April 2011 - Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Usability development help for Inkscape available
by Aslak Karsi 19 Apr '11

19 Apr '11

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

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ANNOUNCE: Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 Montreal Needs Your Sponsorship, Presentations, and Registration
by jon＠...235... 19 Apr '11

19 Apr '11

Please help us by spreading the word to your communities! Blog post with attachments at http://ur1.ca/3vw3t ### Help Keep LGM Free for Developers and Artists Your contribution can help make Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 (LGM) a success! All funds donated by the community to the LGM 2011 Pledgie campaign go directly towards providing travel reimbursement to the developers of free graphics applications like GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Open Font Library, and MyPaint, and to the artists that use these apps to create their work. Libre Graphics Meeting is an invaluable meeting ground for developers and end users because it brings them together face to face. Underwriting travel costs is essential to LGM's success, as many open source developers and independent artists and designers cannot count on employer-provided travel. LGM has been free of charge since the very beginning -- but as the open source community continues to expand, the economy getting tougher, attendance keeps increasing, and the need for LGM support is greater than ever. Your support is vital for the continued success of LGM, whether you are a developer, an attendee, or simply a fan of free graphics software. Click here to make a donation: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610 No matter what the size of your individual donation, you can also help us spread the word: add the LGM Pledge button to your site, and blog about the event to raise awareness. For larger organizations and companies, we have platinum, gold, silver, bronze and copper levels of sponsorship which give you attention and eyeballs on your company and products for supporting this amazing group of thought leaders in creative and design industries: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/sponsors. Submit a Presentation! LGM's strength comes from the presenters who talk about their work and inspire others by sharing their experiences, techniques, and best practices. Whether you are a developer, an artist, or an enthusiast, you can be a part of this year's event by sharing your story and your work. The LGM community wants to hear your proposal for a session. Submit your idea any time between now and April 20, 2011 by visiting http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/Conference_2011/Submit_Talk Topics of interest include: open design, development of creative applications, color standards and color management, designer and developer collaboration, web services, workflow, exchange between Open Source Software and artists, power-user techniques, graphics business best practices, and research findings. We already have great submissions like Hackaplot: a project for collaborative art and cool hardware revival, Libre Graphics Global Documentation Project , Krita: Professional Digital Painting, Laidout and Strange Interfaces, Better and faster image resizing and resampling, A manhole to West Africa: hackers, artists and page layout professionals using free softwares, Crafting an Open Font Stack, EBook Design With Open Source, Efficient Creative Web Workflows - An Investigation, Fabricating a Libre Graphics Future, Future Tools, Generative Typesetting with Context, Hypermedia and the Annihilation of Time and Space, Inkscape for Beginners, Using Blender for Patent Absurdity, Making Avatars: Unleashing the Power of Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library to Create and Share, Publishing documentation with Publican, PiTiVi and the state of GStreamer video editing, Open Mind, Literally: Utilizing and Teaching Free Culture As A Life Path, OSP: Adventures in distributed design, MyPaint - the past, the present and the future, Make free art now! Creativity with free software: FooCorp, GNU FM and the Free Software Foundation, Libre Graphics magazine: A year of fantastic and more to come from you! Register Now! You may now register for LGM2011 by visiting http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011. We have four full days of main events, night events, parties, a big dinner, and more. Even before LGM we have some pre-events for those whom arrive early. But, we need to know you are