February 2015 - Inkscape Devel

Dropping colours from document or into Swatches through colourpicker etc.
by Jelle Mulder 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

As I cannot reach launchpad (with all of China having holidays I cannot even reach Tav's Inkscape manual pages). I'd like to drop this wish/idea here. Ehmm,.. Setting swatches seems less than intuitive to me and I cannot access the manual. Maybe there is a method already that I am not aware of, but how feasible would it be to create a swatch object and then drop the colour into it from the document. Lets say that I'd like to create a number of swatches in a non defined set of colours. I'd make 32 swatches of non defined colour (Additional Button: New) and just pick them up from the screen through the colour picker and change them to my hearts content and save them into a new list. It would make the whole swatch list into a great productivity tool and it wouldn't take too much effort I think to make it possible. In this setup making a new button with a delete function would be logical as well, just to be complete. It is nice to have all those predefined swatches around, but a simple and fast method to create and save your own seems a much better option to me. Also taking a predef swatch list and adding your custom colours to it might be a nice option. Saving the thus created swatch list could force a save as to keep the predefined swatch lists clean. When selecting the names of the swatches in the list, it would be a nice thing if you could reorder them, so you don't have to scroll down to the bottom every time. Maybe a save as and using an underscore _ could be a simple way to force them to the top. Reordering the swatches themselves would also be great to have. One may use 200 or more swatches, but finding the more common ones can be a bit of a hassle. Maybe something like a palette within the swatch docker would be an option. Let the user create a grid of size Columns x Rows and drag his preferred swatches to it. Any option on swatches I actually would expect to find in the swatch menu. Currently the interface has two very similar icons in it. A top menu icon with a left pointing arrow and one a few pixels lower with the same shape giving a drop down menu. How about making the second one a arrow pointing down to make clear it is something dropping down? Could be a nice GSOC project ;-) Cheers, Jelle

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generate guide with certain color in extension ?
by Samuel Dellicour 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

I have build some extensions that generate guides (like guides in a grid with columns and gutters - available here: https://github.com/sambody/inkscape-guide-tools). It works fine, but now that Inkscape 0.91 is out with the ability to change the color (and label) of an existing guide by hand, I had the following question: When I generate a guide in an extension, can I define the color (and label) of the guide when generating ? If yes, how? I'm using a code like this : inkex.etree.SubElement(parent,'{ http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd}guide ',{'position':position,'orientation':orientation}) I tried with just using 'color':'#ff0000ff' as extra parameter, but that didn't work. If setting the color is possible, I could let the user choose a color for the generated guides, different from their default guide color. Thanks. Samuel

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Official release location
by Alex Valavanis 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

Hi All, Please can someone confirm what the official location(s) are for our release files? I guess it's now https://inkscape.org/en/download/ instead of the SourceForge file repo? I ask, because downstream packagers will generally want an official upstream source location to be specified (for automated update notifications etc). Is there a plan to upload the 0.91 tarball on SourceForge, or is that file repository now considered to be obsolete? SF is advantageous for downstream, because the direct-download URL is predictable. Best wishes, Alex

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Inkscape 0.91 in the news
by "Christoph Schäfer" 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

FWIW, the Swiss "Publisher" magazine mentioned the 0.91 release in its current printed issue: http://publisher.ch/news_detail.php?t=Inkscape%2B0.91%253A%2BDie%2BVektoren… As I've written before, a 2-page article will be included in Publisher 2-2015. Christoph

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Good Press for 0.91
by Bryce Harrington 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

