- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Developer Meeting Notes; May 21st 2026
by Martin Owens 21 May '26

21 May '26

Hi Devels! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Charlotte, Elendil, Mike Terry, Roland Tarlor, Seán Burke Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We have a backlog of 23 approved but unmerged Merge Requests which need to be dealt with. The windows CI is failing for most of these and blocking the ability to merge effectivly. Martin is tasked with talking with René and Marc to figure out how to solve this problem. Tav has been working on converting opentype to harfbuz, this is especially useful for variable fonts as harfbuz gives better results. We can remove a bunch of code we were using to cope with the lack of functionality. Martin asks about unit testing for the new code, Tav hasn't gotten around to it yet. One limitation is a conflict between font variations and style in file fonts. Eventually the inkscape-font- spec attribute should go away. Martin asked about font variation information being available in the poppler pdf import. Charlotte has been working on her own extension. Has a question about aprovals for merge requests and if the approver should be the one to hit the merge button. The general consensus is that they should for contributions from non-senior contributors, but not for senior developers generally. Though this isn't policy. Roland has given us an update on the first full week of the Bug Accelerator program 2026.1, has been working through the priority list and get down to a short list. Removing issues which have been kicked down the road but are not actually applicable any more. Developers are working on crashes as a priority for this week. Roland is giving usability blockers more priority to help with Inkscape's usability. The end of the month is the targrt for having a solid work list of priorities for the program. Elendil discovered a feature and wants to remove it. It's an obscure feature of the grid which allows incremental moves but was using the Alt key which was inconsistant with other features. The feature is removed as it's not useful and not documented anywhere. The keyboard bindings for some other items are updated too and Elendil wanted to know if the default should be in the xml or the code, Martin says the code unless the default should actually be "disabled". Martin talked about the color work and the new rendering engine. Giving a brief overview of where we are and what the direction of travel is for getting this merged into 1.5. The new static color functionality refactoring is all merged thanks to pbs for the review. The ongoing work to add test cases for the drawing code should prove that the display tree interface for the new rendering engine is the same as the old code and can be swapped out for testing. Roland gives Martin thanks for the PDF work which he's used on multiple projects so far. Martin is proud of the stability of the PDF output as it's been tested by more people and proven itself to be more dependable and faster than the old cairo output. Next meeting is the 29th May and is the earlier meeting. Thanks everyone for coming!

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Developer Meeting; May 13th 2026
by Martin Owens 13 May '26

13 May '26

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

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Inkscape 1.4.4 is out!
by Maren Hachmann 06 May '26

06 May '26

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

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Developer Meeting; May 5th 2026
by Martin Owens 05 May '26

05 May '26

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

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Inkscape Developer Meeting; April 27th 2026
by Martin Owens 28 Apr '26

28 Apr '26

Hey everyone, Big thanks to everyone who could make this week's meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Charlotte, Ishaan, Tav, Willy, René, Marc, Vaibhav Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ May 5th Tav has got his color font merge request ready, has put the run time check and make sure to keep the unit test separation with using flags instead of prefs. We talk about testing with fonts and the problems with testing with isolating fonts. There needs to be more leeway with visual tests and the tiny differences that don't matter. We want to push upstream to release Cairo, especially because 1.5 depends on it as a blocker. Tav will be working on namespace sanitisation and cleanup. He's found an interesting way to make an alias to help with compile issues. René has been busy working on the hiring committee with Martin. Martin worked on a small feature for Chris adding in an algo for nodes who's segments are invisible; thus removing nodes which are very close together. Tav and Martin talked about the removal of shape-inside from the SVG 2.0 specification. Martin doesn't like the way text shaping is now worse in 2.0 than it even was in SVG 1.2. Willy has been working on the 1.4.4 release; is working on the risks and advantages. Has a deadline of Thursday to get things together. Marc asked about a docs update; maren has made the merge requests for that and translations. The target date is May 1st. Ishaan reports about extensions not working on 1.4.4rc on macOS and asks René. René says he has a small window to be able to fix it. Ishaan reports the problem started in 1.4.3 so isn't a recent change. The release is scheduled for May 6th. Charlotte asks about the py2geom and the ability to have it available in inkex; she says she may work on getting it packaged for pypi and hopefully get a wheel made for various operating systems. Marc has mostly been working on release management tasks; cleanup up the architectures, but could do with more testing for Arm windows if possible. Updated the ppa so we're ready to update to 1.4.4 when we want. Vaibhav has been working on some performance and crash related issues. Happy to report that various open issues can be closed because they've been fixed in the meantime. Martin and René give a brief update on the status of the hiring process. They opened the floor for any questions the developer team might have had about the program, Marc asked if they were happy with the candidates and we had 38 C++ applicants and they were able to select really good candidates from that pool to interview. They are are about make a decision about who to hire. Have a good week everyone! Martin,

