- Inkscape Board of Directors

Contributor T-Shirts for 1.4
by Martin Owens 20 Oct '24

20 Oct '24

Dear Inkscape Project Leadership, # Background I have ordered 24 t-shirts featuring the design for 1.4 on white cotton. The design is meeting with approval from people who have been asked and I would like funding to be able to send these to members and cover their production costs. See photo of me wearing t-shirt here: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_vectors?msg=hLavFfkSrbdd95HF5 Sizes available: Unisex Medium=3, Large=7, XL=6, 2XL=4 Women Medium=1, Large=2, XL=1 I'll be making them available to contributors who are members of the project and who have been active during the 1.4 release (so over 2023 and 2024) in any area, not just code on a first come first served basis. Logistically, I have them here now and I will be sending them out one at a time to people's addresses directly from here in the USA. If it's cheaper, I may request a European plc member to take a batch of them but I'll document that if it happens. Each shirt will cost $12 plus I'm estimating $20 per delivery cost (though I expect that to be widely variable). The project only needs to buy the ones I send out to contributors. # Vote Budget $900 to cover the maximum possible costs of sending out these shirts, the amount to be less than this once they've all been sent out and delivery costs are known. a. Approve of t-shirt budget b. Disapprove c. Something else I abstain from the voteas the t-shirt vendor 😅️. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape 1.4 released!
by Marc Jeanmougin 13 Oct '24

13 Oct '24

================ = Inkscape 1.4 = ================ Thanks to all the work from our community, we are proud to announce that Inkscape version 1.4 is now released. ---------------- You can find out about the new features at: https://inkscape.org/news/2024/10/13/inkscape-launches-version-14-powerful-… and download it for your platform on: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4/ then, if you want to support Inkscape, donate to the project at https://inkscape.org/support-us/ ---------------- Inkscape 1.4 is the latest major release of Inkscape, following more than one year of development after the 1.3 major release, and paving the way for the next version of Inkscape. The highlights of this release are: - Filter Gallery: it has never been so easy to find the best filter for your needs! This new dialog features previews, categories and search. - Modular grids & improved axonometric grids: set the grid angle by ratio for isometric designs and use modular grids to plan layouts and make icons! - Swatches dialog and palette file handling improved: quick access to dialog layout controls, search for colors, and open different palette file formats! - Unified font browser preview: when activated in the preferences, use it to quickly browse through your font collection. Try it out and give your feedback! - Customizable handles: Power users with CSS knowledge can now customize the styling and basic shape of all the handles! - Fast image clipping with the Shape Builder: raster graphics can now be clipped into multiple sections using the Shape Builder. - Affinity Designer File Import - Support for internal links in exported PDF files - A whole new icon set - There's even more: faster extensions, new templates for folding booklets, additional options in Ruler and Taper Stroke LPE, new keyboard shortcuts, changed node deletion behavior, preview in Spray tool, many new command line options, more supported color palette formats (e.g. CIELAB, Adobe Color Book and Adobe Swatch Exchange), updated translations and many bug fixes. The new features are showcased and illustrated at https://media.inkscape.org/media/doc/release_notes/1.4/Inkscape_1.4.html . ----------------------------- Join an Inkscape project team ----------------------------- Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas: code[1], translation[2], UX[3], testing and bug triaging[4], documentation[5] or even outreach[6]! The main ways to get involved are listed onhttps://inkscape.org/contribute/ The preferred points of contact are: [1]https://lists.inkscape.org/postorius/lists/inkscape-devel.lists.inkscape.… + https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_devel (or libera.chat/#inkscape-devel) [2]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_translation [3]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_ux [4]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_testing [5]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/documentation [6]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_vectors A warm thanks to everyone involved in making this release possible! -- The Inkscape team

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The Next Stage for Inkscape
by Martin Owens 04 Oct '24

04 Oct '24

Dear Inkscape PLC, We have just had a meeting between Martin, René and Jonathan about the future of Inkscape with the Software Freedom Conservancy. Recent events have convinced us that the project needs to graduate from the SFC in order to allow the project to grow. And we have some suggestions about what those next steps might look like. We want to invite everyone from the project interested in this topic to come to a video call meeting on Big Blue Button on the 26th of October, 3PM UTC, we've added it to the calendar here: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/62/ This is a big and exciting topic and we hope we'll be able to talk with everyone about our next steps. From Martin, Jonathan, Rene

