February 2007 - Inkscape Devel

Inkscape Project Status
by Bryce Harrington 02 Mar '07

02 Mar '07

Just to give some visibility into some of the work bubbling away these days: Cairo renderer: Bulia has taken point on investigation of conversion to Cairo. Some tough problems have been uncovered but we're gaining a clearer picture of what needs done. Presently this looks like it will require an all at once brute force approach, rather than incremental refactoring. If so, we'll need to reach a decision on how to undertake that while minimizing disruption to SVN HEAD users. Build system: There is definitely a concensus that our current build system sucks. Options include CMAKE, Bob's buildtool, or just a cleaned up automake. We really need to have interested parties mind meld and find a single solution. Version control system: Mental has been experimenting with git and trying to get it to operate with svn. This study is still very early on, but if it works out well, one day we may begin encouraging developers to use git. Bug tracking: I have been experimenting with use of Mantis with the goal of replacing our SF bug tracker. It looks good, but the principle issue is how to migrate the bugs and their history from SF to Mantis. I'm also interested in seeing if it can be combined well with Drupal, maybe along with Pootle. Any drupalheads out there? Manual: We've got a good unofficial non-free manual/book and several [semi-]official incomplete free manuals. There is discussion about if efforts can be combined to produce a good official free manual. Anyway, I've probably missed something, but I think that covers the pending changes that are percolating. Most of these would benefit from discussion, so we can make sure there is a rough concensus favoring the change - so if you have concerns about any of these changes, now's a good chance to bring 'em up. Bryce

11 15

official inkscape user docs
by ryan lerch 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

hi all, i have a query about the _official_ user docs for inkscape. i am wondering if it is being developed actively at the moment, and if it is, how do i help out? i have found bits of information about it on the wiki, however it refers to the docbook files in the CVS. i cannot seem to find these files in SVN. is the docbook stuff ancient history? if so would it be feasable to use the wiki as a collaboration tool for developing the official user docs more? sorry if this is all in the wiki somewhere, but the details (to me at least) seem a bit sketchy and spread out a bit... cheers, ryanlerch

6 10

Re: [Inkscape-devel] GSoC 2007 is ON!!
by Jon Phillips 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 14:11 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote: > It's great to see this program continuing again this year. > > Just to illustrate how huge of an impact this project has had, last > year Google funded two students to work for Inkscape on implementing > 'gaussian blur'. Gaussian Blur is what allows things like drop > shadows, feathering, blurring, etc. This was a very significant and > challenging feature to get implemented, and required a good bit of > effect to get it perfected, but those two students put in the bones > for it. > > To give an idea of how profoundly this has improved Inkscape, take a > look at these examples, that almost seem photorealistic: > > http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-volumetric-light.png > http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-photorealistic-car2.p… > http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-cupoftea.png > http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45363866/ > > Thanks google! It will be exciting to see what advancements this > year's GSoC students will produce. :-) > > Bryce > Heya all, I stubbed out a space on our wiki to brainstorm about good ideas (which some have done on the wiki). Please take a chance to help motivate that wiki page, edit out the old 2006 ideas (as it is currently just that list), and come up with some stellar ideas: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code_2007 Anyway, the GSoC timeline is coming along quickly....fun!!!! Jon -- Jon Phillips San Francisco, CA USA PH 510.499.0894 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org MSN, AIM, Yahoo Chat: kidproto Jabber Chat: rejon@...896... IRC: rejon@...897...

6 9

scripting interface
by unknown＠example.com 01 Mar '07

01 Mar '07

Hello, I try to add some new Python scripts to Inkscape in a project with my students. We need information where the ".inx"-file interface is described. There are other types than only int, bool, float or string to be passed to the script. But we did not find a description how to. Can anyone give us a hint where to find the file format definition of the ".inx" file and where to find some working examples? 2nd question: If anything is detected to be wrong when the script is running, is there a way to inform the user about it? Thanks in advance Werner

4 4

Solaris binary of Inkscape?
by Bryce Harrington 28 Feb '07

28 Feb '07

There's been a private request from a company needing to run Inkscape from the commandline on Solaris 8. Would anyone be interested in working with this company to complete this port? Let me know and I'll put you in touch. Bryce

2 1

Calling All Artists and Designers: The Open Font Library Logo Competition Announced
by ryan lerch 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

