Hey everyone!
First week with our new hires attending with us.
Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/
Attending: Martin, Seán Burke, Ishaan Arora, Mc, Mike Terry, René,
Roland Taylor, Tav, Charlotte
Next meeting: May 21st, later time, https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/
We kick off today's meeting with introductions of the new contract
hires and all the volunteer developers.
Martin explains how the developer meeting works, cadence, format and
questions and what the developer team is. We now kick off into the
meeting proper:
René has been doing some infrastructure work for windows and macOS. An
open merge request to look at. Has been packaging a different Gtk4
application to improve support for Gtk4 on macOS as a side quest so we
don't have just Gimp and Inkscape using it.
Martin has been continuing their work on the rendering engine. Has a
new color API merge request which needs review. It allows the calling
of internal functions for color conversion by the rendering engine much
faster than the std::vector pathway as well as various other fixes.
lcms2 is still slow though in comparison.
Marc asked about windows arm support in the build system. René pledges
to work on it during the long weekend. Marc says that the system might
be a good option for x86 as well as arm.
Ishaan asked about PDF export and if we will support cairo going
forwards. Martin says that the plan is to support CapyPDF going
forwards and not fix issues with the cairo export.
Marc asked about 1.4.5 and if that was going to happen. ltlnx wasn't
here to answer so Marc will proceed as if there will be no more 1.4.x
releases wrt packaging maintenance.
Marc has fixed some communication issues on the website as downstreams
were packaging the arm build by default which was not great. Marc asked
Martin about the website and creating a new platform for x86-64bit
which is more specific that the current platform `64bit`. Martin says
yes and redirects can be created, though only for one at a time.
Charlotte wanted to look into py2geom, it's not ready yet. Decided to
use the addon system in C++ instead of a python based system. Because
of a deadline will put the python functionality to one side. Perceptual
grouping, imported from pdf which can group based on them being
together visually.
Tav has been going down a rabbit hole with memory leaks in the color
font; while searching found other memory problems in freetype.
Rewriting using Harfbuz directly but then found an issue with the
optical size values in variable fonts. Removing the fudge we have in
the sizing for hinting actually makes us more consistant with firefox.
Martin gives some instruction for the bug accelerator program and what
it will look like and how people will be meeting.
Ishaan talks about an issue with text alignment, where Inkscpe is now
more compatible, but the user experience is now broken as we appear to
be including extra spaces at the ends of lines which then result in
ugly spacing. This certainly is a regression, but it can't be fixed by
making Inkscape less compatible with other programs. So the xml we
produce for text must be changed to remov the ugly spacing instead.
We talked about the recent AI announcement by GitLab and what the risks
are. Developers reported that they see the AI UX even though it's
switchef off for our project. Members inccouraged to report the issue
to GitLab.
Thanks everyone for coming to this week's busy meeting!
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Inkscape 1.4.4
==============
Inkscape 1.4.4 is now available for all three supported operating
systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)!
You can download it from:
https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.4
BUGFIX and MAINTENANCE RELEASE
------------------------------
Inkscape 1.4.4 is be a bugfix and maintenance release, which brings you
20 crash fixes, more than 25 bug fixes and performance improvements, a
couple small new features, and comes with almost 20 updated translations.
The most important fixes and changes in this release are:
* 20 crash fixes, among them for three nasty bugs where Inkscape
wouldn't even start
* almost 20 other bug fixes
* 6 changes that improve performance
* a new palette
* a new button for rotating stars and polygons into their 'neutral'
or 'upright' position
* 27 updated interface translations
* 15 updated documentation translations
* installation files for Windows on Arm
See the release notes for more information (also about known issues):
https://inkscape.org/doc/release_notes/1.4.4/Inkscape_1.4.4.html
Like its predecessor, it is also a bridge release in the sense that it
can be used to convert the planned Inkscape 1.5 multipage file format to
the pre-1.5 multipage format. Versions lower than Inkscape 1.4.3 will
not be able to interpret pages created in Inkscape versions 1.5 and
upwards. Opening a document in Inkscape 1.4.3 and saving it will convert
it to the current ('old') page format (MR #7608).
Background: While the 'old' format of pages in Inkscape is a custom
addition that only works in Inkscape, the new format will make use of
the svg:view element, which is standardized and can work in other SVG
viewers, too. Find more information about this in MR #7525.
Report Bugs
-----------
Please report all bugs you find in our Inbox bug tracker on GitLab!
https://inkscape.org/report
-----------------------------
Join an Inkscape project team
-----------------------------
Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas:
code, docs, translation, UX, bug triaging, or even outreach!
The main ways to get involved are listed on
https://inkscape.org/contribute/
and you can get in touch with us on https://chat.inkscape.org/
Thanks to everyone involved in this release!
-- The Inkscape team
Hey Everyone,
No attendees for this week's meeting.
Next meeting is the earlier meeting:
https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/
hope to see you all there, it's the earlier one.
Best regards, Martin Owens
