June 2008 - Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

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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sorting out PS/EPS/PDF export mess
by bulia byak 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

It's always bad when the UI offers two ways to do the same thing without really explaining what's the difference. It's equally bad when UI uses some meaningless techno jargon such as "cairo" :) Unfortunately 0.46 was released still in the middle of a transition period which made both these evils inevitable. Now that we're in 0.47, however, I would like to address this issue by switching all of PS, EPS, and PDF output to cairo, removing the builtin Inkscape exporter, and purging the mentions of "cairo" from the UI. As a matter of fact, this has already partially happened (not sure who did this). Right now both PS export options work via cairo and produce identical output. The Inkscape-native PDF export is nowhere to be seen. The only exporter which still uses native code is EPS. However, since 1.5.2 cairo can produce EPS files too, so this can all be done in one place now (closng several EPS export bugs along the way). The only downside is that it will require cairo >= 1.5.2, is everyone OK with that? By the way, the latest cairo 1.5.12 finally fixes the bug where zooming in too closely in Outline mode produced messy broken lines. Now everything is neat and clean. Upgrade is recommended. -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Welcome to GSoC 2008!
by Aaron Spike 20 Aug '08

20 Aug '08

Felipe, Jasper, Johan, Marco and Maximilian, On behalf of the Inkscape community, let me congratulate you. You have been selected to participate in Google's Summer of Code 2008. I'm happy to see that all of you have already begun working with the community. We're all looking forward to working with you through the summer and beyond. Bryce Harrington and I are the GSoC administrators for Inkscape this summer. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have concerns. If you have not already done so, please subscribe to the Inkscape-devel mailing list. We recommend that you conduct the bulk of your Inkscape related communications through this list so that the community can keep up-to-date with your progress. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel We want to see you complete your project successfully. With this in mind, please strive to communicate actively. Active and open communication is a must for any successful Open Source Software project. We recommend that you be mindful of your schedule. Attempt to complete 90% of your project by the midterm evaluation period (July 7-14th). This will allow you to concentrate on bug fixing and documentation for the remaining time. Aaron Spike

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cutter control discussion
by Patrick 06 Aug '08

06 Aug '08

I have not seen any posts on this topic for a week or so. I would like to help but I am terribly slow to get things done. I am just wondering if we could hammer out what needs to be done so I can add it to my "to-do list" volume 3 I could buy a cutter in July or August and I should be able to finish reverse engineering the command protocol sometime in the fall. I know there are different formats used to send information to the cutters, would it be good to work on a more robust DXF export option too? I don't know the first thing out GSD, does does someone want to work on this ? I am unfamiliar with Inkscape internals, if I provided the commands could someone integrate this into Inkscape? Or do we even want to do this? Is there a better way? Thanks-Patrick

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PS and PDF: Print/Save As
by Tavmjong Bah 04 Aug '08

04 Aug '08

Hi, I have been trying to understand Inkscape's PS and PDF output with v0.46. It is very confusing so I thought I would summarize what I have found in a table. I tested the various ways to get PS and PDF output with: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/images/SVG_TESTS/svg_test.svg . Save As Print Cairo Vector Raster# PS PS% PDF PS PDF PS PDF Patterns No Wrong No Wrong Wrong Yes Yes Clipping No Wrong No Wrong Wrong Yes Yes Masking No No No No No Yes Yes Transparency No Yes Yes* Yes Yes Yes Yes Dashed Lines Yes Wrong Yes Wrong Wrong Yes Yes Gradient on Stroke No Yes Yes* Yes Yes Yes Yes # Only at 72 dpi regardless of DPI setting. % Crashes when run from window manager but not command line. * Displays OK in Acroread, not with Evince 0.8.2. The "Save As" and "Print" PDF use two different Cairo routines. What is the history of this? It seems to be a bit of a waste of effort. Tav

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Temporary canvas items
by Maximilian Albert 30 Jul '08