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Inkscape 1.4.4 release candidate available for testing!
by Maren Hachmann 25 Apr '26

25 Apr '26

Inkscape 1.4.4 Release Candidate ================================ Inkscape 1.4.4rc is now available for testing for all three supported operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)! For the first time, we also provide packages for Windows on Arm. Being a pre-release, this version is not intended for production use, but to help us smooth out any issues that should not show up in the actual release which is due in less than 2 weeks from now. You can download it from: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.4rc BUGFIX and MAINTENANCE RELEASE ------------------------------ Inkscape 1.4.4 will be a maintenance and bugfix release, which brings you 20 crash fixes, more than 25 bug fixes and performance improvements, a couple small new features, and will come with more than 25 updated translations. See the release notes draft for more information: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.4.4 Like the previous version, Inkscape 1.4.4 will also be 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. 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. KNOWN ISSUES ____________ * On macOS, if Inkscape has been started from the command line, extensions will not work (both in the graphical user interface as well as when only using the Inkscape commandline). Many import / export file formats provided by Python extensions are also affected. This is a security feature added in 1.4.3 for official macOS .dmg files, which fixes CVE-2025-15523. Learn more about it in our bug tracker at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/6047 * On Wayland (display server), depending upon the Gtk version your system uses, a crash may occur when moving a docked tab, or closing a floating dialog. Trying to undock a dialog may result in the wrong dialog being undocked (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/6013). Report Bugs ----------- Use at your own risk, and 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 pre-release! -- The Inkscape team

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Developer Team Meeting, April 19th 2026
by Martin Owens 19 Apr '26

19 Apr '26

Hey everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Vaibhav, Ishaan, Philip, René, Tav Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ CI builds with 26.04 from Ubuntu 24.04 and there are some breakages which will need attention. This was highlighted by a PPA failure with test failures. There were some ASAN issues, these might have effected our CI, but don't appear to be. The test failures appear to be related to fonts. Martin talks about how capypdf works with fonts and how the system in the CI might be failing in it. We talk about the test failures for antialiasing and improving robustness. Vaibhav has been working on backports. Wants to talk about a merge request for a crash ready for review. Ishaan wanted to talk about the issue in Gtk4 clipboard and the missing functionality. We talk about the C++ bug fixing program and how much the contractor will have to fix bugs in upstream projects like Cairo, Gtk4 etc. There's Gtk4 demos which we can test to see what can be fixed in Inkscape for 1.5. Martin has continued working on the new rendering engine with a full separation of SPstyle using templating and a consistent API use they are now developing a way to allow the current rendering engine to print out the code for a running svg file so we can copy paste those outputs into test files to make sure we are getting the same output in the new engine. Philip and Martin talk about the new engine's place, and how the discipline could help with using a GPU rendering engine in the future. Pillip wanted to ask René about the CI improvements for pinning. The linux CI is not pinned and asks about the setup in use for the repository for ci building. There are details which this note taker does not understand, but it looks like a bunch of work are possible but would take time with GitLab. Philip asks Tav about his color font merge request. There's an open merge request which can be fixed; any cairo version before 2027 would deadlock instead which we can patch in windows and macOS but not on Linux. Martin requests checks to avoid the new fix from causing the deadlock for users who might paste emoji into their document. Philip finishes with the lib2geom test case issues; there's been a build up of test issues for various platforms. There's some slight differences between archetectures and Philip believes some of the features can't be fixed at all. Martin advises to contact previous lib2geom contributors at the same time as investigating the issues and seeing what is possible to fix and what tests will have to be disabled. Tav is planning on a refactoring branch to cleanup the namespace use of Inkscape. Martin suggests that using namespace Inkscape is valid for a lot of code since it's part of Inkscape. Ishaan reports that the 1.4.4 release in on schedule and thanks ltlnx (Willy) for their work on backporting. René would like to understand how the python interaction works for macOS for 1.4.4 but this might not be possible in the time. Thank you everyone for coming to this week's meeting.

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Inkscape Developer Meeting Notes, April 11th 2026
by Martin Owens 11 Apr '26

