Usability development help for Inkscape available
by Aslak Karsi
Hello
We are a group of five students from Finland, studying at University of
Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science. We are currently working
on a project assignment to offer help in usability development for an open
source software project of our choice.
Past few weeks we have been familiarizing ourselves with Inkscape and its
community and now we would like to offer our work resources for your use.
We have already figured out a few ideas of what we could do for the Inkscape
project:
* Heuristic evaluation
* Usability testing
* Prioritization of usability related bugs on the buglist
To produce as useful results as possible, we would like to hear your ideas.
How do you feel about the tasks suggested? Is there some specific part of
the software we should focus on? Any ideas and feedback at this point would
be greatly appreciated.
Project leader Aslak Karsi
Marko Arffman
Matias Patosalmi
Jouni Rissanen
Matti Siipola
12 years, 7 months
Compile error (color-profile.cpp)
by Marcin Floryan
Hi!
Did anyone bump into this compile error - I was just trying do do a
clean compile of latest inkscape from bzr trunk.
color-profile.cpp: In static member function ‘static
std::list<Glib::ustring> Inkscape::ColorProfile::getProfileFiles()’:
color-profile.cpp:758:34: error: ‘sanitizeString’ is not a member of
‘Inkscape::IO’
make[3]: *** [color-profile.o] Error 1
Did I miss something?
Cheers,
Marcin
--
Marcin Floryan
http://marcin.floryan.pl/
Please consider the environment before printing this email.
12 years, 9 months
C++ificiation and GTKMM
by Abhishek Sharma
Hello everyone,
C++ification of inkscape has been a long term planned goal for inkscape. To
the same accordance I would like to ask a few questions:
1. Does the dependency on GObject need to be removed?? The current code is
huge and based on GObject as inheritance, increasing the complexity further.
But if we wish to use the functionalities of GTK+ and remove GObject from
the picture, wouldn't it be possible and feasible to instead use GTKMM to
suffice for the same???
2. While c++ifying what is going to be the fate of the inkscape's own
implementation of garbage collection??
3. What are your views regarding GTKMM to be introduced in the codebase for
c++ification??
Expecting replies from the developers.
Thank You.
--
Abhishek Sharma
12 years, 9 months
idea: Exposée-like effect for visualizing complex stacks of svg elements in Inkscape ?
by Felipe Sanches
I have been using inkscape a lot recently and I noticed that sometimes it
can become very annoying to select svg elements that are in the middle of a
pile of other elements.
Thus, I was thinking that we could have a key-combo that would break appart
all "hidden" shapes to allow you to select one of them, and after that, all
shapes would be places back in their correct places. Sometimes I do
something similar to that by hand, but an automated UI feature would be very
useful. Also, it would be solely a visualization mode, not actualy modifying
elements in the SVG DOM.
I'd like to have some feedback on this idea.
thanks,
Felipe Sanches (Juca)
12 years, 10 months
Should inkscape take over libcroco?
by Daniel Macks
I just received a fairly surly reponse to a libcroco bug on bugzilla.gnome. Apparently the upstream is so inactive that gnome doesn't want to see bugs about it. Inkscape appears to be a major user of this library and (last I knew) had some unmerged (or at least unreleased) patches for it. Might be worthwhile for an inkscape dev to get developer access to the project on gnome to keep it alive. Bonus: could actually use it as an external dependency instead of needing bundled source?
dan
--
Daniel Macks
dmacks@...2516...
12 years, 10 months
Fourth-year student projects
by Jean-Baptiste Mouret / Mandor
Hi Inkscape developers,
I teach computer science in France (in this school:
http://www.polytech.upmc.fr/version-english.html ) and my fourth-year
students are required to work on a project for a few months (2-3
months), for about 2 days a week. Instead of asking them to do
"random" projects, I would like them to (try to) contribute to open
source projects.
In particular, I would love that they contribute to Inkscape.
We have three main constraints in the choice of the project:
- be do-able by 2 students in a few months;
- be a challenge interesting enough to provide work to 2 students for
a few months;
- include a design phase (understanding the topic, asking questions,
designing a planning, find algorithms, etc.) and a coding phase (this
excludes code cleaning, documentation, bug-fixes, etc.).
Ideally, I would like the students to be mentored by an Inkscape
developer who could answer their questions and give some directions;
I'd like a least to be sure that the project is interesting for
inkscape developers. You can think about this like something similar
to the Google Summer of Code. The main difference is that we don't
really select candidates so the students may not be very good and the
project can obviously fail; but sometimes they can also be very
efficient and motivated!
I've checked the google summer of code page
(http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Google_Summer_Of_Code). The
import/export code might be interesting to try with them. The font
designing idea and the ICC support migh also be cool. Are these
proposition still up-to-date? I'm of course open to other ideas.
Something I was thinking about: I often use Inkscape to design posters
and I'd really like to have an option to use the Knuth-Plass algorithm
and hyphenation (at least in English). I know that they're not in the
SVG specifications but this could be only for pdf exports. Another
feature which would be useful is to be able to link text blocks (as do
Indesign and Xpress) [again, this is not in the svg specs]. This would
make an interesting challenge for our students.
What do you think? Would some of you be interested in helping us? What
task would you suggest? At any rate I need your help to calibrate a
task (or several tasks) so it's not too hard but challenging enough.