coming. The main event is completely free thanks to our community fundraising campaign and sponsors. Who is Attending? More and more people are signing up right now! Let us know you are coming and reserve a free spot: Adam Hyde, Adam Turcotte, Alessandro Rimoldi, Alexandre Quessy, Ana Carvalho, Anthony Thyssen, Brad Phillips, CelineCelines, Chantal Racette, Christopher Adams, Christopher Webber, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Fabricatorz, Femke Snelting, Francesco Fantoni, Fred Weinhaus, Ginger Coons, Hong Phuc Dang, Ian Scheller, Jean-François Fortin Tam, John Cupitt, John Haltiwanger, Jon Nordby, Jon Phillips, Louis Desjardins, Lukáš Tvrdý, Magaouata DAN BOURGAM, Mamadou Diagne, Matt Lee, Nicolas Robidoux, OSP (Open Source Publishing), Pete Ippel, Ricardo Lafuente, Robert Oakes, Roméo DOSSA, Ryan Lerch, Tom Lechner and many more soon to be announced design stars. Submit Your Artwork! In addition to the speakers' schedule, LGM 2011 hosts a juried exhibition of art and design produced with free software. Submissions are due by the end of April; a jury selects fifteen pieces to be printed and exhibited at StudioXX during LGM, and a further eight will be included in the next issue of Libre Graphics Magazine. Details for how to submit your work are here: http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/exhibition Give Your Feedback! All throughout LGM 2011, you will have the opportunity to join in birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions, panel discussions, and hands-on workshops led by the libre graphics community. Come share your feedback, ask questions, and help make libre graphics much improved. A special bonus opportunity in LGM 2011 is the chance to participate in a usability lab session coordinated by ICGQ, Inc. Saturday, May 14, the ICGQ graphic art industry members will sit down with the LGM developers and artists to do an in-depth analysis of the open source graphics suite, with an eye towards helping new users learn the environment. Pre-LGM Activities! Always wanted to create a sewing pattern from a python script? Work with developers and artists around the same table? Visit a color lab? >From Friday evening 6 May onwards we organize workshops, excursions and other activities for early arrivals. The perfect warm up for LGM! Watch out for latest announcements at http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/pre-lgm Thanks to Our Current Sponsors Main Sponsor and Partners École Polytechnique, http://www.polymtl.ca/en/, Create Project, http://create.freedesktop.org\ Platinum Sponsors Organization Internationale de la Francophonie, http://www.francophonie.org/ Gold Sponsors Google, http://google.com/ Silver Sponsors The Quebec Institute of Graphic Communications (QIGC), http://icgq.qc.ca/bienvenue_icgq/, Wikimedia CH, http://www.wikimedia.ch/ To become a sponsor, please visit http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/sponsors and/or contact libregraphicsmeeting@...2620... About Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal May 10-13, École Polytechnique Engineering School Programmers and artists from around the world are headed to Montreal for the 6th annual Libre Graphics Meeting in May. The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual gathering for the users and developers of free and open source creative software: artistic tools that are free for anyone to use and modify. LGM gives software developers, artists, musicians, designers and other creative professionals the opportunity to collaborate, share their work and learn from each other. The Libre Graphics Meeting exists to unite and accelerate the efforts behind Free, Libre and Open Source creative software. Organised by volunteers from the international Libre Graphics Community since 2006, this annual meeting is the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library. At LGM, teams gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of assets, and common formats. For More Information For more information, visit http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org LGM 2011 is hosted by the Create Project, Libre Graphics Community and Polytechnique. Press Contact Sponsoring Organization: Libre Graphics Meeting and Create Project. * Jon Phillips * jon@...2474... * +1.415.830.3884 (skype: kidproto) * http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/ * Pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610 * Photos: http://ur1.ca/a34y Organization Contact * Louis Desjardins * louis.desjardins@...400... * +1.514.994.9351 Blog Post Announcement * http://ur1.ca/3vw3t