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Developer meeting 20th Sep 2024
by Martin Owens 20 Sep '24

20 Sep '24

Dear inkscape developers, Our meeting this week is as follows. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, René, Jonathan Next date: September 28th Martin wanted to try populating a "Roadmap" which documents in the meeting what the developer team as a whole is doing. This is an effort that KDE uses to encourage contributors and gives them a way to know what's important to the whole project, even if people can work on anything they like to. The way this would work is to have a graphic in the meeting with he roadmap and some space to draw. Jonathan thinks this kind of thing can go on our website too, with the idea that we can frame it as a direction of travel for the whole project and what we'd like to be able to do in the future. Release for 1.4 release candidate. Marc, Martin and Rene talked about the issues still outstanding and what kind of risk we would be taking. Everyone present was happy enough with the quality of the beta3 to continue with the rc schedule: Wednesday September 25th for the RC, this is the last day for any extensions patches. October 7th is the last day for translations, and October 9th is the scheduled date for release. Rene and Marc talked about a window packaging bug which adds windows CRLF end lines to all text files in the repository, this should be fixed so the release no longer shows up as a custom version. Martin wanted to embody the user's needs by saying that having a custom string in the version shouldn't block or delay the release. Marc has a patch for 1.4.x which solves the problem with gitattributes, although this doesn't cover all future cases so René we continue researching the problem. Marc has made a new process for submitting translations and it's currently in testing. And this is how it works: For each Release, we create a single merge request in gitlab targeting that branch. For example 1.4.x. This merge request is the URL we send to translators, who can then submit their translations to the merge request by creating a new comment with the po file attached. Marc has made a system which consumes the comments, adds them as a new commit to the merge request with a credit to the author and then submits a reply comment with the total statistics so users can see if they have submitted correctly. When ready, the translations will be merged into the branch. This can be done multiple times, so we can progressively add translations for betas and release candidates as we move alone the process. The 1.4.x and master branches will be tested and the translation team will be brought in to make sure everything is set up and working correctly and the new system works as a contributor experience. Marc will ask Maren to compile a message for the translations team at the weekend when this live test will be ready to deploy. Jonathan Sent an email to the SFC on the hiring team for the Adobe Illustrator file format and is waiting to hear back. Marc and Jonathan talk about Hactoberfest, it's a way to get first time contributors into open source development; if they contribute a certain number of commits then they get a t-shirt. Except this year, there's no more t-shirts. They have decent ways of dealing with spam so we can add the tag. Marc already added the tag and we part of the program now. spam and accepted tags allow us to tag things positively and negatively. All contributions are welcome, not just code. Because they've ran out of t-shirts we should fund our own. We need to order some t-shits so that we can have them for this event, but also for other things. Martin will make some generic t-shirts and ask for reimbursement if the project decides to fund them, he says that he can use them for his own supporters and projects if not so there's no risk either way. Martin talked about the color stuff and including capypdf into inkscape directly with the C++, Marc recommended including the library as a submodule and gave instructions for how to do this using mason. The gtkmm4 build is an instructive example. Martin explored the developer survey results so far; 21 people responded, the survey will be kept open another week for any stranglers to add their thoughts to it. We'll document the final results after that. Thanks to everyone who came to today's meeting.

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VOTE: AI Import Contracting project, take 2
by Jonathan Neuhauser 09 Sep '24

09 Sep '24

Dear all, ===== Background ===== The developer team ist requesting a budget of $10,000 to continue the AI import project. For details, see the attached proposal. ===== Ballot ===== A: Accept the attached proposal by allocating USD 10,000 for the compensation of the contractor and reimbursement of the license. B: Do not continue the AI project. C: Other ___ Thanks in advance, Jonathan

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Developer Meeting, Sept 4th 2024
by Martin Owens 04 Sep '24

