January 2008 - Inkscape Devel

win32 build working again
by Bob Jamison 08 Apr '24

08 Apr '24

The win32 build, which was broken for the weekend, is working again. I just made a "manual autobuild" again, so that we can see how it looks on Windows: http://troi.titan-aeu.com/~rjamison/inkscape/builds/ Bob

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Smooth transitions in Bézier paths
by Diederik van Lierop 11 Nov '08

11 Nov '08

Hi, I hope you don't mind if I increase the traffic on inkscape-devel even more ;-) At some point an idea popped up to only snap to nodes at discontinuities in paths, and not to nodes at smooth transitions from one Bézier segment to another. This is more intuitive (less "Hey, what it is Inkscape snapping to now?") and might increase performance. Problem is that in the object-snapper I only have access to SPCurve, which is a wrapper for "old-style" NArtBpath. It's easy to find out whether a point is inbetween two Bézier segments, but how do I find out if a transition is smooth? I guess that should be done by comparing the control points, or is there an easier way? With the transition to lib2geom, will the NArtBpath be deprecated in favor of the Path class? (that would make this rather exercise useless in the long run). Any pointers would be appreciated here, Diederik

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question regarding wishblade robocraft support...
by stuart 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

Sorry for posting here if the user list if better. And sorry about the subject if it has been talked about before. I couldn't get sourceforge to add me to the inkscape user mail list and sourceforge was timing out on all my archive searches with no results. --- I remember reading that there was a patch or something to inkscape to support wishblade and robocraft users. Has that been integrated into the inkscape application? Is that what the DXF is all about? Wishblade users can not use DXF directly (needing the robocraft software to import DXF and change it to some sort of native (and maybe proprietary) GSD). Is there a way to get inkscape to save images in GSD in order to simplify the process? Ideally, I would prefer to skip bringing up the wishblade application. In my set up, I do all my work in linux (GIMP/INKSCAPE) and only the plotting in Windows. If I could do everything in linux it would simplify the flow of work greatly. Has anyone figured out how the craftrobo is communicated to in order to use it with common open source linux plotting software? Better yet, has anyone figured out how the wishblade has been crippled in order to use it with common open source linux plotting software? ...thanks

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inkscape git mirror?
by MenTaLguY 18 Jun '08

18 Jun '08

I'm interested in setting up a git mirror of Inkscape SVN; who's the person in charge of our server currently? We'll need to have a fairly current version of git, libsvn, and the libsvn perl bindings installed to do this. -mental

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How to change notification settings in Launchpad?
by Maximilian Albert 26 Feb '08

26 Feb '08

Hi all, sorry if this is a dumb question but how can I change my Launchpad settings so that I do not receive an email each time someone works on one of the bugs? Is this the default behaviour for members of the "Inkscape Bug Team" group? Currently I am sent a notification for each and every change, but I'd prefer not to get my inbox flooded and rather browse the list myself when appropriate. It may be just my infamiliarity with Lauchpad (and lack of time for detailed investigation), but I wasn't able to find out how turn this off. Thanks in advance. Max

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New win32 lib bundle with Dwarf2
by Bob Jamison 26 Feb '08

26 Feb '08

Hi, all, I just uploaded a new lib bundle on the server. It has been over a year since I last updated the C++ libs. I also have wanted for months to move from the existing setjump/longjump (sjlj) exception handling to the new (to MinGW) Dwarf2 EH. Gcc has had Dwarf2 for years, but only recently has MinGW started providing it. It should allow better backtraces and slightly smaller binaries. I made a build with it manually this morning: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/Inkscape-0710221807-dw2.7z I assembled some MinGW binaries to make this working compiler: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32libs/mingw-4.2.1-071022-dw2.7z ...and here is the new bundle. http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32libs/gtk210-071022-dw2.7z Note that the C++ compiler, library bundle, and Inkscape build must all be either sjlj or Dwarf2. You can't mix them, else there will be a linking error. I also added a version of build.xml to the trunk to handle this, build-dw2.xml. This should keep from breaking everyone else's build. To use it: ./btool -f build-dw2.xml Of course there is a corresponding cross-compiler: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32libs/xmingw-4.2.1-dw2.tar.bz2 ...which made this build, which looks ok, but I haven't run yet: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/Inkscape0710230156.7z It looks larger, but none of the DLLs have been stripped yet. From now on, all of the "autobuilds" there will be Dwarf2. Probably in a couple of weeks when everyone catches up, it will become the default. Have fun! ishmal(bob)

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raster effects
by Alexandre Prokoudine 14 Feb '08

14 Feb '08

Hi, Here are several more notes on current implementation of raster effects. 1. Terminology and hints. In some cases terminology used in effects coming from ImageMagick is not quite obvious. For instance, you might want to reread a course on math to understand what "Sigma" stands for in "Sharpen"/"Unsharp Mask" effects ;-) We might either rename some of the labels (not good for experienced ImageMagick users) or provide hints to explain the meaning of each option. 2. Raster effects are not the only ones to suffer from it, but here goes: effect dialogs inherit caption from menu item name. In several cases the caption is too long and is shrinked. This is not quite visually appealing. Two solutions comes to mind: 1) automatically resize dialog to match caption's length and 2) provide a separate string to dialog's caption which translators could try to make smaller. 3. Cancelling isn't working reliably. I run "Reduce noise" on a 2200x1500 picture and when I click "Cancel" nothing really happens. 4.Should we probbaly implement a "Resize" effect too? Alexandre

