November 2025 - Inkscape Devel

freeColour palettes available and ready for inclusion in Inkscape after a change of licence
by christoph-schaefer＠gmx.de 19 Nov '25

19 Nov '25

Hi there, I've been no longer active in Open Source or Open Content development/promotion for some years, mostly due to health reasons (Long Covid), but also some personal disappointments. However, one of the issues that are still important to me is the original mission of freieFarbe/freeColour (not its current incarnation). With respect to Inkscape and other FLOSS programs, the most important development is that after I resigned in protest, because they refused to honour an internal agreement to release all colour palettes under the zlib licence, they did it anyway, albeit much later (https://freiefarbe.de/en/licence/). What does this mean? It means that Inkscape can now choose to include any of the more than 300 commercial colour palettes from the Open Colour Systems Collection 2.0 and, more importantly, both versions of the free and open Pantone alternative HLC Colour Atlas (standard and XL) in one of the formats supported by Inkscape (https://freiefarbe.de/en/thema-farbe/software/). I would, however, strongly advise against including all OCSC files. A reasonable selection would be the HLC and CIE palettes for the fF CMYK colour fan (as opposed to the much larger Atlas) and the HKS palettes, since HKS is still being widely used for signage in Europe. As regards the rest, you could either provide a download + installation opportunity, as Scribus currently does, or simply leave it to users to download and install the palettes they want or need. With all of the fF content under the zlib licence, this should no longer be a legal problem. I wish you good luck and success for the future! Christoph

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Developer Meeting, Nov 18th 2025
by Martin Owens 18 Nov '25

18 Nov '25

Hey Devs! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Mike, Philip, Tav, Willy Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ (TIME HAS CHANGED!) Mike has been working on making the newer spin button widget used in the rest of the project. Migrating over the UnitTracker and various widget fixes. Willy is trying to fix 1.4.x: text tool pop-over Spinbutton changes, pop-over closes. and Command bar collapsing issue. Pbs talked about animation and live preview, some time was spent discussing the preview functionality and what we can do to allow changes to be previewed without modifying the document or abusing the rendering engine with extra changes at unexpected times. This discussion was quite long. RPATH issues in our build systems are ongoing. Tav has been working on macOS bugs and crashes where jpeg files are not accessable from finder, this involved learning a lot of how macOS works for depevelopers. and color font support and getting the tests all smoothed out. Talking about the late meeting situation, looks like the best time is 2 hours after the early meeting. Which is about 3 hours earlier than currently set. 6pm France, Noon in Boston, 1am Asia etc. Pbs and Martin talked about the filters engine work and the need for clearing up the premultiplicating situation in bilinear interpolation for various different spaces. Martin has been working on harmonising spin button user experience. Thanks for coming everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Nov 10th 2025
by Martin Owens 10 Nov '25

10 Nov '25

Dear Developer Team, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Marc, Tav, Charlotte, Martin, Mikekov, Jonathan Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Tav has been adding color fonts to Inkscape so we support all the various different formats. SVG, OpenType COLRv1, COLRv0 and Google Font thing. He's made some color fonts with the same glyph to test the font support going forwards. There's a couple of failing tests for some clipping and some pepper and carrot text tests. This test is useful for visually inspecting possible problems before committing the changes with slight differences. There's a slight problem with strokes not being rendered in Firefox which makes it hard to compare the SVG Font format. Martin talked about Conical gradients, which are needed for some css and COLORv1 Object to Path. Marc, not much, some updates for weblate and the translations stuff. Tav asked about how easy it is to add a new file, and Marc explained that it's all automatic now so is even easier. There's a security fix in librsvg which is a security problem, we're hoping that the new version will be able to fix it, but we don't know for sure if it will fix it. Marc has time to work on the 1.4.3 release and Martin points to the milestone page on GitLab https://gitlab.com/groups/Inkscape/-/milestones/19 for everyone to work from. Charlotte has been looking into the the bug for windows flashing back and forth in windows. But it's tricky because windows development is so much slower than on Linux even with a powerful CPU. She's also added a merge request and was concerned she has the ability to push directly to master but this isn't the case. Jonathan is still around and interested in working on funding projects but time is tight right now with his PhD. Martin talked about the website and taking payments, is in talk with Ben about putting together the second round of funded work to add that Stripe integration to the website. Martin has been working on widgets in the fill and stroke dialog and has been working on the harmonising the generic widgets so our programs looks more cohesive. And also has been working on some UX testing workflows with RDP and desktop sharing, but the technologies aren't great for disposable desktop sharing. Will share if it's figured out. Mikekov has been working on some UI improvements here and there, the next target is the spin button, we have developed our own based on Tav's work and now we need to remove all the older generic Gtk spin buttons with our more functionality such as unit support. We talked a bit about the design of this widget and all the possible ways of integrating units into the actual box itself. Next meeting we will decide the new meeting time for these later developer meetings. Thanks everyone who was able to come.

