January 2008 - Inkscape Devel

whiteboard continuation
by unknown＠example.com 14 Jan '08

14 Jan '08

Actually whiteboard is not compiled by default, because there is no one to work on it, and then not enough resources to respond to a huge flow of bugreport. After a short discussion on IRC, the idea was, in a first time to know what is the actual state of the whiteboard, to undertand if it usable or if everything has to be throwed or restarted ? : I addeddocumentation on the wiki on how to compile and use it. I started it here : http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/WhiteBoard If someone found freetime to meet on inkscape whiteboard via jabber and list what work and what don't work today. Depending of the effort done by people able to compile it with the --enable-whitboard option activated the project could continue or be throuwed out of the inkscape trunk. I've myself compiled it, was able to connect to jabber server but don't know other one that have whiteboard enable Inkscape. I will not have time until saturday to test it. If someone can test it with me saturday, I will be happy to share funny crappy drawings. ;) Else if two people have time to test it and report the results on this page, that's good too... Regards, Popolon

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Inkscape Thread Safety
by Joel Holdsworth 14 Jan '08

14 Jan '08

Hi All, I'm wondering how easy it would be to make the whole inkscape back-end thread safe, so that for example, SVGs can be parsed and rendered from within worker threads. Does anyone have any idea why it's not thread-safe already? The reason I'm asking is because I've noticed a couple of scenarious such as PNG export, and quickly flicking between complex SVG files in the file dialogs, where the whole application locks up, in some cases for many minutes, with no way to cancel. Right now the renderer is required to run in the UI thread - even if it's a "headless" rendering such as in PNG export. That seems odd to me. Any thoughts on this subject? Maybe I should add it as a blueprint in launchpad. Thanks Joel

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Frost status (nearing end)
by Bryce Harrington 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

Hi all, Quick recap of where we're standing today with the release: * Complete frost exception development work. ALMOST MET - PDF/PS Blur as bitmap work is still in progress. Adib is working on this, but needs Simarilius' help. - Two packaging projects are still open (afaik), but they're not blockers for progressing to Freeze * Focus should be on bug fixes, packaging, documentation, and translation work, all of which may be committed to SVN normally. MET - The number of milestoned critical bugs has been reduced to 5, which puts us in a good position for Freeze. - Translation is making good progress, even though we've not hit string freeze yet. - I don't have a good view on how our documentation is at present. I assume it's in an acceptable state. * Gain some candidate submissions for the About Screen contest. MET - Voting concluded today on a number of quite good entries. - This should be wrapping up * Release Notes should be >90% filled in. MET - JonCruz, rejon, and gustav have some sections to fill in - Overview needs fleshed out a bit more * Bug Hunt ALMOST MET - Good progress here; we're nearing our point goal. If each of us can adopt and close one bug, we should be done soon. * Post inkscape-0.46-alpha0.tar.gz NOT MET - Ted has volunteered to package it up and post it soonish.

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Keyboard shortcuts in tooltips?
by Maximilian Albert 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

Hi, some time ago there was a discussion about adding keyboard shortcuts to the tooltips in the various toolbars (although I can't find the corresponding posts right now). I have done this in my local repository but wanted to ask before committing it to SVN because - I'm not sure if this causes too much overhead for translators - maybe I'm overlooking something about user-specific personal adaptions to shortcuts or localized versions, etc., that makes shortcuts in the tooltips useless for some reason. Just wanted to make sure that this is really desired. Max P.S.: I seem to remember that the consensus was also to display the mnemonic shortcuts in the toolbox (rather than 'F1', 'F2', etc.). I wasn't able to find the location where these are set, though. If this change is agreed upon, too, could someone point me to the corresponding file? Thanks.

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Win32 snapshots
by Bill Baxter 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

What's the canonical location for inkscape win32 snapshots? There seem to be several places to get them from and they aren't quite the same. This snapshot: inkscape-0801090900.7z from here: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32-snap/ Will output pdf via Cairo, but text is flipped. (As I reported earlier.) However this snapshot: Inkscape0801091456.7z >From here: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/ Just crashes when you try to output pdf via Cairo. --bb

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help needed: my patch does not link properly
by the Adib 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

hello all, I prepared a patch that should do a blur_as_bitmap. simarilius introduced two new files but it fails on linking. Could please someone check why. The patch is on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/m6b26c006 I already did: ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make clean && make but no luck thx for any coments Adib.

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make dist fails
by theAdib 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

running make dists on current svn fails. This is because of to long filenames in /packaging/macosx/Resources/themes/Clearlooks-Quicksilver-OSX/gtk-2.0/Scrollbars_1 and other files in that directory. The maximum allowed number of characters for the full path is 99. Any solution? Should we use other technology instead of tar? (7zip or zip)? HTH, Adib. ---

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Inkscape Answers site
by Bryce Harrington 13 Jan '08

13 Jan '08

Hi all, I suspect a lot of people already know about this hidden corner of Launchpad, but for those that don't, we have an Answers site: http://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/ Essentially, it's a tech support forum, for users to ask questions about using Inkscape. If it turns out their question is really a bug, they can be directed to file one "next door", (or you can do it for them, and then link the bug to the question.) It's nice in that it's more structured than a plain forum - you can mark questions as "Answered", "Solved", "Needs Info", etc. Also, answering questions of users also adds to your Launchpad karma score, especially if your answer results in "solving" the user's issue. Even though we've not advertised it much, I notice it's getting a good bit of use, with a couple dozen questions asked, well over half solved, and all but 3 answered. The answers people are giving are well considered and thorough. I get the sense that users are finding it a reliable way to get their questions addressed, and I bet it will serve as a good reference for users going forward. So, if you're ever bored looking at bugs, click on over to Answers and see if there's a question or two you think you can answer. Bryce

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An easy way to hide things?
by Bill Baxter 12 Jan '08

12 Jan '08

How about putting "Hide" (and "Lock") entries on the right-click context menu? Seems like it's a little bit of a pain to hide (and lock) things right now. Unless there's some secret key stroke that the manual doesn't mention. It's also odd to me that there's an "Unhide all" and "Unlock all" on the main Object menu, but no hide or lock options. --bb

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Selecting objects in tweak context
by Maximilian Albert 12 Jan '08

12 Jan '08

Hi, in tweak context it is not possible to select objects by simply clicking on them. When looking into this I realized that this seems to be intentional since clicking on something does perform a light change (at least, that's what the code and the additional entry in the undo history suggest). However, in my (very decent, admittedly) applications of the tweak tool I have never seen a case where this small change was actually visible. And imho not being able to click-select something is such a major deviation from the usual/expected behaviour that it should be considered enabling this in the tweak tool, too - at the expense of losing the hardly useful "do a light change" option (which can otherwise be achieved by reducing the force parameter). What do people think? Max

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