November 2004 - Inkscape Devel

Announcing Inkscape 0.40 Release
by Bryce Harrington 30 Nov '04

30 Nov '04

= Inkscape 0.40 = 'Draw Freely' http://www.inkscape.org/ The Inkscape community is proud to announce the release 0.40 of Inkscape, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool." This release includes three majorly requested new capabilities: Layers, Text-on-Path, and Bitmap tracing. In addition, there are many minor features, a number of usability enhancements, three new tutorials, and hundreds of bug fixes. This is by far the most feature-packed release the project has had. This is all due to the strong developers that have contributed countless hours on Inkscape 0.40. Following our last release four months ago, we have focused intensively on development, adding several new dependencies such as the Boehm garbage collector and the stable Gtk 2.4 libraries. Because of this, user's may encounter more trouble getting Inkscape installed on some platforms than in previous releases. To help those who run into this issue, we're also providing 'Static Binary' packages that include these new libraries inside the package, and thus, the static releases are very large. Download your packages: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438 For many more details, see the Release Notes for 0.40: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes040 Community submitted screenshots: http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/

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XMLifying of tutorials
by bulia byak 30 Nov '04

30 Nov '04

As you know, currently tutorials are written directly in SVG. This, among other things, prevents proper automated i18n - if a section changes, a translator will have to manually figure out what changed, manually find the matching text in his translation, and manually change it. Also, producing the tutorials in formats other than SVG is also pretty much manual work. In other words, it looks nice but is a nightmare to maintain. Our attempts to change that ran into difficulties: a script or stylesheet which might generate an SVG tutorial would have to combine text (from some source file, e.g. Docbook) with illustrations (from separate SVG files). To do so, it would need to know the dimensions of the pieces of texts and the illustrations, because everything in SVG is absolutely-positioned. And that was the problem. Now I got an idea: Why not use Inkscape itself for this? Here's how it might work: 1 Add a couple new command line switches to Inkscape that would force it to load the document, find the object with the specified id, and report on the command line the width or height of that object's bbox, then quit. 2 Write an XSLT stylesheet that, for each piece of text, would write a temporary SVG file with it (in flowtext, same as the finished tutorials would use), run Inkscape with these command line switches to figure out its dimensions, and then use these numbers to position it in the final SVG files it produces. Same thing is done with illustrations, except that no temporary files are needed - they are stored separately (and referenced from the master XML source) anyway. If this sounds like a mess, it's not. I've done XSLT running external processes before. It works, and it is even portable (though portability may depend on the processor you use). It will be rather slow but in our case it does not matter much, I guess. So, unless someone invents something still better, I can do 1 above (it will be useful for other things, too), and someone will need to do 2 (with my help if needed). Perhaps 2 can also be done in another language, but I vote for XSLT - it's a very nice and powerful language for XML processing, definitely worth learning.

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Spiral bug
by Gazal, Geraud (GE Healthcare) 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

Hi, playing with the 29nov04 build on win2k, I got a very bad bug with spiral Here is the way to reproduce it : Start inkscape Draw a spiral, then set its divergence to 0.00 Select the spiral, and switch to node or spiral tool Try to modify the spiral with the mouse (inner or outer handle) -> crash with an error pop up : **Error**: file sp-spiral.cpp line 446 (NR::sp_spiral_get_xy(const SPSpiral*, gdouble)): assertion failed: (t>=0.0) aborting... I don't think it has been reported yet. By the way, I'm wondering about the toolbar: being in node tool, when selecting a shape (spiral, ellipse, rectangle, star), it displays node commands, that are not applicable to shapes. would it be possible to have it switch to the appropriate toolbar ? (example : selecting a rectangle -> rectangle tools, then selecting a path -> node tools, ...) Shall I submit a RFE for this ? Regards, Matiphas

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End of freeze - back to regular development
by Bryce Harrington 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

With 0.40 tagged and branched, it's safe to go back into the water. Regular development can resume now. Thanks to everyone who worked at putting out this release, it is going smoothly, and we don't expect any issues. Presently the focus is on packaging, distributing, and PR. Going forward, the plan is to take a good long break for the month of December. If you're worn out from Inkscape development, please disappear and rejoin us when your batteries are recharged! If you're itching to do some coding, scratch away. I'm going to be working on the Gtkmmification stuff, and would welcome anyone wishing to join in on this; the code is in the experimental CVS module currently, and it'll be integrated into the main codebase in the coming weeks. (Note: Since we added several dependencies in the 0.40 release, it would probably be wise to hold off a bit on adding new ones until we see how these do. If you need to add a new dependency, please get a concensus with the other developers before doing so.) Bryce

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Static builds (again)
by Kees Cook 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

Okay. We can take two approaches to the static linux compile: 1- requiring gtk 2.4 already be installed 2- requiring pango 1.0 already be installed Pango does not appear to allow itself to operate as a statically compiled library. As a result, it's use of glib creates dynamic lib deps. I'm going to try to solve that, but it will still require pango dynamic libs. I was shooting for only requiring pango, but this is getting harder and harder. My test-case is a redhat 9 box, and it really doesn't like me: /tmp/inkscape.strip: relocation error: /tmp/inkscape.strip: undefined symbol: g_type_class_add_private So, I'm going to continue working on pango, but I think we can make an operational "static" build that requires gtk 2.4, since that's the bulk of the static lib work I've been trying to make work. Getting gtkmm hasn't been very hard. libgc has some tricks up it's sleeve, but I think I solved those. I'm building an RPM now that basically requires gtk 2.4, but is actually my latest attempt at approach #2. I need someone with an RPM-based distro with gtk 2.4 to test it. All I have is gtk 2.0 on rh9. -- Kees Cook @outflux.net