Thank you and merry Christmas.
Best regards,
--
Jean-Baptiste Mouret / Mandor
http://people.isir.upmc.fr/mouret
3 ((4&({*.(=+/))++/=3:)@([:,/0&,^:(i.3)@|:"2^:2))&.>@]^:(i.@[) <#:3 6 2
12 years, 10 months
OpenMP fix
by Krzysztof Kosiński
I just discovered that OpenMP support (used to parallelize Gaussian
blur) is not functional on Linux and OS X because of a missing
AC_DEFINE. Here is a patch that fixes this problem. Admins: please
apply to 0.48 branch also.
Regards, Krzysztof
12 years, 10 months
1 bug left for 0.48.1
by Josh Andler
Hey all,
Given that I'm thinking a .2 will probably be in order, this is the
one bug really holding back .1 from being released at this time.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/510618
Is anyone willing and able to look into this? If not, the only way
that .1 will get out without it is to have someone pledge to fix it
for 0.48.2 or 0.49 to be released (whichever makes sense in 4-6 months
based on the current rate of progress). If 0.48.1 gets out without
this fixed, it will not be avoidable as a fix after that... no
exceptions, as unnecessarily hitting the undo-history or dirtying
documents is incredibly bad practice.
I hope we have a taker.
Cheers,
Josh
12 years, 11 months
current trunk fails to build with dbus enabled (Bug #696062 “dbus builds no more”)
by ~suv
Bug #696062 “dbus builds no more”
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/696062>
fails with (current): 9994
last known working: 9834
on fedora 13:
> CXX extension/dbus/dbus-init.o
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp: In function ‘void Inkscape::Extension::Dbus::init()’:
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp:87: warning: unused variable ‘obj’
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp: In function ‘gchar* Inkscape::Extension::Dbus::init_document()’:
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp:109: error: ‘sp_document_new’ was not declared in this scope
> ./document.h:99: error: ‘gchar* SPDocument::name’ is protected
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp:112: error: within this context
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp:103: warning: unused variable ‘result’
> extension/dbus/dbus-init.cpp:104: warning: unused variable ‘error’
> make[3]: *** [extension/dbus/dbus-init.o] Error 1
Anyone else building with dbus enabled and getting the same build failure?
~suv
12 years, 11 months
Re: [Inkscape-devel] inkscape.org update needs [text]
by Leo Jackson
Chris,
I wanted to make a comment about the text shown in the mockup there.
This part:
"which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux"
Quite besides putting your fellow FOSS project last in a list of
supported operating systems, especially since many distros package and
release Inkscape ready to install and windows and macosx don't.
It's quite simply a question of popularity. The list of operating systems goes by general OS popularity - and quite reasonably too. Linux users will expect it to go in that order, whereas if you put Linux first, I think many Windows and OS X users would be put off it as "a Linux thing" that just happens to have been loosely ported to Windows/OS X.
Yes true order is right.
But worse is the confusion of "Linux". Does this sentence mean that
Inkscape will work on Android? Will it work on my TiVo or my Home brew
Wii? It is nonsense to claim to run on Linux when linux is a kernel
which can't run Inkscape in most cases.
I disagree very strongly with your case here. "Linux" is a generally recognised
family of operating systems. In the lingua franca, "Linux" means these operating systems, not the kernel as a technical definition of Linux may be. And there isn't really any way I think it can
be improved without it becoming too verbose (frankly I think even one
word more in each of the places where Linux is mentioned would be too
verbose, the brevity of "Windows", "Mac OS X" and "Linux" is important, and on your later points a group of three is in a literary manner far more pleasing than four or five items would be). I
don't believe anyone will get confused and expect it to run on any
mobile browsers. The downloads page will also have OS-sniffing and so
present the most likely of the three options first, including
highlighting the relevant option (e.g. Mac OS X 10.4 users will get that
button glowing and the others slightly faded, Ubuntu users will get a
sentence on how to get it in Ubuntu highlighted in some way).
It would be more clear and honest to say "which runs on Gnome/Linux" or
"FreeDesktop Linux" or just "Fedora, Debian and other awesome Free
Desktops".
If you start putting in some particular flavours of Linux then you get bickering about which ones get included.
And if you're of the opinion that Android and such aren't marketed as
Linux and there for won't be confusing. Think about the way Ubuntu isn't
marketed as Linux either (because it isn't true and because it's not
helpful to scare away new users), will we have "which runs on Linux and
Ubuntu" to account for that?
No. Ubuntu is still recognised as Linux. And putting this in combination with highlighting the relevant information on the download page, I don't think it'll be an issue.
Some people are adopting GNU/Linux as the operating system. Free Desktops include and not limited to Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and others.
The lack of consideration that Linux distros are given by the Inkscape
website is currently frustrating. The install for Windows and Mac is
easy, but we don't have a single deb, apt link, or ppa and instead ask
users to compile. Please consider rectifying and please start with the
text on the front page.
You're right about the need for more information on how to source Inkscape; I don't believe you're at all right about starting with the text on the front page. What it says is correct. The modifications only need to take place on the download page.
So very true and easy to do.
Regards,
Leo Jackson
12 years, 11 months
