March 2016 - 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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Inkscape for embroidery
by Michael Soegtrop 26 Nov '16

26 Nov '16

Dear Inkscape Developers, I added a few features to Inkscape for use in embroidery, because the commercial tools available don't offer the artistic flexibility I want. I would like to have your opinion on if you think it makes sense to integrate such functionality into the Inkscape mainline, or if it would be too much of a stretch. It boils down to some LPEs and an export format. The commercial tool I have from Bernina (a Swiss sewing machine manufacturer) is based on Corel Draw. Below is a list of the additions I did / I am working on. Please let me know what you think about this. With these additions, Inkscape offers substantially more flexibility than affordable commercial SW (and affordable here means 500..1000$). Best regards, Michael 1.) Ways to fill an area with clusters of contours Inkscape already offers 2 path interpolation LPEs which allow this. I plan to add a 3rd one which creates a set of equidistant inset/outset paths. 2.) A way to connect sub path of a path into one continuous path I added an LPE to do this with various options of end interpolation. Maybe if I use bool-ops I need to extend it with some sort of sorting, cutting and auto reversing mechanism to keep the connections short. 3.) A way to cut a path into stitches (straight line segments) in a controlled way. I added an LPE to do this, but it is quite primitive as yet. 4.) Bool ops on paths because in embroidery you cannot simply hide an object below another one. I just added a bool-op LPE for this - needs some additional work to cut contours against a closed path. 5.) A tool to convert graphics output to some format an embroidery / sewing machines can read. I wrote an external tool to convert HPGL to a common embroidery format (stitch/DST), but could also integrate this into Inkscape. 6.) Maybe a tool to hide connections between path segments below filled areas. For a sewing machine it is quite complicated to do a "pen up" - it has to cut the threads, so one typically hides connection paths below some embroidery to avoid thread cutting. Currently I do this semi-manually. Doing this automatically might be quite complicated.

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Thanks for your votes! We have our new "Draw Freely" font!
by C R 02 Nov '16

02 Nov '16

And the winner (by quite a bit, actually) is Euphoria Script! Thanks to everyone for the votes and helping us choose a new open font. The new font will be deployed to the website and relevant graphics. You can start using it now in your inkscape-related materials by downloading it here: (includes font and ofl license files). http://www.opendesignstudio.org/inkscape/euphoria_script.zip Have fun, and thanks again for the help! -C

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performance problems and possible remedies?
by Yale Zhang 29 Sep '16