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Survey Results 2025
by Martin Owens 07 Nov '25

07 Nov '25

Dear Developer Team, Big thanks to everyone who filled out this year's developer team survey. These are the digested results as a summary, full results can be provided on office.inkscape.org Admin note: We'll use office.inkscape.org for next year's survey exclusively. There was no difference between google and nextcloud in functionality. 26 people responded, 77% claimed to be programmers, 65% were active, 70% were new (and didn't fill out the 2024 survey). For developer platform we have a fair split between Debian based (35%), Fedora or Arch based (35%) and macOS (23%). With Windows being 4% (1 person), so a considerable deficit in windows developer retention this year. Testing looks little better with 60% able to test on Wayland, 50% on X11, 46% Windows and macOS. Extra 23% Android and one person on macOS intel and one on ChromeOS. Most people who needed help are finding help in the chatroom. Only one person needed help and didn't find it. Build instructions were found by everyone except 2 people. And only 1 person couldn't get their build to work. Most people fixed issues they wanted to or was interesting. No one couldn't find issues to work on. Merge requests was our biggest failure this year with a lot of problems reported ion Slow Reviewing, Reviewers asking for too many changes (usually diverging from the original work with refactoring challenges) and also a new problem, merge requests getting stuck waiting for the UX/UI team to respond. This is the first time where we've tried to put a pause on merges until they can be checked by the UX team but we're going to have some rules about how long we can wait for volunteers to become available to check the work. (and how big the requested changes can be before it should just be a rejection) Testing was good. We're getting better at requesting people write tests. though most people didn't think testing frameworks were expressive or extensive enough yet. A direction the project is improving on this year. The majority of people work on Inkscape as Volunteers for Public Service (54%),followed by Education and Leisure (42%), 3 people were hired to work on inkscape and 9 people said "Other" mysteriously. What we should work on ranged from improving programmer documentation, tutorials and videos to help developers get started. To full breakdowns of all the various parts of the code. A big problem highlighted was the massive duplication of documentation on the wiki, website and code repository was highlighted by the vast majority of people. Other things of note were timing of meetings (see Tav's poll) and and paying more people to work on inkscape. Lots of people thanked the project for keeping everything moving and how helpful an friendly our community it. Well done everyone! That's it for this year. Thanks to everyone for responding and I'll see you all next year. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Measurement input UI suggestion
by Ray at Daylon 03 Nov '25

03 Nov '25

Hi everyone, I was wondering if it would be worthwhile to modify Inkscape's UI where input of measurement values are used. My apologies if this has been discussed before. Currently (version 1.4.2) measurement input fields use an edit box containing the number and a combo box to specify the measurement unit. My suggestion is to use an edit box alone, with the user indicating the measurement unit after the number by typing its name e.g. "4.2px". A space may be optionally used if desired e.g. "4.2 px" (current locale is used to interpret and display decimal points). Okay, but why? - Less UI widgets to place, show/hide/enable, reflect to/from, etc. - Less chance of accidentally using the wrong unit by forgetting to change the combo box selection. - Ability to use multi-unit measures e.g. "2p4" to indicate 2 picas and 4 pts, common in typography, or things like "6ft 2in". - Percent symbol (%) can be used where appropriate to indicate a percentage of some contextual distance e.g. a document dimension, lessening the need for users to figure out the computed distance. If this is of any interest, I have some C++ library code to help with implementation. Ray Gardener Daylon Graphics Ltd. www.daylongraphics.com

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Developer Meeting, Nov 2nd 2025
by Martin Owens 02 Nov '25

02 Nov '25

Hey Everyone, Sunday meeting this week, Monday next week, big thanks to everyone who came today. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Willy(ltlnx), Marc, Philip(pbs), Tav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ There was a discussion about live path effects and merge requests. We reviewed a merge request which was stuck in review and got it un blocked by the consensus of the team. We talked about some of the difficulties with live path effects and getting things fixed while waiting to get lpe structures refactored. We talked about the release for 1.4.3 and some of the outstanding issues, the file opening in macOS and the language change crashes in windows. A review of a bunch of different issues depending on their priority on the milestone mostly between Itlnx and Pbs. We talked about a Gio security bug which can cause a security issue, but it's an upstream issue and it's only breaking on Windows. We tried to think up ways of testing the issue given out limited access to windows machines and experts who can help debug it. Marc will report a bug upstream to Gio / security gnome org. Marc has moved the translation work their own po files and communicated with the developer and translation mailing lists. Thanks Marc! Martin has paused working on the engine waiting for reviews, they're working to get a new paint order widget which is a restackable widget that allow values based on their order and is poking Gtk with the specific UX they want. Willy was working on the default canvas colors in the preferences and has been looking at some of the difficulties in Gtk4 widgets for color selection. Tav has been working on getting his merge requests merged and reviewing his color font work again. Martin will do the developer survey results next week. Thanks everyone for joining on this Sunday Evening/Morning. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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