30 Jul '08

Zitat von bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>: > On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:45 AM, Maximilian Albert <Anhalter42@...173...> wrote: >> Yes. My question is how the "... that renders text" part would work. > > Since you don't need to worry about exact font, kerning, etc., which > all may be tricky, cairo is the natural choice for this. Each canvas > item has a render method which is passed the SPCanvasBuf; you can just > deconstruct it to access the actual memory buffer, create a temporary > cairo surface and context in the render method of your text canvas > item, and draw text to it using cairo's show_text. Is there boilerplate code available somewhere for creating and managing such a context? In particular, how would I tie it into SPCanvasBuf? Is the guchar* buf variable the memory buffer you are talking about? Why/how do I need to access it and what's the interconnection with the cairo context? Sorry if these are very basic questions, but I don't have any experience yet with Inkscape's on-canvas rendering. > But that would be wasteful and hacky, although acceptable as a > temporary solution. The proper solution that would take us one step > closer to total cairofication is to create a common cairo context in > sp-canvas, associated with SPCanvasBuf, and pass it down to all canvas > buffer so they could draw to it using cairo at once. That is what > needs to be done, the biggest obstacle being that most canvasitems are > drawn with direct bit-flipping in the buffer and they assume 3 bytes > per pixel and fixed RGB order, neither of which is true for cairo > which only has 4 bytes whose order depends on endianness. So all of > canvas items must be switched to cairo (or at least to 4 bytes) at > once, this cannot be done incrementally. This is what I'll have to do > as soon as I have some time to devote to it (unless someone comes to > my rescue :) How difficult and/or time-consuming do you expect this to be? Could it be done without knowing anything about the bit-flipping and other issues you mentioned? If you think that it would be worth it to take this little detour from my actual SoC project, I'd be glad to be this "someone". :) But I neither have any experience with cairo nor am I familiar with the problems you mentioned. So someone would need to give me step-by-step instructions of what needs to be done. Max -- Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger gehört? Der kann`s mit allen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger

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Misc questions (dropdown menus, retrieving path info from files, LPE)
by Maximilian Albert 22 Jul '08

22 Jul '08

Hi all, I started working in the direction of Valerie's proposal for a redesigned pen/pencil toolbar (see http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Vector-brushes), and I have a few quick questions: 1) How can I add images/paths to dropdown menus, e.g., to illustrate the shape that is going to be applied as a PatternAlongPath LPE? 2) I'd like to save the various possible shapes for dropdown menu #6 (cf. the image in the blueprint) in a separate file and read them during runtime rather than to hard-code them in advance. How can I access their path information from my code so that they can be applied as a PatternAlongPath? 3) For the LPE experts (Johan in particular :-) ): Valerie suggests that the width of the shape can be controlled via two spinbuttons. When I apply a given shape to a path (using PatternAlongPath), does the width of the resulting LPE-item depend on the length of the path or is it independent of this length (i.e., does the resulting item become wider when the path is longer and thus the pattern is "stretched" more)? Thanks in advance, Max -- GMX startet ShortView.de. Hier findest Du Leute mit Deinen Interessen! Jetzt dabei sein: http://www.shortview.de/?mc=sv_ext_mf@...1921...

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Poppler 0.8.3 change to GfxFont
by Bob Jamison 19 Jul '08

19 Jul '08

Hi, all. One of the guys on the channel asked me if Inkscape runs with Poppler 0.8.3. I didn't know that Poppler had released anything recently, so I gave it a try on win32. Inkscape's sneaky use of some private Poppler APIs finally bit us! :-). There is a small change in GfxFont::getNextChar() that needs to be addressed for Poppler-0.8.3+. <tsdgeos> on #poppler kindly showed me the tweak, which I committed. To be able to use the latest Poppler and this fix, compile with -DPOPPLER_NEW_GFXFONT It seems to run nicely. But you must recompile. Do NOT use the new Poppler shared objects or DLLs without recompiling, else it is a crasher. The tweak is just something to keep Inkscape compiling. Miklos, can you look at this? I'm sure there is a cleaner, more permanent fix out possible. thanks! bob

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