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