November 2013 - Inkscape Devel

Inkscape and SMIL support
by HadiM 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Hi guys, I wonder to know if you have a mid term plan to add animation support on inkscape (with a nice GUI and all that stuff...). I you do, are you planning to use SMIL or DOM manipulation script ? I saw on your wiki some pages related to animation support but they are all old and do not seems updated. If you don't have time to work on it, could you consider launching an indigogo or kickstarter campaign to raise some funds. I am sure many people will give you money to give that support. In my opinion with HTML5 / CSS3, modern browser, video support and inkscape, animation support in inkscape is the only key missing to be able te replace PowerPoint. I except to see many software based on SVG+animation emerge in the next few years with the HTML5 explosion. It will be sad to see a new proprietary software emerging and becoming the standard in SVG animation. Best, -- HadiM

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SMIL in SVG
by Tavmjong Bah 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Hi, The Inkscape and SMIL thread is getting pretty long so I am starting a new thread on if SMIL is the right solution for animation in Inkscape. I personally think SMIL is quite useful, but you should be aware that Microsoft has been quite forthright that they will not support SMIL in Internet Explorer. They don't want to support a second declarative animation model, the first being CSS Animations[1]. CSS Animations does have some problems, namely at the moment you can only animate style properties (things that you can set using the 'style' attribute). You cannot animate attributes (such as rectangle 'width'). This is suppose to be resolved at some point. Having said that, the other browsers do support SMIL and SMIL is not at risk of being dropped from SVG 2 (as was SVG fonts last week). (Although, I know of at least one Chrome developer who might be happy to see SMIL go.) If there is enough demand from designers for SMIL, Microsoft has been known to change its mind (they weren't going to implement SVG filters at first). But this is someone of a chicken and egg problem. There is the "FakeSmile" JavaScript library that can be used with IE so lacking native support in IE may not be that big of a deal.[2] There is precedence for Inkscape to lead the way. I've had one person who has been around SVG for a long time tell me that without Inkscape SVG would not now be part of HTML5. BTW, I have a page where I created the same animation using SMIL, CSS Animations, and JavaScript.[3] Note that browser support for declarative animation, either via SMIL or CSS Animations is full of little quirks so the tests may or may not work correctly depending on which version of which browser you use. Tav [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-animations/ [2] http://leunen.me/fakesmile/ [3] http://tavmjong.free.fr/SVG/ANIMATION/

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Elliptical arc branch
by Tavmjong Bah 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Hi, The current Inkscape code converts an elliptical arc to a Bezier curve via converting it first to an SBasic curve. This leads to some loss of accuracy to the curve (noticeable now that we are using SVG <circle> and <ellipse> elements where possible) and control over where the resulting nodes will be placed. lib2geom has been patched (r2122) to fix the accuracy problem. Is there a reason this patch hasn't been applied to the copy of lib2geom in Inkscape? (If no, I can apply the patch.) Even with this patch, it might be better to provide a direct route to go from an elliptical arc to a Bezier curve bypassing the SBasic step to have better control over where nodes are placed. I have made a first pass at providing a direct route. At the moment, one Bezier curve is created if the arc is less than pi/2 in length. If it is longer, extra nodes are placed on the major and minor ellipse axes. Can the lib2geom experts have a look? I am sure I have not done things in a lib2geom sanctioned way. The branch is available at: lp:~inkscape.dev/inkscape/elliptical_arc I've attached a test file where the red ellipses/arcs are drawn using an "ideal" conversion to Bezier curves (with four per circle/ellipse) and the blue curves are test arcs. (The Cairo routines convert the arcs to Beziers for display as Cairo/PostScript/PDF do not have a native elliptical arc path segment so just rendering arcs on screen tests the code.) One obvious bug is that the flash path when using the node tool is wrong. Thanks, Tav

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Recent change to ellipse to path conversion method?
by mathog 01 Dec '13