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Inkscape Release 0.40 Now Available
by Bryce Harrington 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

The official 0.40 tarball is now posted, and is available for download here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438 The Release Notes describing the changes are available here: http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes At this time we are requesting all packagers to create and post packages for the release. Formal announcements for the release will be delayed until Monday evening in order to give a little time for packages to be created and tested. We are also encouraging everyone to assist with the PR push to get word out about this release. If you're interested in writing an article on a topic related to Inkscape, this would be an excellent time to do so. Bryce

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SVG version?
by MenTaLguY 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

While I'm thinking about it, what SVG version should we indicate in our output? If we are including SVG 1.2 features like the flow text stuff, don't we almost have to bump the version number to 1.2? -mental

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Hard Freeze
by Bryce Harrington 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

We've held off on going into hard freeze for a few days, due to several troublesome bugs. However, I'd like to propose that we move ahead with the hard freeze. It's impossible to release a bug-free product. It's understandable and commendable that we hold such a high set of standards for bug-free-ness, but the fact is, we'll have more releases in the future, and we'll _always_ have "one more thing to do..." If for some people, 0.40 won't run, they can stick with 0.39, or wait for 0.41. We've done a large amount of research into the bugs that exist; we can provide a good, detailed 'known issue' list. Heck, maybe this'll give some others inspiration and a headstart on figuring those problems out in the coming weeks. 0.40 has been one of the most energy-intensive releases that Inkscape's done so far. We've integrated a number of new dependencies, added scores of new features, and fixed hundreds of bugs. I would bet folks are getting worn out! With Christmas coming up, we ought to get the release behind us, so folks can enjoy the time off without worrying about Inkscape issues. This is a great release and I think the community's going to really enjoy it. As far as the remaining bugs go, here are some thoughts. The infamous Windows open file and freeze error is the worst remaining bug, however the current working hypothesis is that it's an issue with libgc. It is entirely conceivable that the fix would go against libgc, not inkscape, so may be entirely orthogonal to our release. However, if indeed it is an inkscape problem, it is an intermittent bug, and doesn't occur on every Windows user's box. As well, the use case for it is on file open, rather than save or during work, so the chance of data loss is small. I think we could simply document the problem and ensure users are aware of it, and provide workarounds/solutions later as we find them. The 'windows gets stuck in loop' error is a similarly annoying problem, and does involve data loss. However, it sounds like it is even less reproduceable than the previous one. The other level 9 bugs do not sound very serious to me. Most appear to be issues for a particular user running on a specific configuration (e.g., with Japanese language encodings, or installing with the autopackage snapshot, or when compiled with a particular version of gcc, etc.) All of these need fixing, but I don't think they're critical enough to warrant delaying the release. I suggest we write the hypotheses for each level-9 bug, list them as 'known issues' in the release notes, and move forward with the hard freeze today. Bulia, Mental, Kees, Peter, Jon Cruz, Ishmal, Simarilius, and Ted, how do you feel about moving forward with the release at this time? Bryce

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Updated Norwegian Nynorsk translation of Inkscape
by Karl Ove Hufthammer 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

Here's an updated Norwegian Nynorsk translation of Inkscape. Please commit it to CVS. Hope I'm not to late for 0.40! :) -- Regards, Karl Ove Hufthammer

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Fwd: [Inkscape-devel] Graphics-by banner
by Ana Saiz García 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

I'm very proud to see it in your homepage :o) Only a remark, my first surname isn't García, but Saiz (you know, I'm spanish, so I have two surnames :o)) I'm glad you liked it, thanks for all Ana On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 12:57:03 +0100, Ana Saiz García <anasaiz@...400...> wrote: > thanks to you :o) > > On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:59:53 -0800 (PST), Bryce Harrington > > > <bryce@...260...> wrote: > > Thanks Ana, I've added it to our homepage, and stuck them in our images > > directory. :-) > > > > Bryce > > > > > > > > On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Ana Saiz García wrote: > > > > > Hi all > > > > > > I've been searching for the typical "graphics-by" banner to put it in > > > a web and let all people know I've used Inkscape to make some of the > > > graphics on the web, but i didn't manage to find anything. I don't > > > know whether there is already something like that, but I've done one > > > on my own and I wanted to share it with you in case somebody else want > > > to use it. > > > > > > I don't know if I can send attachments to this list, so I give you two > > > links from where you can download it. > > > > > > Here is the svg: > > > > > > http://david.f.v.free.fr/ana/imagenes/gfx_by_inkscape.svg > > > > > > And here is the png, with a more appropiate size for a banner: > > > > > > http://david.f.v.free.fr/ana/imagenes/gfx_by_inkscape.png > > > > > > Hope you like it :o) > > > > > > Ana > > > > > > > -- > "El más baldío de todos los días > es aquél en que no hemos reído" > (de Chamfort) > > http://www.cosasdedos.net > http://ana.cosasdedos.net > -- "El más baldío de todos los días es aquél en que no hemos reído" (de Chamfort) http://www.cosasdedos.net http://ana.cosasdedos.net -- "El más baldío de todos los días es aquél en que no hemos reído" (de Chamfort) http://www.cosasdedos.net http://ana.cosasdedos.net

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