I'd like to thank everyone that helped make this release a success. Often times people focus on coder contributions, but software releases are decidedly multi-disciplinary, and I'd like to specially credit four teams in particular for being well organized, thorough, and dependable. Before the release really even got started, a strong foundation was built for us by the Bug Triaging Team. Especially after such a lengthy development period, with such extensive changes, there can be an overwhelming number of bugs. But due to how thorough the triaging was, we actually had very good transparency into what needed fixed the most. In the past, we've learned that packaging of our windows and osx builds can make or break the release, and even a small glitch can throw everything out of wack. We certainly had our share of packaging challenges to overcome, and more that still need solved, but the Packaging Team developed a good strategy for charting us through to the release, to ensure we'd have functional packages for all platforms within two days. Even now the Translation Team is hard at work on the release announcements and our website. This cycle we allocated ample time to their translation of the application, and I think that paid off in spades. I think this may be the first release where our Web Team played such a crucial role. They established a solid infrastructure both for editing the website and for mirror-caching our downloadables; we have exercised both these functions extremely heavily the last few days, and while we've had a few brief (but quickly fixed) glitches, the infrastructure appears to be shouldering all the loads without complaint. ~ ~ ~ Going forward, my plan is to keep us on course to deliver at least a couple new major releases each year. So, like perhaps shoot for a 0.92 release this summer or early autumn. Maybe even more frequently than that, but to achieve this I think we will need to tighten up in a few areas. First is marketing. Unsurprising after 4 years since the last release, our marketing abilities seem to have atrophied quite severely. We recognized this would be a problem and attempted to fix it; it's my fault we didn't get things organized here in time, but fortunately all the other teams filled in. We can try again for 0.92, and I will work harder to ensure we have a good solid marketing team by then. Second is the release mechanics themselves, which are quite byzantine. Fortunately no one else needed to deal with this but me! A number of steps are manual which should be automated, other steps are redundant but can't be skipped for one reason or other, and there's some steps that have to be carried out by specific people or at specific times. The result is that release management requires handling by someone with release experience to know what knobs need turned and levers need pulled, when and by how much. Instead, we need to systematize all this logic in scripts, so that releases become more like a push-button exercise that any one of us could do. A third area is user documentation. The only reason this hasn't been a release issue is because we haven't got any! :-) We get away with not shipping documentation thanks to having a quite excellent tutorial writing community and well-crafted release notes; users also thankfully have a selection of third-party commercial documentation to fill the gap. But to be considered as professional software, a user manual is a must. Since it'll need updated each release, this implies the need to create a Documentation Team. Bryce P.S. here's some of the press we've gotten so far: Our news announcement: https://inkscape.org/en/news/2015/01/30/inkscape-version-091-is-released/ Was rather a last minute rush. Hopefully we can do better next time. Slashdot announcement: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/31/1914255/inkscape-version-091-releas… Amongst the usual comment chaff is some strong praise. "Best of Breed," "One of the handful of apps that together make up a good base set," "One of the coolest things it does [is] converting bitmapped images to vectors," "Have always preferred Inkscape", "Plays nicely with Inkcut - vinyl cutting," "My current business depends on Inkscape. I use Inkscape's 'gcodetools' plugin to generate gcode for a CNC mill." "I spoke with the very helpful people on Inkscape's IRC Channel for this tip." "Is it just me, or is this whole thread making you feel nostalgic for the good ol' Slashdot days when we gabbed about stuff that was a lot more fun to gab about?" Much of the critical feedback is stuff we're already working on: UI design looks out of date, needs porting to Gtk3, needs more functionality before it can supplant Illustrator, Gtk+ is poor on Windows, need a more native L&F on OSX, needs proper CMYK / printing support. http://fedoramagazine.org/inkscape-0-91-released/ An article by our own Ryan Lerch. A great overview of the release, and would have made a much better news announcement than the one we put out. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Inkscape-0.91-Released Unfortunately, this one was a leak of the release before we were ready for it to get out. I suppose they wanted to get the scoop, but with no packages available nor the news release posted, there was little to go on and it caused users some confusion and misunderstanding. I fault myself here for not having the marketing end of things better organized, so we could have kept the release hush-hush until everything was ready to go. http://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/2u6kxi/new_release_of_inksc… Reddit also scooped the news release. But the comments here were a bit more interesting. A lot of pro-Inkscape cheer. A few areas where work is needed: Working with text, Saving as .eps, CMYK spot color. Hopefully Monday we'll see wider uptake of our release.