01 Dec '13

Earlier today I found one small bug related to images written to WMF files and posted it in launchpad. But while working on that noticed that there was also another binary change in the output that didn't correspond to anything I could see in the images. A careful byte by byte comparison of EMF and WMF output from the lp988601 and current trunk branches showed that outside of my code there has been a change, where the paths returned on ellipse to path conversions are not as they once were. In emf-print.cpp in the print_simple_shape() routine a print statement was added after the call to pathv_to_linear_and_cubic_beziers() and the loop which adds up nodes, lines, and curves. For the exact same ellipse (long axis aligned with x, short with y, axis ratio about 2:1) this is what was found: nodes lines curves lp988601 5 0 4 trunk 9 0 8 They start at the same point, but differ from there. Tried it again with perfect circles and got the same result. The strange thing is that there is no change at all to the geom.cpp file, where pathv_to_linear_and_cubic_beziers() is coded. I also checked to see if anything similar could be seen in the GUI, and it sort of could be. Select the ellipse, select "stroke to path", then edit points. The points on the ellipse are in different places in the two branches, and there are different numbers of points. For lp988602 there is one point on the end of each axis plus one point in roughly the center of each quadrant. For trunk there are the same points on the ends of the axis, plus two points within each quadrant, and these are clustered towards the "sharp" ends of the ellipse. Is this change intentional??? Thank you, David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech

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Bug in Blend Modes, Please Help
by Martin Owens 01 Dec '13

01 Dec '13

Hey Devs, Blocking bug lp:850992 [1] is proving impossible to get a handle on for different devs who are not familiar with the blend code base and it's resisting attempts to let us learn about it. We could do with a heavy-hitting genius who hopefully knows something about the blend modes for layers to figure this out. I'm betting it's a single line fix when the little worm is rooted out. To reproduce: Make a new layer with a blend mode other than normal. Group any objects together. Grouping fails to refresh, ungrouping works as expected. The area isn't being cleared by the redraw method like the text bug (I checked), the redraw is simply failing to happen at all. Tracing the update events is what's causing some headaches since both upstream and downstream tracing just seems to vanish. Thanks for your help. Best Regards, Martin Owens [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/850992

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Email Address
by Martin Owens 30 Nov '13

30 Nov '13

Hey Devs, I'm trying to think of a good email address for this kickstarter persona. I'm thinking that funding@...1478... or some other special email address would be ideal. We can decide where to route emails from there. Do you have any good ideas for some authoritative email addresses like this? Or a better suggestion for this one? Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Questions from InfoWorld.com
by Tavmjong Bah 26 Nov '13