29 Sep '16

Hi. I'm using Inkscape to author a comic and the slow speed for certain things is very annoying. I'm already have OpenMP turned on and using 4 cores. 1. *large blurs are slow* - I'm an expert with writing SIMD code, so I was thinking about vectorizing the Gaussian IIR filter with SIMD intrinsics, even though it's harder than for a FIR. But I noticed there isn't any SIMD code in Inkscape so does that mean it's something to avoid. I'm pretty sure no current compiler is smart enough to vectorize it, and besides, Inkscape is compiled with -O2, meaning -ftree-vectorize isn't on by default. 2. *when there's a large image (raster based) background - scrolling in a zoomed region is very slow* I compiled the latest 0.49 code with GCC profiling and it shows this: 33.98 22.47 22.47 exp2l 21.29 36.55 14.08 log2l 17.57 48.17 11.62 pow 7.12 52.88 4.71 658 0.01 0.01 ink_cairo_surface_srgb_to_linear(_cairo_surface*) 6.72 57.32 4.44 563 0.01 0.01 ink_cairo_surface_linear_to_srgb(_cairo_surface*) 5.51 60.96 3.64 1216 0.00 0.00 Inkscape::Filters::FilterGaussian::~FilterGaussian() 5.23 64.42 3.46 internal_modf 0.59 64.81 0.39 _mcount_private 0.41 65.08 0.27 __fentry__ 0.12 65.16 0.08 GC_mark_from 0.09 65.22 0.06 5579 0.00 0.00 Geom::parse_svg_path(char const*, Geom::SVGPathSink&) 0.06 65.26 0.04 35320 0.00 0.00 bounds_exact_transformed(std::vector<Geom::Path, std::allocator<Geom::Path> > const&, Geom::Affine const&) 0.06 65.30 0.04 8 0.01 0.01 convert_pixbuf_normal_to_argb32(_GdkPixbuf*) 0.05 65.33 0.03 885444 0.00 0.00 std::vector<Geom::Linear, std::allocator<Geom::Linear> >::_M_fill_insert(__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator<Geom::Linear*, std::vector<Geom::Linear, std::allocator<Geom::Linear> > >, unsigned long long, Geom::Linear const&) The cost is absolutely dominated by ink_cairo_surface_srgb_to_linear() and ink_cairo_surface_linear_to_srgb(). My first instinct was to optimize those 2 functions, but then I thought why are those even being called every time I scroll through the image? Why not convert the images up front to linear and stay that way in memory? If that can't be done, then my optimization approach is: 1. replace ink_cairo_surface_srgb_to_linear() with a simple 3rd degree polynomial approximation (0.902590573087882 - 0.010238759806148x + 0.002825455367280x^2 + 0.000004414767235x^3) and vectorize with SSE intrinsics. The approximation was calculated by minimizing the square error (maxError = 0.313) over the range [10, 255]. For x < 10, it uses simple scaling. 2. replace ink_surface_linear_to_srgb() with a vectorized implementation of pow(). Unlike srgb_to_linear(), a low degree polynomial can't be used due to the curve having larger high order derivatives. An alternative would be piece wise, low order polynomials. The main question I have is what degree of accuracy is desired? Certainly, it doesn't need double precision pow() since the input is only 8 bits! Is +- 0.5 from the true value (before quantization) OK or do people depend on getting pixel perfect results? UJ

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Style dialog
by Tavmjong Bah 07 Jun '16

07 Jun '16

Hi, One of the proposed GSOC projects is better CSS style sheet support. There are a number of simple things that can be done to improve Inkscape's use of style sheets and there is one big thing... adding a Style editing dialog. I've made a first stab at designing such a dialog. The dialog presents a list of CSS selectors. * Clicking on selector Selects all matching objects in the SVG document. * Double clicking on selector Selects all matching objects in the SVG document and opens CSS dialog. * Dragging selector Allows reordering selectors. * Click on object Selects all matching selectors. * Modifying property If "Sheet" enabled: modifies CSS of highlighted selector if only one selector highlighted otherwise produces error message. If "Attribute" selected: modifies inline style attribute. * Clicking on '+' in front of selector Adds selected objects to selector. * Clicking on 'x' in front of object Removes object from selector. * Clicking on '+' at bottom Opens up text dialog to add new selector. If the selector is a Class selector, adds the class attribute to the selected objects with the value of the selector name. If the class attribute already exists, appends the selector name to the class attribute value (the class attribute can include more than one class name). * Clicking on 'x' at bottom Removes selected selectors unless selector is a Class selector. If it is a Class selector: if the selector was selected by clicking on it, remove the selector; if the selector was selected by selecting objects, removes the selector name from all selected objects class attribute. This dialog could replace the "Selection Sets" dialog, using CSS class attributes to define sets. Please comment on the dialog here or at: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Style_Editor Tav

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New video three features.
by Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz 25 May '16

25 May '16

Hi, here are my last video. Is a kind of showcase of three features: * Eraser tool with no width now in trunk. * Randomize color extension now with a limit slider, also in trunk. * Optional auto fill Delaunay triangles with color and thin stroke in the same color. The code of this are in this bug:https://bugs.launchpad .net/inkscape/+bug/1553497 Anyway, there is better/faster ways to make Delaunay based in a image. So this is just a example. http://jabiertxof.marker.es/2016/03/no-width-eraser-mode-limit-random.h tml Cheers, Jabier.