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Creating guidelines from objects
by Maximilian Albert 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

Hi, I just committed a change to SVN (rev. #17022) which allows the user to convert rectangles and 3D boxes to a collection of guidelines that are aligned along these objects' edges. Originally, this was a stab at something in the direction of RFE #172136 (in particular, it was only meant to work for 3D boxes). But since I'm not familiar yet with grid infrastructure I thought that instead of a grid it would be easier to create a couple of guidelines from a box, which can then be used as a basis for 3D based drawings. Not as functional as a 3D box based grid but better than nothing. Then it occurred to me that it may be even more useful to convert *rectangles* to guides because in this way it becomes much easier to create guidelines in specified positions/constellations (imagine applying it to rotated or skewed rectangles). So I implemented this as well and added an additional menu entry "Object->Objects to guides" which allows conversion to guidlines of any rects or 3D boxes in the current selection. Now I have some questions. 1) I'm not sure if this kind of change should occur during Frost phase (I couldn't ask for an exception before because I hadn't thought of it at that time). But since IMHO it's an extremely useful yet very lightweight change - even if a couple of files were adapted - and I don't see any way in which this can possibly break things, I committed it anyway. If it is not desired and should be held back until after 0.46, please feel free to revert it. 2) Originally I added a button to the 3D box toolbar which allowed conversion of selected boxes to guides. After providing this option for rects, I also added this button to the rect toolbar, but then I thought it might also make sense in (at least) Selector tool, so I decided not to clutter the toolbars and removed the buttons altogether in favor of the menu entry. Do you think there is any value for such buttons? 3) I added the keyboard shortcut 'Shift+G' for conversion to guides in Rect, 3D Box and Selector tools. Do you think this is appropriate (I personally find it very handy to have a quickly accessible shortcut in these tools) or should there rather be a global shortcut associated with the corresponding verb? What would be an appropriate one? Thanks, Max P.S.: Release Notes will be updated in case this change is accepted for 0.46. BTW, I'm aware that I still need to update them for the 3D box tool and other things. Will do so as soon as possible.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] [Inkscape-user] Interested in helping on os x
by jiho 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

On 2008-January-31 , at 00:45 , carl olsen wrote: > I'm very interested in contributing to the project. I have > intermediate programing experience, but need someone to mentor me. I > pick this stuff up pretty fast so I just need to get in touch with > someone who knows about developing on os x and can tell me what to > work on. That's great news! If you are looking into developing the OS X side of Inkscape (integration with the OS, appearance, building with native GTK), it has been my area of focus for a while. I don't have much time right now but know what needs to be done and where to look. If you are interested in developing Inkscape in more general sense and that OS X just happens to be your platform of choice, there are at least two people you can contact: Jon Cruz (jon at joncruz.org) and Michael Wybrow (michael.wybrow at infotech.monash.edu.au). They have been silent for a little while though, so you may need to be patient to get an answer. However, developing on OS X is quite straightforward and very similar to the process on Linux (we don't use XCode or any other OS X specific environment, so you only need a text editor, a terminal, gcc and make). Once you get Inkscape to compile as per these instructions: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingMacOsX you're ready to go (I advise you to remove the option --enable-osxapp at configure time and just keep Inkscape as a plain command line app, which is easier to debug and run with special options). Then, to know more about Inkscape internals, development practices or what's on the wish list, subscribe to the devel mailing list and hang out on the IRC channel, you'll find plenty of clever people there. It's release time right now so focus is on bug fixes and major development has to happen in branches. You can use a SVN branch or use git locally (via git-svn) and prepare your patches with it. The "rule" is that, once you get two solid patches accepted, you are given direct SVN access. Thanks for offering your help! PS: I'm ccing you and the devel list so that people hav your address if they want to reply directly. However you should really subscribe to the devel list afterwards. JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/

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Feature missing from Roadmap
by Michael Grosberg 11 Feb '08

11 Feb '08

Correct me if I'm wrong, but skimming the roadmap I was unable to find any reference to work on a swatch palette for named colors, grdients and patterns. I'm talking about a single dialog where the user can create named colors which would later be referenced by name in the XML (I don't know if SVG allows it) - for example, suppose I create buttons and other graphic elements for a website design. I have many of them and they are differently shaped. I might want to paint them with a blue color. I then create a new swatch, name it "buttonBackground" and set all the background rectangles to use it. Later, I may want to change the entire color scheme of the website - in this case all I need to do is just access that swatch and change its value to, say, red - and all The button backgrounds immediately update. I feel this is a very basic, important feature missing from Inkscape. I know from experience I use this extensively on other applications, and even on Inkscape I try to fake this feature by creating gradients with two identical colors and sharing them between shapes (but it's awkward and the gradients can't be named and are hard to find among the long list of used gradients in a large document).

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