The Open Font Library (OFL.o, www.openfontlibrary.org) is proud to announce the commencement of the Open Font Library Logo competition today, February 26, 2007. Artists and designers of all ranges are invited to make a logo to help identify the project. Judging will take place by contributors to the project, Alex Roberts (bovinity), Liftarn, and Zeimusu, who will select the winning logo. The last chance to submit submissions is March 14, 2007 at 11:59 PM PST. After that, the judges will select a logo within five days from the submission closing date. Other guidelines on the contest include that all submissions must be dedicated to the public domain in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format which may be edited in all major drawing application, like the free SVG editor Inkscape (www.inkscape.org). Also, contributors may upload as many submissions as they would like and optionally submit bitmap graphics showing how their logo might look on the site. The project is not wed to the current green color on the site, so please feel free to think of how the site should be colored around your submission. The Open Font Library encourages all participants to join the Open Font Library mailing list to discuss this competition and to participate in the project. Also, for the time being, discussion about this project is happening on channel #openclipart on irc.freenode.net for any interested parties. While this competition is about creating a great logo, the project hopes to interest hopeful font designers and software developers in building up this project. Join Mailing List http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlibrary About Open Font Library The Open Font Library's (www.openfontlibrary.org) major goal is to create an archive of freely usable fonts for anyone to download. If this sounds familiar, its because it is newborn sister project to the Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org). While the OFL.o's site is fresh, with few fonts, the goal is to build it up so that it can be useful to the free and open source communities (and world). For More Information: Please see http://openfontlibrary.org/?ccm=/OFLBLogo for details about this contest. It closes March 14 at 11:59 PM PST.

1 0

Getting menu items from class Desktop
by Irfan Hamid 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

Hi, Newbie question follows: I'm trying to fix bug #1664790 ("Display mode toggle doesn't update radio button"). Today's the first time I have delved into the Inkscape sources. I've got the hang of how the menu UI portion is generated automatically and how verbs work (more or less). I've also been able to trace my way to the Desktop class's setDisplayModeNormal( ) and setDisplayModeOutline( ) functions which is where I should implement logic to toggle the radio button change for it to happen. Question is, how to get the GTK widget handle for the main menu bar? I couldn't find any helper functions in Desktop nor any in events.cpp TIA, Irfan.

2 1

A Reminder : A Survey on Defect Management Practices in Free/Open Source Software
by Anu Gupta DCSA 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

Sir/Madam I seek help from designers, developers, testers,defect fixers,project managers or playing any other key role in Free/Open Source software development or maintenence in carrying out a study to identify practices and problems of defect management in various Free/Open Source Software projects. The insights gained from the study can further help us to extract publicly accessible defect data and determine impact of defect management practices on software quality. Please spend a few minutes of your precious time to fill up the Questionnaire. The most of the questions follow multiple choice formats and are quite easy to answer. To have the Online Questionnaire, please visit: http://anu.puchd.ac.in/phpESP/public/survey.php?name=FOSS_Defect_Survey (You can also copy and paste this link into your browser, and hit the 'Return' key.) I hope you will find all the questions interesting and thought-provoking. Your answers will be kept anonymous.The data thus collected will only be used for research purpose.It would be nice if you may further refer this mail to others actively engaged with Free/Open Source Software development. If you have any query or suggestions then feel free to contact. Thank You With regards, Anu Gupta Senior Lecturer Department of Computer Science and Applications, Panjab University, Chandigarh. INDIA In case of any problem in accessing/using the above mentioned link please contact: E-mail: anugupta@...1665... anugupta98@...400...

1 0

Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: flood fill
by Joshua Facemyer / Impressus Art 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

These work? > - we need a better icon for it - icon artists anyone? > > - we need a matching b/w mouse cursor for the tool

2 5

git on win32
by Aaron Spike 27 Feb '07

27 Feb '07

The recent morbid talk of creating a branch for cairo conversion work makes me think, wouldn't an SCM like git be a huge facilitator for such work? In my mind the one thing that makes branching such a negative is SVN. IMHO SVN is branch possible but not branch friendly. I've only used git for a few small (and mostly linear) projects at work. So I don't have a huge base of knowledge to speak from. I know mental has been doing quite a bit of research into the workflow for using git locally in combination with a central SVN repo. He would be much more capable to comment on its suitability for Inkscape. (Hopefully he will summarize his for the rest of us sometime.) One apparent downer is git's level of support for win32. So I thought I'd take a chance to mention a couple of the options in case anyone wants to check them out. 1) git via cygwin. Two major complaints I've heard are: a) that git is slower on cygwin than it is on native unix. Well, of course it is but rarely do you see a comparison with SVN on windows. I did just recently run across the following quote: "Note: At the time of writing, GIT does not run natively on MSWindows platforms. Several projects are underway to port GIT to Windows but they are not complete yet. It is possible to use git on Win32 via Cygwin, but with slightly worse performance (note: v1.4.5 has several performance enhancements on Cygwin) though even on Cygwin GIT is much faster than CVS or SVN." -- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tracking_Moodle_CVS_with_git b) installing cygwin is complex. Perhaps we could lessen this perceived complexity for our devs by providing a unified package as we do for libraries. I recall seeing a few packages that distribute portions of cygwin like this. In case anyone wants to try, the most detailed description of running git on cygwin that I have found is at http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/WindowsInstall?action=show . 2) mingw git fork. Apparently there is a usable fork of git built with mingw. Info at http://repo.or.cz/w/git/mingw.git . So maybe win32 won't keep us from git forever. Aaron Spike

3 2