March 2008 - Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Inkscape 0.46 Released!
by Bryce Harrington 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

The Inkscape community today is announcing the release of the newest version of its open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape 0.46 is a major update that introduces native PDF support. The implementation of PDF support in Inkscape provides an easy, open source solution to editing PDF documents. Tons of new features and performance improvements are included in this release. Dialogs now have the ability to be docked to the editing window. Gradients can be edited completely on-canvas. The new Paint Bucket Tool fills bounded areas with color. A new 3D Box tool helps create perspective-correct drawings. A new Tweak tool provides an intuitive method for editing paths and painting objects. The new Live Path Effects feature can create "brushes" and various organic effects on paths. Improvements to color management include support for color spaces other than sRGB. Most SVG filters are now implemented, and a new powerful UI is provided for editing filter stacks. == Downloading Inkscape 0.46 == Inkscape 0.46 is already included by default in Ubuntu Hardy so just install it normally. Ubuntu Gutsy users can install by adding the following to System : Admin : Software Sources : Third-Party Software: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main Macintosh OS X users can download a Leopard Universal package from our SourceForge site: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438 Packages for Fedora, Debian, Windows, and other platforms should be coming soon. == For more information == Complete Release Notes for 0.46: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes046 Community Contributed Screenshots: http://inkscape.org/screenshots/ Bryce

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website needs "latest" fixed
by Jon A. Cruz 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

The top still lists 0.45.1 as the latest stable, and the download link also still goes there. https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/206996 Can someone with main access tweak that to point to the latest. thanks.

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Proposal: use std::iostream and friends instead of Inkscape::IO
by Krzysztof Kosiński 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

Hello, I had a look at the stream classes used to output SVG to flies and memory while working on fixing the clipboard bug. The functionality of those classes is largely the same as std::iostream and the related class hierarchy. I think Inkscape could switch from its own stream implementation to the standard library streams. This would, among other things, reduce the complexity of the application and the size of the codebase. Is there some good reason Inkscape uses its own stream implementation instead of the standard streams? BTW, you might want to look at this before replying: http://spec.winprog.org/streams/ Regards, Krzysztof (Chris) Kosiński -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Proposal%3A-use-std%3A%3Aiostream-and-friends-instead… Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Inkscape Classes?
by Bryce Harrington 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

Ubuntu does a really cool thing by holding online "classes" on various topics, like making patches, using Launchpad, doing Screencasts, etc. [1] Other FOSS projects do similar. I think it would be very worthwhile for us to do something like this - brief 101-level intros to various topics (both usage and development), if enough of us are able to teach. How it'd work, is we'd set up #inkscape-classroom in IRC with logging, and publish a timeline of classes. The teacher would prepare their lesson plan, including screenshots, sample files, etc., then run the class for 1 hour (max) and answer questions, and afterwards put the IRC log into wiki (and clean it up a bit), for future reference. Some random ideas for topics: * Using Live Path Effects * Using Filter Effects * Creating Icons using Inkscape * Web Design using Inkscape * The Open Clip Art Library * Google SoC Primer * Translation 101 * Launchpad 101 * Refactoring 101 * Scripting Effects 101 * Bug Triage * Debugging Inkscape * Maintaining the Inkscape Windows Port etc. etc. What do you guys think? Does this sound like a good idea? Would you be interested in teaching a class, or have ideas for topics not listed above? If there's enough interest (6+ teachers), I'll go ahead and start organizing it. Bryce [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek

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Cairo-1.5.14
by Bob Jamison 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

Hi all, I tried Cairo-1.5.14 out today and it works fine. One small problem, though. It breaks Cairomm. If you try compiling with it, you will encounter the error: 'CAIRO_FONT_TYPE_ATSUI_replaced_by_CAIRO_FONT_TYPE_QUARTZ' was not declared in this scope This is because 1.5.14 has a small API change, using the QUARTZ names now instead of ATSUI. Cairomm does not have that change yet, even the version on their server. If you still want to try Cairo-1.5.14, just change line 195 in cairomm/enums.h from: FONT_TYPE_ATSUI = CAIRO_FONT_TYPE_ATSUI to FONT_TYPE_ATSUI = CAIRO_FONT_TYPE_QUARTZ Happy hacking. bob

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UI ideas for next version(s) of Inkscape
by Michael Grosberg 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

The usual disclaimer... not a programmer, but perhaps some GSOC participant would find my suggestions worthy of implementation. Inkscape has gained some pretty impressive features lately, but complexity has taken a toll on the UI. It now contains many icons, toolbars, and dialogs, and these UI elements take a lot of space, even on a large monitor. he problem is even more pronounced on an Ubuntu desktop where the GTK theme forces Inkscape to render all toolbars using extra large icons, making it too large for many resolutions. The dialogs are also too large, with oversized controls and a lot of spacing, and you can barely fit a couple of them on each side when they are docked. Gimp had a similar problem and they solved it by introducing a "small" theme that users can st, which makes all the icons and widgets smaller. I think Inkscape could benefit from using such a theme. Another great UI improvement would be to make inkscape remember the windows settings between sessions. Currently whenever I open a new session of Inkscape I have to resize the window and turn on a couple of dialogs - layers and fill & stroke. Then I have to resize the dialogs themselves because the layer dialog opens with hardly any space to show more than one layer. It would be great if Inkscape could remember those settings between sessions. One last thing, a very small one - I think having layer dialog icon next to the other dialog icons on the right size of the main toolbar could be useful.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] UI ideas for next version(s) of Inkscape
by MenTaLguY 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

On Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:07:14 +0300, "Alexandre Prokoudine" <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:57 PM, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote: > >> > I'd say, bug themes developers. I've used a number of really small >> > GTK+ themes like Gummy Orange. They are cool, but not available by >> > default in distros. >> >> We want some widgets to be normal size, though. >> >> Really what GTK+ should have is some way to request various standard >> sizes for widgets; "large", "normal", "small", "tiny", or something >> along those lines. A lot of other widget toolkits provide such a >> facility (e.g. Cocoa and Qt). >> >> -mental > > Did you want to send this offlist? ;-) Er, whoops. No, meant to include the list. -mental

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SoC'08 SVG Fonts application
by Felipe Sanches 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

As suggested on http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SOC_Writing_Project_Proposals I am sending you a first draft of my application so that you can comment on it. I also expect to find out who would be interested in mentoring this one. Please, tell me if I forgot to mention something important. JucaBlues == About Me == My name is Felipe C. da S. Sanches, known on Inkscape community as JucaBlues. I study Electrical Engeneering with emphasys on Telecomunications on University of São Paulo, Brazil. My contributions to Inkscape are described later on this SoC application. I like a lot to deal with computer graphics and I have been ploting pixels since 11 years old, when I started to learn computer programming by myself on an old 386 with QBASIC and MS-DOS. Later I learned C, C++ and x86 Asm. Recently I have also played a bit with javascript and python. Currently I am working 20 hours a week on web development (using the django framework) on a brazilian startup. I will continue employed there during SoC. I have some small free software projects started by myself. Often very small and unimportant stuff. During some time I have contributed with bug reporting and feature requests to some big projects such as Mediawiki and Firefox, and I have aprox. 3 lines of code incorporated in DemocracyTV (now called Miro), but I did not get commit rights on those projects, so I won't count them. The first big project I am involved with a lot of coding is Inkscape. == My first contact with Inkscape == I first heard about Inkscape when I was looking for a free software drawing tool. I needed to draw the schematics of wood cuts for my pinball machine. You can see my (not yet finished) homebrew pinball machine at www.flickr.com/photos/felipesanches By that time Inkscape was on version 0.43 and I remember I got very impressed by the about screen drawing. == How I got interested on coding for inkscape == After some time I started designing some SVG images for my hexamines game ( http://code.google.com/p/hexamines/). I had to set the CC-licensing metadata for a lot of files and I didn't know it was possible to do it easily using templates, so I decided to write a patch to make a "default metadata settings" UI. This patch, and a fix to a bug in itself, gave me svn commit rights. Later, the patch was considered confusing and not that much useful and was reverted. But since I saw myself, for the first time, with commit access to a free software project, I got excited about that and decided to pick something to work on. I saw some work going on filters UI (Nicholas Bishopp's SoC) and decided that filter renderers would be something cool to implement. == Work done on Inkscape == Last year I have implemented in Inkscape some of the SVG filter renderers. More precisely, these ones: feTurbulence, feDisplacementMap, feFlood, feColorMatrix, feConvolveMatrix, feImage, feMorphology and feComponentTransfer. I have also worked a bit on the filters user interface. I have implemented the filters infobox (which gives users instructions on what each filter primitive does). I have designed all of the icons used on this infobox(*). I have also added all of the tooltips for the filters UI. I have recently adapted the 0.46 About Screen to some languages, based on advice given by people at inkscape-translator list. == What I intend to do on GSoC'08 == Basic SVG Font rendering support. This does not include UI for the SVG Fonts. === Parameter loading === Some time ago I started work on sp-font.{cpp,h}, sp-glyph.{cpp,h}, sp-missing-glyph.{cpp,h} and sp-glyph-kerning.{cpp,h}. These are not functional yet. I intend to complete their implementation, so that svg parameters related to SVG Fonts are correctly parsed. This will probably also need refactoring (as I understand that having these implemented as C++ classes is a main target for 0.47) I will need advice on the refactoring part of this task. (or, alternativelly, I will look at already refactored code in order to find out) === Laying Out Text === I intend to write code that uses Pango to layout text that uses SVG Fonts. Although I have never used pango before, so this is the part of my SoC work where I mostly need advice. I suppose that it is possible to setup a font and provide its metrics and details to pango, and then hook the glyphs handled by pango on code that properly creates the NRArenaItems and render the glyphs that are described by arbitrary SVG. It will depend on the capability of reading the proper coordinates of the glyphs after being laid out by pango. I also heard something about cairo's user font support. I wish somebody could explain this to me. This part of my SoC proposal can be improved once I figure out these things clearer. === future ideas (not to be implemented for SoC'08) === Here I include some ideas that I would possibly work on after I finish the SoC tasks. * SVG Fonts to TrueType (or other font formats) conversion and vice-versa * SVG Fonts User Interface Offtopic Notes: (*) The bird photograph was shot by my daddy. If you are interested, you can take a look at his work at www.flickr.com/photos/dariosanches