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Inkscape and Eclipse on Windows
by Bit Barrel 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

I want to compile, and most importantly, debug (single stepping etc.) Inkscape on windows but I am stuck at some of the instructions. I followed this: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_Eclipse Then this: http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrEclipse/Installation But at this step there is nothing like "bazaar" in the project window: Go to: *File* --> *New* --> *Project*<<BR>Eclipse opens the new project dialog Under *Bazaar* select *Project From Bazaar* and click *Next*. Eclipse shows the *Eclipse Project From Bazaar* dialog. I installed Eclipse 4.3 Kepler (recommended), but at the download site, there are several sub versions: http://eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/Kepler/SR2 It is not mentioned which sub version of eclipse you are supposed to download. I downloaded "Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers", but maybe that one is not correct?

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Text Highlighting
by Martin Owens 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Dear Developers, I've got a request here from one of my clients to add text-highlighting to inkscape/inkview. The y've got a batik extension to do the following to text and tspan elements: background-color: colour value, default is 'transparent' background-mode: [ line-height | bbox ] background-outline: width of padding outside background color (similar to margin in html) background-outline-{top,right,bottom,left}: specific version of above. line-height: default: 'normal' i.e. font-size *1.1 otherwise size expression, used when background-mode is line-height. In which case background color is proportionally divided between ascent/descent to obtain line-height. Tav - The client claims it's not a part of the svg standard, but have talked with some people about adding it into future versions. Before I did any work, I'd like to nail down exactly what you think will happen (so we don't create something that doesn't make it into the standard) I'm attatching the batik extension file for reference. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Regarding Inkscape in Indian languages
by chandrakant dhutadmal 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Hi All. We have submitted requests for bringing out localized Inkscape for Indian languages through various bugs filed. List of all such bugs filed can be looked at https://bugs.launchpad.net/~cpdhutadmal. We have also submitted translations for those languages. Would like to know from the community if we have considered making builds for Indic languages. If so, when are we going to do it. If not, can we have a discussions surrounding the topic ? RegardsChandrakant DhutadmalPune, India.

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Cairo 1.14
by Alex Valavanis 12 Feb '15

12 Feb '15

Hi All, As discussed previously, are there any objections to bumping the Cairo version dependency to >=1.14 in trunk, now? AV

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[lance@...2167...: Re: [Hosting] ns2.osuosl.org Emergency Maintenance]
by Bryce Harrington 12 Feb '15

12 Feb '15

If these hosting emails are of interest to you, please subscribe to the mailing list at: http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/hosting ----- Forwarded message from Lance Albertson <lance@...2167...> ----- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 21:52:10 -0800 From: Lance Albertson <lance@...2167...> Cc: hosting@...2167... Subject: Re: [Hosting] ns2.osuosl.org Emergency Maintenance Just an update: We got this back online on newer hardware and it appears to be stable. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the system. We'll likely do the same with ns1 fairly soon since its on similar aging hardware. Thanks! On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Jordan Evans <jordane@...2167...> wrote: > ns2.osuosl.org (140.211.166.131) has suffered some hardware failure, > and it will be replaced shortly. This is the same machine as > ns2.auth.osuosl.org(140.211.166.141) > > We're currently busy with a few other things, but will be migrating > ns2 at 5:00 PST, or 0100 UTC. The new machine will be up with the same > ip addresses as the old > > ns1 and ns3 are both still up and operating as normal, but if you have > any machines > that hit ns2 first, you'll see some slowdown on dns until ns2 comes back > online. > > Another email will be sent to this list when the new ns2.osuosl.org is > up and running. -- Lance Albertson Director Oregon State University | Open Source Lab _______________________________________________ Hosting mailing list Hosting@...2167... http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/hosting ----- End forwarded message -----

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