their website. Our developer working group member Vaibhav is looking into setting up something similar for Inkscape. For this, we need a Steamworks account. Apart from that, we've received a request for revenue sharing from a game developer who's using Inkscape for their in-game graphics. This also requires a Steamworks account. The onboarding steps for Steamworks are described here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/onboarding In particular, there is paperwork needed (which we need the SFC for), and there is a one-time 100 USD "Direct Fee" for publishing a product on steam for the first time. This fee will be refunded once the product surpasses 1000 USD in revenue. (This is probably intended to avoid spam publications.) I've briefly brought up the topic with Tracy from the SFC today, and she suggested to go ahead with a vote to encourage a fast processing of the paperwork. ;) == Vote == Sign up for a SteamWorks account and allocate 100 USD for the direct fee. After the paperwork has been done by the SFC, Inkscape will be published on Steam at the discretion of the Developer WG / Release manager. a) Agree b) Disagree c) Other: ____ Best regards Jonathan

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Vote: Apple Developer Program
by René de Hesselle 22 May '25

22 May '25

Dear all, Background: ----------- Creating properly signed and notarized releases for macOS requires a paid membership in Apple's developer program. This membership comes in the form of a yearly subscription. So every year we get to decide anew if we see enough value in signing macOS releases to warrant the expense of 99 € that comes with it. It is possible to distribute and use unsigned apps on macOS just like on Windows. The downside is that a user has to take additional (but not overly complicated) steps to make this work while macOS itself discourages people from using unsigned apps. Proposal: --------- We've been creating signed macOS apps since 1.0 and I propose to continue this practice at the expense of 99 €. Additional information: ----------------------- Last year, concerns were raised about me requesting a reimbursement after I've paid for the renewal, stating that this would impede a free choice because people might feel some form of obligation towards me. The vote still passed. You should know: I never followed through with the reimbursement, I ate that cost myself eventually. You are welcome. This year, I'm calling for a vote one month before the renewal is due. Votes: ------ a. Agree to spend 99 € on the Apple Developer program b. Disapprove participation in the Apple Developer program c. Other: ________ Vote closes on May 31st at the latest.

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, May 10th 2025
by Martin Owens 10 May '25

10 May '25

Dear Developers, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: RdH, Martin, Anu, Aarav Oswal, Tav, Adam Belis, Marc Next meeting https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ is the late meeting on a Sunday. Bare this in mind! Release scheduling; René and Martin talk about the building of the 1.4.2 macOSX release. The tag is ready so he'll be uilding those after the meeting. Marc says everything looks good when he looked two days ago, so he went ahead and made the installers and tags. There's over 50 commits of translations because of how weblate works there tends to be multiple commits for each user. We formalise that each protected branch has a translation branch with the pot file updated to that protected branch so translations can happen as soon as posible. Tav has been working on context fill and context stroke which fixes a bunch of issues for inheritance. Including some crashes. Martin and Tav had a disagreement about how tests should be done and did not come to an agreement. Some discussion around the PDF output with various issues that has been spotted. Tav has worked on a crash when text flowed into space and you export selected item. Marc has been trying to draft some stuff on the future of LPEs. Martin suggests meeting to talk about the design. Tav suggests using a switch statement. Generated Items is the more generic name. A discussion develops that goes into some of the possibilities and details. René has been working on the move to the new mac statium infrastructure. Master is already working on the new system. 1.4.x is currently stalled as there are some issues remaining. His next tasks is working on that after the release. Up next will be looking into providing remote access to developers who don't have a macOS machine themselves. René needs to work out how to do it network wise and will provide a proposal for everyone when ready. It can be slow for openGL and we should explain this to people who use the system. Martin asked RdH about the process for doing capypdf in macOSX. We expect a 1.5 release in a year so we have time to work it out at the very least we will have a version for the very latest version. We check upstream macOSX version limitations. Marc reports on the GSoC. We have 5 students who have been accepted. On-Canvas spell checking, UI-Free Inkscape, AI file format support, Recolor Art Work, lib2geom improvements. Martin has worked on some PDF fixes as well as the next steps in design for color management. Running a design meeting this week. We talked about the hotel being paid and the trouble with getting the SFC to make sure this important aspect is finalised safely. Thanks everyone for coming.

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