04 Sep '24

Hey everyone, Time for our regular developer meeting notes. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Eledil, Jonathan, Marc, Mikekov, Tav, Ishaan, René Next Meeting: September 12th, (but there is also a PLC meeting on Friday) Beta3 is not perfect because it produces a custom string in the version string which needs to be cleaned up. Marc's certificate expired and needs to renew it. We don't have an official certificate, there is a way around that if we used Azure as a CI builder. We are releasing beta3 today, we had it on draft by accident and have now got it out the door for windows testing specifically. There is an outstanding vote, for hiring a contractor to finish the ai extension. Please make sure you get your votes in for today. Jonathan and Martin talked about the color extensions refactoring branch that is ready for review. Martin will proceed to work on the pdf out extension to add all that color support that now exists. They talk a bit about extensions progress bars and how to get pdf and other things. Jonathan is worried about the speed with a large text file. And how to treat text. Mikekov, has continued work on the object dialog and working on styles. There are a bunch of issues to do with signals and propagation and Martin suggests using signal keys to identify where an update modifier signal has come from. We will discuss this issue further in the chat room. Tav has been working on an Importance Critical bug; when you right click on a spin button it would pop up a menu, that was not the case in 1.4. The menus were mostly used for when the toolbar got too small and there was a menu for each thing that fell of the bar. During the refactoring this feature got removed as not being important. He has a merge request to put them back. An empty call will generate a few useful values even if it's empty. Martin will review. Elendil, if you have an svg file with a css file. The CSS dialog is currently parsing the CSS itself manually and could do with refactoring. The patch code with a comment explaining it should be ok for now as it retains more functionality than retaining the comments would. René is continuing his work on the cross-compiling and Martin's MR to improve that capability. And will help with the version thing. Ishaan will be giving a workshop on Inkscape at a FOSS conference, Bangalore, India. Mikekov; some of our tools are very special. The sp-desktop-style setting and getting is quite broken right now. There's a lot of issues with how these styles are processed before dialogs get access to them. Tav and Martin talk about text object selection with tspans. Ishaan asked about tablet code in master, it had to be removed and now had to be reimplemented. We may need to just review it and make sure we are using the new APIs as intended and that those features are available to windows and macOS users. See you all next time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Augus 27th 2024
by Martin Owens 27 Aug '24

27 Aug '24

Hey everyone, Thanks to everyone that came to today's meeting. A lot of focus on the release and the tasks needed to get us over the line today. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: René, Martin, Jonathan, Mikekov, Marc, Tav Next Most exciting thing from René, he has seen the future of macOS CI, because after having talked to someone who is doing this for gstreamer, the tech that allows having the virtualised runners which means you don't need to spend time on build and installation configuration because that's baked into how that would work. The only down side is it requires more hardware resource than we currently have available. the hardware we currently have from mac stadium is currently the smallest size. Though we do want to move towards this virtualisation. René is going to meet with Macstatium tomorrow to explain why we need an upgrade to our hardware setup. If that doesn't pan out René will probably make the setup by himself. René has an open MR which is holding up beta3. We had a look at how important it was to have this fix in time for beta3. We've decided to make a beta3 without the raster image extensions so we can get things tested. The pencil target for RC target for September 13th. Jonathan reports his mentoring of the GSoC project for the aidesign file format by Manpreet. The project is pretty much done and has a fantastic release ready code which will be in 1.4. There was a fraudulent zendesk help site which sent users to a fraudulent website. This was taken down. Jonathan gave the background to the previous adobe illustrator importer. He believes we understand what went wrong and we think we can continue the work with a known developer who knows how to develop these kinds of extensions. He will make a vote to fund the proposal after this meeting. Tav talked with pono yesterday about the rate and a base rate of $40 per hour extendable for local conditions. We're looking for 100 hours. The team held a vote to formally request the funding from the PLC. The vote was 6 in favor, zero against. Scour is now inside the inkscape project, if no one comes to help it it will be on the GSoC list of available project. It's not written with the new extensions system and has a lot of duplicate code. Mikekov is working on the popup editing feature for inkscape in the object properties. It's a work in progress. Martin suggests splitting out any refactoring so it's easier to review if there is any. Martin asked Tav if he could do an assessment on the open bugs for 1.4. Marc completely rewrote the debian packaging for the PPA, this only works on 24.10 because that is the first version that has all the packages we require for Gtk4. And only for AMD64 as there are some test failures on other platforms. There are a bunch of extra fixes for the debian packaging for language and extensions including splitting out inkex. We have a look at fininasing what's needed for 1.4 See you all next time! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Aug 19th 2024
by Martin Owens 19 Aug '24