26 Nov '13

Hi, Paul Krill from InfoWorld.com is preparing an on-line presentation of SVG tools. He has indicated that he wants to include Inkscape in his presentation and has contacted us through the Software Freedom Conservancy. I volunteered to answer his questions. I could use some help (and some feedback). I hope to be able to send him a reply in the next day. His questions are indicated by *'s with my tentative replies following. There are a couple of places I could really use some help as indicated. Thanks, Tav * What is the purpose of Inkscape? What are its main functions? Creating vectorized drawings, from serious artwork to technical illustrations. A good summary of Inkscape functions can be found at: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/about/features/ (We will be going live with a new website in the near future.) Inkscape provides an easy to use interface for creating complex drawings. While Inkscape supports most of the SVG 1.1 standard, knowledge of the standard is not directly required. * What does Inkscape do that other SVG tools do not? [HELP WANTED (I don't have Illustrator or CoralDraw to compare it to). Tracing? Tiling? File format support? Command-line conversion between file formats?] Inkscape has a well developed plug-in system that allows users to extend Inkscape's functionality in many unique ways. One area that has been particularly popular is directly driving plotters and engravers including the "Egg-Bot". See: http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/171-egg-bot * Who developed it? A team of volunteer developers. The original developers were mostly artists who were looking for a tool that allowed them to create the art they envisioned. * Is Inkscape an open source or commercial product? If it is commercial, can you provide a price range per-seat? Open source. It can be downloaded from: http://inkscape.org/download/ * How important is SVG, from your perspective? Originally SVG was chosen as the native file format for Inkscape as it is an open standard. In a more general historical perspective, SVG did not gain the popularity on the Web it deserved due the lack of support in Internet Explorer and due to Adobe losing interest after purchasing Macromedia (i.e. Flash). The inclusion of SVG as part of HTML5 and the addition of SVG rendering support in IE9 has resulted in a dramatic increase in interest in SVG. Adobe is once again on board and sees SVG (and HTML5) as the future. SVG is starting to appear on major websites such as this graphic from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/20/movies/among-the-oscar-conten… * Can you provide some screen shots or URLs with visuals of Inkscape? Certainly. [HELP WANTED, I assume that he'll want something he can use on his website.] See: http://inkscape.org/screenshots/index.php?lang=en * I understand from a user of Inkscape that it has not been upgraded in a while. Are there any plans to upgrade it soon? We will have a major upgrade in the very near future. Inkscape's rendering engine underwent a complete rewrite resulting in a significant speed up in rendering complex drawings while reducing memory use. There were a number of regressions that have had to be dealt with. We are down to a small number of blocking bugs (one?). Tentative release notes for the upgrade can be found at: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.49 * Who is your employer and what is your title there? I am self-employed as a writer and software developer. I represent Inkscape in the W3C SVG working group.

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Trunk r12812 building on Windows for anybody?
by mathog 24 Nov '13

24 Nov '13

There seems to be a build problem right now on Windows with r12812. bzr update rm build.dep rm -rf build g++ buildtool.cpp -o btool btool stops here: compile src/xml/simple-document.cpp compile src/xml/simple-node.cpp compile src/xml/subtree.cpp ##### Target : link ##### link objects and library to create executable --- link / rc --- link / link Make error line 437: LINK problem: mingw32-g++: error: CreateProcess: No such file or directory Is a new devlib needed? My system is currently at 47. If that is the problem, could we please have a small revision of btool so that it checks the devlib number and emits a useful error message if the needed version is not present? Thank you, David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Questions from InfoWorld.com (Tavmjong Bah)
by Jelle Mulder 24 Nov '13

24 Nov '13

Hello Tav, I happen to know these other tools really well, but there is not that much Inkscape can do that the others cannot. That said,.. these are the most important aspect why I started to use Inkscape almost exclusively. ** Some other things Inkscape does that the others do not. *** Inkscape uses SVG as it's native file format. This ensures a minimum of fuss in publishing documents on-line. It has the single widest support of the SVG 1.1. standard of all authoring tools you may find. Some of the tools in Inkscape are without equal. The filter editor allows you to create effects that other tools cannot hope to accomplish simply because their native file format is not SVG. There are always conversion steps you have in other authoring applications that you will not have using Inkscape. Errors therefore are confined to browser or viewer implementation. Though some of the basic functions in Inkscape are a bit Spartan, it often is at the more complex things you can do with vector graphic that Inkscape can do things nothing else can out of the box. No other authoring tool will allow for editing the code directly, through an XML editor, nor does any other authoring tool allow you to add scripts in your SVG code, both in Inkscape and outside it, which will be negated by the editor and left alone during the parsing of the drawing. You can often take arbitrary code generated by other authoring applications or even hand coded SVG and happily edit the file in Inkscape and save it back without it being messed up by the editor. Very few other applications are as forgiving accepting drawings from other applications and then being able to edit them.

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Windows devlibs
by Josh Andler 20 Nov '13

20 Nov '13

Is http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tracking_Dependencies#Distros up to date for the Windows devlibs? I'm mainly wondering why pango, gtk+, and gtkmm appear to be so outdated. Cheers, Josh

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