February 2007 - Inkscape Devel

A Survey on Defect Management Practices in Free/Open Source Software
by Anu Gupta DCSA 23 Feb '07

23 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...

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Markers - fix for 'none' bug
by Bryce Harrington 23 Feb '07

23 Feb '07

There was a bug in the recent marker work where markers weren't getting removed from lines if you picked "none". I had disabled the code that makes the 'none' marker work, because doing so prevented an event cascade. So this fixes the event cascade - basically, this temporarily disables the "changed" signal handler when we're updating the marker menus, so the changes don't trigger additional "changed" signals. There is still one bug I know of - if you click on one of the numerical entry boxes on the stroke style page, before clicking the marker dropdown, then when you open the marker dropdown you see two separators rather than 'None' and one separator. But this bug has been around for quite some time. Let me know if you spot any other bugs. Bryce

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Addition of fill to Calligraphy tool
by John Cliff 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

Hi guys, I've Modified the calligraphy tool to create a fill shape as well as a stroke shape. The 2 are grouped so they act like one object in selector. Patch is in the tracker, #1666582 still todo: * Need to fix the setting of the styles of the 2 objects, they just get the current style at the minute, want to fill the stroke with the current stroke, fill with the current fill. * Want to put a check box in the toolbar to enable/disable generation of fills, so that people wanting the old way of working can have it still. Its been a long time since i touched the codebase, and I'm very rusty, so would appreciate some code review before this gets commited to svn. comments are welcomed, just cant promise how swift updates will be. Cheers Sim ____________________________________________________________________________________ No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started. http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail

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Obtaining compiler warnings
by unknown＠example.com 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

Does anybody know a way to neatly catch compiler warnings on windows? I'd like to only see a list of compiler warnings, instead of the complete compiler commandline as it is now. For example: It would be very nice if the buildtool could generate a separate file (say compiler-out.txt) in which all special compiler messages are put such as: gradient-context.cpp:325: warning: 'pointtype' may be used uninitialized in this function Thanks! Johan

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Grip snapping to visible grid lines only
by Daniel Pope 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

I was just experiencing an issue with grid snapping: I wanted objects to be pixel-aligned, so I turned on a 1px grid with snap. However, Inkscape only draws lines every 10px or so, and this is the snap I end up with. I have to zoom to 800% to be able to get single-pixel snap, which is too close to be able to see what I want to do. I went to report this as a bug but it's already been reported as 1505815 which is marked WONTFIX on the grounds that this is intentional. What's the rationale behind this behaviour? Without wanting to revisit it too much if this has been discussed before, I can think of only one reason why this is beneficial: 1. What you see is what you get. Whereas under my expected behaviour (specified grid was respected) 1. What you specify is what you get. 2. Zoom-independence. 3. Can work at 1:1 and use grids finer than 8px. 3. Everything else I've tried works this way eg. XaraLX, Flash Put another way, would anyone have any objections to re-opening this? Dan

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Extension parameters
by Romain Thouvenin 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

I wanted to slight modify webbrower_* extensions so that they directly bring to the web page in the relevant language when it exists. I thought the good way to do that would have been to give the address as a translatable parameter that is not set by the user, but I didn't find how to do that, it seems impossible. I guess it is impossible, since there are several extensions for visiting a web page. Am I right ? Do you have an idea to work around my problem ? Maybe using a parameter proposing the different languages to the user ? Romain

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Marker menu dynamic updating
by Bryce Harrington 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

I've committed a fix to one of the marker menu bugs. Previously, the marker menu had been split to show markers in the <defs> above the line only if they were non-stock markers. However, the problem happens that if one alters the stock marker in the <defs> section without changing its ID, it doesn't show at all in the menu. Now, the menu shows ALL markers from <defs> above the line, regardless of whether they're stock or not. This obviously has the downside that for people who use a lot of stock markers, the menu will get cluttered, however I suspect that may be a less common use case than we thought initially. Also, a more important underlying change is that in order to do this I've added some svg preview cache code based on code used by the icon renderer. This allows us to render each marker preview once, instead of three times (once for each menu), and avoids performance trouble if the marker menu is dynamically changed. (I needed to dynamically update the marker menus when selecting stock id's to ensure that if you select a stock id, it immediately shows up in the above-the-line markers in all three menus.) This will also eventually help solve a problem where if you have the fill-and-stroke dialog open when switching between two docs with custom markers, it doesn't update properly; I haven't fixed this, but just need to figure out how to hook in with the callback for "document selection changed". (This dynamic marker menu underlying structure is also needed for future anticipated changes to the marker system...) Bryce

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Senior Project: SVG Crush
by Ted Gould 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

Hey, So as we're talking about GSoC I also realized it's time to come up with an idea for a senior project. Here's the one I'm thinking about proposing. I'd love it if anyone has any ideas or suggestions about how to improve it. SVG Crunch SVG is a XML vector graphics format standardized by the W3C for use in the Web. It is currently supported by most major browsers and is increasingly being seen on websites. As it continues to grow in popularity economic pressures will start to come into play. Even though bandwidth has become cheaper, it is still not free. This project is to create a utility to remove excess information in an SVG file to reduce its overall size. Phase One -- Basic XML compression -- There are some basic things that can be done to an XML file to make it smaller. Things like removing spaces and carriage returns. Also renaming name spaces from things like "mathml" to "m". The optimizations are simple but important. At the end of this phase the file should be no different to an XML parser. Phase Two -- SVG Compression -- SVG provides several ways that file size can be reduced as part of the format. These some of these include: using a "pointer tag" (use) to refer to objects that are identical; allowing style to inherit down the XML hierarchy; groups to take style for a set of objects; and many more. These optimizations should be applied to the document in order to reduce the size of the file. At the end of this phase the files should render no differently on an SVG renderer. Phase Three -- Display specific compression -- As a vectored format SVG provides elements that can be rendered at any resolution, but rarely does a graphic on the web need to be zoomed in at 1600%. This phase of the compression should focus on removing the precision of numbers and in some cases removing points that are unnecessary based on a target resolution provided by the user. At the end of this phase the files should look no different to a human at the target resolution. This project will be developed and published as an open source project. It can be done in any language that has an XML library available for it. Thanks, Ted

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8080s no more
by Aaron Spike 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

I think we've fixed the 8080s in the wiki urls. Try to prove me wrong. Aaron Spike

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Fixed_g_ascii_strtod
by unknown＠example.com 20 Feb '07

20 Feb '07

Due to a recent compile error, I have found the following in fixed.cpp: /* * until 2004-04-22, g_ascii_strtod could not handle having a locale-based * decimal separator immediately following the number ("5,4" would * parse to "5,4" instead of "5.0" in fr_FR) * * This is the corrected function, lifted from 1.107 gstrfuncs.c in glib */ It defines a function fixed_g_ascii_strtod and config.h defines a macro to point g_ascii_strtod to fixed_g_ascii_strtod. Perhaps it is ok now to purge the fixed function from our code and use the normal function? (trying to build now with "#define g_ascii_strtod fixed_g_ascii_strtod" commented out, but since that'll take a while a decided to already mail this) Cheers, Johan

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