19 Aug '24

This week we had a highly technical meeting with our core developers. Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Jonathan, Mikekov, pbs, Rafael, René Next Meeting: August 27th, 2024 Issue with the windows build for 1.4, a missing dep maybe for ImageMagic, Marc edited it just an hour ago. The way 2geom is imported has been corrected, but the CI builder doesn't do the right thing for testing. PBS presents the issue of using asyinc coroutines for the Gtk4 dialogs. There's a way to wrap the gtkmm calls to be coroutine compataible. PBS asked about using getThing() or jsut thing() in API design. Martin tends towards using get when calculating but goes for whatever is around it when editing code. Martin takled with René about the crossink status and how much work we have to do to get windows builds to work in wine. We talked about using a VM vs. using crossink and how important it is to get developers to comile and test issues with windows builds. We talked about getting fixes into upstream Gnome, Gtk project and some of the technical and social barriers to to doing that. Is Gtk portable or is it crossplatform? We need to know what Gtk thinks these mean to know what their mission is so we can best fit their expectations. Jonathan talked about mentoring his GSoC student for the afdesigner importer. The student needs to write up what he's done and most of the things are supported in the donated files. He found out what clipboard data is available, curiously afdesigner makes an x-inkscape-svg clipboard type. But we'd still use the afdesigner importer for that. Jonathan brought up how we want to re-organise extensions. Mikekov has gotten back into reviewing some of the designs and implimenting them for the object properties dialog. We talked about how the update process works which is too corse at the moment. Rafael was working on the marker tools and is doing a top down rewrite including the on canvas marker editing. Martin talked about doing the color stuff in python and support and testing it. Will support a couple of the new CSS module 4 color formats for exporting. That's it for this week. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Aug 11th 2024
by Martin Owens 11 Aug '24

11 Aug '24

Hey everyone! Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, skipper, Marc, René, Raven King, Ishaan, Tav, pbs Next meeting: 19th August We talked briefly about the hardware program and Adam leaving and the SFC's failure. Further details about this will be sent to the plc mailing list soon. # GSoC Skipper wanted to ask about problems with UX follow up now that Adam has left. Vaibhav is the mentor and suggested coming into the meeting to find out how to proceed. Martin talked about a similar issue currently being felt in the node delete tool. Suggested coming to the chat or post an issue where the discussion could be done. Marc recommends making a proposal and use that as a starting point, especially since people who are not happy about it will have to give their arguments. # Beta3 for windows The background is that we have a beta2 which is not functioning for windows users and since we have significant windows issues, then we need to make a beta3 as soon as possible. René says that if we need a beta4 or beta5 because we can't get it working, then so be it. René wants to know if some of the deps need to be updated or not. There are a few things to do. # Release procedure Moving everything to the CI builder so there's much less work to do and we can all know how a release is done. We're still building the 32-bit windows in order to have access to Arm builds. If we had a machine that built for Arm we wouldn't need this. We briefly talked about support and what Inkscape supporting users means. Pbs wants to talk about the broken Debian packaging link and how it's stopped working. We talk about how Debian packaging on launchpad is done and some of the details about how that system works for us as a sort of CI builder. He also fixed some issues with the AppImage builder, specifically to do with CJK support. But the fix isn't available to Inkscape 1.4 because of how it would be built with upstream libraries. Philip wanted help with the AppImage but there weren't anyone in the meeting who knew AppImage very well. Recommended to post to the mailing list. # Procedures We talked about how to create merge requests, and what is expected of developers. Assigning themselves to issues, reviewers and keeping their local admin clean to help other contributors. We talked about spaghetti code and various issues with trying to keep the code tidy. We talked about limiting the merges to master to people who have two factor authentication enabled on Git Lab. # Other items Is there still font issues on windows for user installed fonts? We think this is fixed, but we're not sure. Spellchecking has stopped working on master. It looks like an upstream issue. Philip was working on GUI free Inkscape and tab based Inkscape, which was too much to do at once. Tav did some of the groundwork for this with things like SPDesktop. # Activity We worked on merge requests for 1.4.x at the end of the meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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W3C WG Charter
by Martin Owens 05 Jul '24

05 Jul '24

Hey guys, Is this anything we need to pay attention to? https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2024Jun/0012.html They've been posting it on social media, is this part of the move to part svg into a non-active mode within their org? Martin,

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