11 Apr '26

Hey everyone, A smaller meeting from last week, but some heavily topics. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, karliss, Mikekov, Tav, Elendil Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Tav has been fixing bugs with the svg font, a crash. May have found a problem in the regex where strings are defreferenced. We talk about cairo bugs and the need to pay close attention to the versions. We will need fixes from code that isn't even released upstream yet, but we should still specify we need that future version. With a critical problem hanging around for developers, testers and future 1.5 users. Elendil talks about the poppler drama with versions constantly needing IFDEFs and Martin talks about the problems with the upstream poppler design making font interfaces private. We have an indepth discussion about the problem with depedencies and upstreams and how receptive they are to accommodating our needs. Karliss has been doing some pixel alignment and some other issues. Martin has been working on unpicking the Gradient paint servers and trying to allow the rendering engine to work without needing to include th whole of the SPObject tree and SPStyle. These includes prevent proper unit testing. Mikekov has been working on his object properties dialog. We had a longer discussion about the AI policy. Mikekov will probably stop contributing to the project if and when we stop allowing AI contributions. He believes that the project would benifit from having merge request reviewed by AI and that the capabilities of these tools are quite a bit more capable than the project believes. Martin has his own issues with AI and a frank discussion is had about some of the many dimentions involved in the discussion. We get into merge requests and the history of trying to have enough people to review code being submittd to the project. If a proposal is before the project about using a new tool, then we'd be looking for something ethical, pen source and capable; no matter what it's tooling was. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting!

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Developer Meeting Notes; April 3rd 2026
by Martin Owens 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

Hey everyone, Big thanks to everyone who was able to join our dev meeting which happened at the same time as the PLC meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: René, Karliss, Charlotte, mgmax, Philip, Tav, Martin, Vaibhav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ René; update on hiring process for bugfix accelerator, applications are coming in and official deadline is soon. Also updating dependencies for Win/macOS for upcoming release. Pointless reporting of security issues by AI agents who don't understand the codebase and can't answer questions about the problem. MC provides access to Windows ARM, René will test that will look into offloading Windows CI with budget of 150 Euros to pay for cloud provider. Tav asks if Inkscape will run on new "cheap" mac, Rene says yes it should, the architecture is the same. Less powerful chip and 8 GB RAM, but Apple claims to use memory more efficiently. Vaibhav has no problem on 8 GB low-end macbook. Charlotte, has been doing some windows testing. Failed successfully. Philip tried to do a fix for this specific static threading windows bug but it's quite a difficult problem. A couple of people have tried to fix it. He thanks Charlotte for the testing and asks follow up questions. Has a limited machine to do development on. Karliss, pixel alignment related issues. Links us to an issue related to security issues which allows svgs with unsafe problems in them. Philip has looked into this issue too; it's partly an upstream issue in Gio and similar pathways. Martin asks if it's possible to deal with the issues on a case by case basis. Tav; getting back into some old merge requests. Some specific libnrtype changes which now have a merge conflict thanks to some recent unit testing work. mgmax has an old merge request which they were asked to present at the meeting. It's a windows script which sets up everything for you. (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7557) it also allows a virtual machine for testing. Martin has already looked into it, and wants to get more visibility on the changes. René wants to know if this is based on the CI toolchain which is based on making a fixed image with better stability. This new script uses the developer instructions which is a rolling release. Max and Rene will get into contact to get the MR merged and to get the scripts and documentation changed to use a fixed MSYS image instead of rolling release. Vaibhav has continued their performance optimisations, in existing issues. An LPE specific issue using simplify (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7833) the reason is because of update signals that happen on every selection change. Martin has been working on text on path and text in shape to catch up to the big improvements in Krita text handling. Tav and Martin talk about the SVG spec support, and Krita using SVG for their vector layers giving the spec two implemetations which is important. The new text functionality is basically ready, but will need more testing. We talk about the steam issues and move on to talking about our relationship with the SFC. See you all next time! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, March 26th 2026
by Martin Owens 26 Mar '26

26 Mar '26

Dear Devels, This weeks meeting was quite interesting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Lola Egherman, Mikekov, ltlnx, Vaibhav Ted introduced Lola Egherman to Inkscape at SCaLE; they are a worker for a non-profit which helps people get into Free Software projects and learn to code. Has joined us to learn about how to contribute to Inkscape to hopefully guide people into contributing. We talked about all the conferences in the world like SCaLE, FOSDEM, the difference between cultures in various places and the interesting people who work on FOSS. Martin points to the python extensions as a good introduction to contributing and we talk about the various ways in which you can get into inkscape and how difficult various types of contributions are. Mikekov has been working on the same sorts of things. A paint widget refactoring which uses the SPObject directly was a mistake and this caused Mikekov to have to rethink the solution to the problem. The issues with the style system as a whole was discussed. Martin talks about the problems with getting merge requests approved and merged and we talked about the problems with a lack of senior developers involved in the project as we've had a big attrition this year. Martin has been working on text inside shape and text on path and gives a little demonstration. There's some refactoring and some ancient bugs which have cropped up need fixing but it's fairly nice to use. Vaibhav has been working on speed problems, flame graphs and things are improving. Running individual test units multiple times to get data for speed testing. Ltlnx has been working on some design work and is impressed by the speed of 1.5 compared to 1.4. Has been working on fixing 1.4 issues for 1.4.4. Next meeting is April 3rd, thanks everyone for coming! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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