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0.91 performance when zoomed in
by Saar Drimer 14 Apr '16

14 Apr '16

Hello everyone, I work with Inkscape nearly every day, but am now experiencing some painfully slow performance with some files (that I cannot share right now, sorry!) I'm working with Inkscape 0.91 r13725 on Ubuntu 15.10 with an i7-5500 and 16GB of RAM. The designs are not particularly complex, but have one feature that might be relevant: I'm working with dimension accurate objects that can be very small, 0.1mm and below (I design printed circuit boards). The slowness becomes painful when zoomed in onto the small objects; it happens when I try zooming, choosing objects, moving them, and even changing tools from 'node' to 'select'. nearly every such operation I get the greyed-out Ubuntu stall. Working on the design when zoomed out is not practical, but it is quite a bit faster performing. Another thing that's happening that could be related is the following prompts keep appearing on the console: (inkscape:15569): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_font_family_list_faces: assertion 'PANGO_IS_FONT_FAMILY (family)' failed (inkscape:15569): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_tree_view_scroll_to_cell: assertion 'tree_view->priv->tree != NULL' failed I could not find any report for how to handle these, and discover if they are related to the performance problems. Searching for a solution through looking at bug reports, I've tried: * Running with fresh preferences.xml * Geometric bounding box * Reducing the complexity of the design * Hiding layers (there are 24 layers) to only ones that are relevant for the operation (usually only two layers) * Hiding rulers and scroll-bars * Maximising memory and threads (with restart) I'm out of ideas, and I hope that someone might be able to recommend something. If there are no ideas, I'll work on a design that I can share so that we could work though it. Thanks, Saar.

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Paint-order attribute needs to be put in stroke properties dialogue
by C R 08 Apr '16

08 Apr '16

We need a checkbox for it in the stroke properties tab. Currently I think it's a compile-time flag, which means it's unusable for most users. I'd love to highlight this feature in the Inkscape video at LGM. Can someone add this? For reference as to what it does, look here: https://plus.google.com/+inkscape/posts/QBxB6CDhNzZ Thanks. :) -C

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Hackfest catering and venue information
by Alex Valavanis 04 Apr '16

04 Apr '16

[Can ignore if you're not attending the Hackfest!] Hi All, Some information about the Hackfest venue, and a request for your dietary requirements... == Venue == The Hackfest venue will be in the Evans Room at Devonshire Hall in the Hyde Park area of Leeds [1]. It is a traditional "Oxbridge style" stone-built hall. Our meeting room will accommodate 10 delegates. == Catering == A buffet lunch will be provided each day. I will suggest that we break for lunch at 1300 each day, unless there are any objections. Please let me know by tomorrow if you have any special dietary requirements. There will also be an unlimited supply of tea, coffee and biscuits. Sugar, milk and soy milk will be provided. == Facilities == * Wireless networking * UK mains power (remember to bring your own socket adapters if you're coming from outside the UK!!) * Data projector & screen * Flipchart and pens == Nearby amenities == There are a few pubs, bars, cafes and coffee shops 5 minutes walk away from the venue if we want a change of scenery. There is also a small convenience store. The venue is located on the Woodhouse Ridge nature trail if you want to step out for some fresh air [2]. == Local contact == I live within walking distance of the venue. Send me a message if you get stuck! I'll also be free on the Sunday evening before the Hackfest if anyone would like to meet for food/drink in Leeds City Centre. Best wishes, Alex [1] http://www.meetinleeds.co.uk/devonshire-hall [2] http://www.woodhouseridge.org.uk/

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Git
by Krzysztof Kosiński 02 Apr '16

02 Apr '16

Eventually we probably need to move to Git. The user interface is completely atrocious, but the fact it works from a single directory by default is very convenient when using Eclipse, and Eclipse is an elephantine monstrosity but has good code navigation. This could also encourage more people to contribute, since almost all OSS developers know Git, while a very limited number know Bazaar at this point. The bug tracker and answer tracker should definitely stay on Launchpad, but what about the code? Should we use Launchpad's nascent Git support, or some other site like Github? What people think? We can convert lib2geom first and apply the lessons learned to Inkscape. Best regards, Krzysztof

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