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My application for you to critize (thanks in advance!)
by unknown＠example.com 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

Abstract With the refactoring spirit of Inkscape 0.47 in mind, I'd like to work on delegating Inkscape's math needs to lib2geom. The special goal is to convert Inkscape's internal representation of paths to a lib2geom type. The integration of lib2geom is a big task, therefore I propose a team effort. Name Johan Engelen Project title Lib2geom integration Benefits to Inkscape: I think it would be beneficial for Inkscape to use lib2geom (2geom), because it makes the math code better maintainable. Already LPEs profit hugely from the ease and power of using lib2geom. Deliverables 1. internal representation of paths as a 2geom type 2. conversion methods between current path type and new 2geom type, to use by methods that have not been converted to 2geom calls 3. implementation of test methods to ascertain and to prohibit regressions 4. Team work to move as much as possible of Inkscape to 2geom calls. Project details I think it is not possible to completely change all math to lib2geom within one GSoC project. I will try to get as far as I can, but I do have one specific goal: the internal representation of paths should become a 2geom type. This way, all path operations can be transformed to 2geom. First, 'perfect' conversion methods between the current representation and 2geom type will be made. Then, step by step, all path operations can easily be recoded to use this conversion methods first, then later on transformed completely to solely use 2geom calls. The perfect-ness of the conversion method will be proven by making test functions. More test functions will have to be written for large non-trivial functions that are converted, to decrease the possibility of regressions. I propose to use 2geom's std::vector<Geom::Path> as the new path representation type. I think this type already contains all functionality that the current type has; missing functionality must be implemented in 2geom. There already exist tried and proven 2geom methods that convert SVG pathstring to std::vector<Geom::Path> and via versa (LPE use them already). Apart from converting the internal representation, I also want to work on refactoring other parts of Inkscape to only use 2geom calls for math. E.g. snapping, tools, and transformations. (this largely means converting the over 4k occurances of NR::Point and NR::Matrix combined to their 2geom equivalents.) I want to emphasize that I'd like to work on integrating lib2geom as a team. The internal representation is my personal goal, the other student(s) that might work on integration as well may have his/her own goal; but I think the motivation that comes from seeing more and more parts of Inkscape using 2geom really helps conquer the big heap of work that awaits us. Especially I want to mention Michael Sloan of lib2geom, who has shown great abilities by implementing boolean ops in 2geom (almost complete). I think we can really use his expertise in creating 2geom functionality that is still missing, and I think he can benefit from my knowledge of Inkscape for his project goals. Although not explicitly called that way, I already did some small teamwork with Diederik on snapping and grids; which was highly motivating and resulted imho into something good. I feel integrating lib2geom is a great opportunity for me to try a large teamed effort in improving Inkscape. About me I am 24 years old and live in The Netherlands. I am an electrical engineering PhD student at the University of Twente (Netherlands). I've been programming for so long I forgot when I started; I've programmed in C++, C, Pascal, x86 assembly, PHP, Java and other languages. I'm mostly self-taught in these languages. Inkscape is my first (and only) open-source experience, before that programming experience has been a private hobby (once together with a friend). A friend showed Inkscape to me as his drawing application and I was sold immediately. Coding for Inkscape started after two weeks with adding the "Save-a-copy" functionality, then, apart from many bug fixes, for as far as I can remember: new extension parameter types, on-canvas gradient editing, new grid framework and 3D axonometric grid, angled guidelines, on-canvas mask and clippath editing, and of course Live Path Effects (GSoC2007). See http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/GSOC2007_Live_path_effects_in_Inksc…. Work schedule Being a PhD student in the Netherlands means I have to work during office hours and have no long summer vacation. Therefore I propose to work the same schedule as I did in last GSoC. As soon as I am accepted I will start working on my project, to compensate for the less than nominal available time during the 'official' working 2 month period of GSoC2008. I think my result of last year's GSoC project shows this works very well for me. Other GSoC applications I have not applied for any other GSoC project. I have no motivation to apply to other projects other than Inkscape's. -------------------------------------------------- Thank you very much for reading the long text. Any comments, especially critique, are very welcome. Kind regards, Johan

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tar-pax option in configure.ac
by John Bintz 25 Mar '08

25 Mar '08

Ted, Myself and others have been having problems building Inkscape since r17648, when you added the option for the tar-pax format in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. Ubuntu Gutsy, which I'm running, and Fedora Core 6, according to some mailing list traffic, don't have a new enough version of automake in their standard repositories to run ./autogen.sh successfully with that option enabled. Other distributions may be involved, too. Using automake1.8 and removing the tar-pax option get ./autogen.sh to work, and I'm wondering what you would think about rolling back the tar-pax option for now, to ease the problems that users of those operating systems are having with building Inkscape, and then re-enabling it later, when the repositories for those distributions upgrade to the newer automake1.10. Thanks, John

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