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synfig + i18n
by Alexandre Prokoudine 18 Apr '11

18 Apr '11

Hi, Synfig Studio team has been repeatedly asked to make localizations available on Windows, but the person who does the builds right now isn't very much Windows savvy. They rely on GTKmm and gettext as well, and use NullSoft installer. If anyone has packaging knowledge and is willing to help fellow free graphics software developers, please ping me for contacts. Additionally, and this is, well, just my humble (yeah right :)) wish is that we (Synfig and Inkscape) should cooperate as projects. We don't have the manpower to do animation, and they don't have the manpower to do better SVG importing (they don't have SVG _ex_porting yet, AFAIK). Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

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New SpinButtons with math ops
by Johan Engelen 17 Apr '11

17 Apr '11

Hi all, The last few days I added functionality to spinboxes: you can now type simple math expressions, like 100+20, 55*2, these kind of things. The code to add this functionality was taken from Gimp, very nice! You can try it out in the transform dialog for example. Works also in the toolbar, but... see below. It also works with units. You can write things like "2 cm", and it will be converted to whatever unit you have selected. Or you can write "(2 * 2 cm)*5 + 3 in". Toolbar spinboxes also have this functionality, but lack the unit stuff. (where it would be really convenient :( I will not work on this unit functionality in the toolbar. Maybe someone else can work on C++-ifying the "ege action" stuff and widget/toolbar.cpp, a first step on the way to getting there. In all C++ UI stuff it is easy to add, and let me know if it is missing somewhere. Ciao, Johan

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Weird text problem in Cairo branch
by Jasper van de Gronde 15 Apr '11

15 Apr '11

The attached SVG (which I just made using the cairo branch) has three text objects. One with "$x$", one with "$y$" and one with "$z$" (without the quotes obviously). In 0.48 this shows up just fine, but in the Cairo branch only some of the characters are shown (those that are shown appear to be complete). In particular, for most fonts only the x and the z appear (so no dollar sign or y), and for some fonts (like Times New Roman) all characters disappear... Is this a known problem? Can anyone reproduce the problem? Any ideas on fixing it?

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Mockup for Improvement of Fill and Stroke Dialog
by Valerie 14 Apr '11

14 Apr '11

To be quite honest, I really want to be able to use stroke styles more effectively, but there's something I find extremely annoying about having to open such a huge tab just to get an arrow on one end. For that tiny arrow I have to temporarily hide a third of my workspace, often covering part of the lines I'm working on (and I have wide screen). I forgot if this has ever been proposed, but could there ever be a checkbox in tool options or on the side of the tool control bar, where you can click and add options onto the tool control bar? What I'd like to have is a simple set of three drop-downs + dash: [ ] [ ] [ ] Dash: [ ] The drop-downs only show a visual preview of the markers, not the names. I know many people Don't want it, but want options completely different from what I want, thus the toggling options, like "Visible buttons" in Libre Office and other office programs. Can this be achieved simply in GTK right now?

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Libre Graphics Meeting 10-13 May
by Donna Benjamin 13 Apr '11

13 Apr '11

Hello Everyone! The 6th annual LGM is just a few weeks away in Montreal! http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/ The call for speakers is open! http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/submit-talk/ and the pledgie call for funds to cover travel costs is too. http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610 Can you please help spread the word about the pledgie campaign? Blog, Dent, Tweet, Facebook, Mailing lists - anywhere you can think of... and please feel free to just forward this mail on. Here's a code snippet to put on your blog: <a style="border-style:none" href="http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610"><img src="http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/donate/pledgie_banner.png"></a> The libre graphics community itself has been one of the biggest sponsors of our main event. It's a fantastic way for all the users of free graphics tools out there to make a contribution too... but not if they don't know about it. We need your help. http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/ http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14610 -- Donna Benjamin Libre Graphics Meeting, Montreal 10-13 May, 2011 http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/2011/ -- Donna Benjamin - kattekrab.net Inkscape: Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics http://www.inkscape.org

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Updated proposal: Implement KML SVG translation
by David Xiong 13 Apr '11

13 Apr '11

Hi, Thank you for the comments on my proposal. I have replied to the comments below my proposal, as in the forwarded email in the following. I have revised my proposal based on the comments that I got and some resources that I read further. It can be found in: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/ywxiong/… <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/ywxiong/…>Thank you. David. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <no-reply@...2613...> Date: Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 1:21 AM Subject: [Inkscape] New public review on Implement KML SVG translation (david_xiong) by david_xiong To: yunwxiong@...400... Hi, david_xiong has left the following public review at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/ywxiong/…: Hi, I will add the following comments or changes. 1. Reply to comments on my proposal Re: *Jasper* The benefit is that the implementation would allow conversion between SVG and KML. Then, the SVG file made by a user can be viewed in Google Map/Earth, after converted to KML. Scenarios that Tavmjong Bah mentioned are good ones where it may be useful. Re: Tavmjong Bah It sounds great, if there are a group of people extending SVG for mapping purposes. I will try and contact them, and see how they solve these problems and what features they provide. Your second comment is particularly useful. I will take these scenarios into account. I agree, instead of pre-processing the data, or cropping some data off, we can store them in SVG too. The SVG would not show certain data from KML, but can keep them. As this SVG is modified and converted back to KML, the KML is updated without losing data. I agree that this is a better way to deal with some different entities in SVG and KML. 2. Found a resource I found on Inkscape idea page that tbrugz mentioned his SVG to KML convertor in Java. It seems useful to look at. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/kml-svg-translation *********** 2010-08-12 - tbrugz Hi, I´ve developed an initial converter from SVG to KML in Java. It currently converts polygons, given the output "bounds" (north, east, south, west). Infos and hg repository is at https://bitbucket.org/tbrugz/kmlutils/. Feel free to improve on it *********** 3. Change to my proposal Tasks added to the plan: l Contact a group of people extending SVG for mapping purposes, and see how they solve these problems and what features they provide. l Review the Java SVG to KML convertor written by tbrugz. If some methods are useful, rewrite the Java code to be C++. A task listed in the proposal needs to be changed. Original: 2. write the logic to eliminate the unused element --- two way Change to be: Check and see whether or not certain KML data can be converted to be SVG entities. If convertible, convert them. If not convertible, store them in SVG file as KML entities. Then, these data are ignored by Inkscape, but would still exist in the KML converted back. As this SVG is modified and converted back to KML, the KML is updated without losing data. Greetings, The Google Open Source Programs Team --- You are receiving this message because you are participating in Google Summer of Code 2011. To stop receiving these messages, go to: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/profile/google/gsoc2011.

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Mockup for Improvement of Fill and Stroke Dialog
by Andrew 12 Apr '11

12 Apr '11

Hi again :) Okay so after previous feedback, that the comboboxes for the fill type and fill rule were not optimal (i.e. it is quicker to click a button than select something from a combobox), I have ammended the mockups, adding back in the buttons. I also corrected some padding in places, where I seem to have gone a bit mad with it :) Please see the two mockups here http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Fill_and_Stroke_Dialog_Re-Design#My… Again I really do welcome feedback, positive or negative :) -- Andrew

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Howto - linker dependent linker flags in makefile - help needed
by the Adib 12 Apr '11

12 Apr '11

Hello developers, we run into a little problem while dealing with upcoming gcc 4.6 compatibility. Any help for a "good" solution appreciated. Full story below. Thanks, Adib. -- There should be linker flags leading by "-Wl" curently there is not such option. Gcc fails builing without. But under OSX a native apple darwin compiler is used that do not know this option. I modified makefile to test for osx: src/Makefile.am: ... if PLATFORM_OSX inkscape_LDFLAGS = --export-dynamic $(kdeldflags) $(mwindows) else inkscape_LDFLAGS = -Wl,--export-dynamic $(kdeldflags) $(mwindows) endif ... and conficure.ac: ... dnl ****************************** dnl MacOS X dnl ****************************** AC_MSG_CHECKING([for OSX platform]) if test "x$build_vendor" = "xapple" ; then platform_osx=yes else platform_osx=no fi AC_MSG_RESULT([$platform_osx]) AM_CONDITIONAL(PLATFORM_OSX, test "$platform_osx" = "yes") ... But we should test for linker not a gnu linker. There is such test in aclocal.m4: ... # _LT_PATH_LD_GNU #- -------------- m4_defun([_LT_PATH_LD_GNU], [AC_CACHE_CHECK([if the linker ($LD) is GNU ld], lt_cv_prog_gnu_ld, [# I'd rather use --version here, but apparently some GNU lds only accept -v. case `$LD -v 2>&1 </dev/null` in *GNU* | *'with BFD'*) lt_cv_prog_gnu_ld=yes ;; *) lt_cv_prog_gnu_ld=no ;; esac]) with_gnu_ld=$lt_cv_prog_gnu_ld ])# _LT_PATH_LD_GNU ... So the question is how to modify those files that gnu linker is checked and in case on gnu linker we put "-Wl" in front of those linkre oprtions? Thanks for patience, Adib.

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