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Developer Meeting Notes; Aug 17th 2026
by Martin Owens 17 Aug '26

17 Aug '26

Attending: Martin, Roland, Charlotte Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Roland talks about the bug accelerator program; there's new issues which have been added but the overall fix rate is keeping up and so we are focusing on the unified font browser to make sure it is working well; including some text bugs. Rolands thanks Michael and Charlotte for fixing text issues quickly. The outreach to social media for testing has been effective with some issues being closed because they have been tested by people with the right hardware. Martin reports to Roland about the vote situation to allow Tav to take over Sean's contract for the second bug accelerator position. Charlotte reports on a really old issue with LaTeX with some chars not importing and control chars. Also looking at any pdf importing or exporting. There's an issue with inverse masks which Martin advises on wrt to lpes and svg format. Martin talked about the work on the rendering engine and some of the remaining issues to get things working. Mostly now bugs with integrating with Gtk widgets and reforming certain pathways which were not designed well. Thanks everyone for comming. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, August 9th 2026
by Martin Owens 09 Aug '26

09 Aug '26

Hey Everyone, Time for another weekend developer meeting. This week was a three person meeting and we bounced ideas and talked about fun vacations as well as our Inkscape topics which you can see below: Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Tav, Martin, René René is back from vacation and has found a way of enabling dbus for macOS. Will be reaching out to Inkstitch to figure out how it would be useful to them and possibly other extension authors. Tav got his font code to work but is struggling to get the tests to pass. Has looked at the right to left text bugs for text line lengths. The test issues appear to be magnified by gradient issues. There's a few windows failures which René says there was a few hiccups with the CI but the jobs were restarted. Martin showed the new rendering engine's testing for Glycin integration and SVG SurfaceFactory work for handling all of Inkscape's various object and document rendering requirements. Tav and Martin talked briefly about the difficulty with rendering tests. Tav and Martin talk about Gtk's SVG support and if we are going to use icons generated by Gtk or by Inkscape and if we're being consistant. We review the Bug Accelerator program and the progress. The hiring process and the luck of the draw for getting the right people with the right skills who work well together. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, July 24th 2026
by Martin Owens 24 Jul '26

24 Jul '26

Hey everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Mc, Tav, Sean, Roland We talked about highlighting all the fixes we've managed to do and which ones to focus on. Roland gives us an update for our bug accelerator program. He's added a bunch of issues to 1.5 that he's confirmed them, he's moving swiftly to fix issues that have been around for a while so it's shaping up to be a very useful program. Roland noticed that there's issues that were old and wanted to include some of those into the program so we could make progress on our backlog of issues. Sean and Michael have been fixing things in really nice speed and keeping the bug fixing to 60% even with the influx of new issues. We talked about reporting aznd getting a sense of how much of the program is useful. Martin asked about the blocking problems; it appears that now we've unblocked he organisation of issues and having some really great developers that it's UX/UI that is causing a bottleneck. Often developers have to merge changes without UX review. Martin wants to factor that into a possible future program. Roland thinks it might be a good idea for diciplin to have a weekly report, a list of issues worked on. He thinks the program should be done for 6 months for this type of master-branch focused program as we should have more long term consistancy. Tav has been getting burned out on testing; which any sort of changes makes tests fail very easily. Found a PDF export bug for Right To Left text. Color format fonts is basically done, but with test passing. We might need to split out tests out into release tests and development tests. Because some of the tests are things we should work through for a release and not on every commit. We talked about pdf export bug with right to left text. Martin gave some advice and asked maybe if Charlotte is available to help. Martin has been working on recovering from illness and slowly doing rendering engine work. Has been taking the bold step of removing the old rendering engine and then working through all the compile issues. Roland supports mesh gradient crashes; Martin says that these issues could be solved by the new engine so we can delay fixes until we know the impact there. Roland asks is there any process for choosing what goes into a release. Martin and Roland talk about how resource allocation works and how we can improve things in the future. Thanks everybody for coming, Next meeting Saturday 1st August

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Developer Meeting Notes; July 8th 2026
by Martin Owens 08 Jul '26

08 Jul '26

Hey Devs, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Sean, Roland, Tav, Josh Tav has been working on fonts support. Found an interesting problem, added a new CSS attribute which enables the OPZ (optical size) axis. An interesting issue with the flood filter from being compiled. Has an MR which removes the 500x font size in 8041. Martin asks about font fallbacks and Tav asks about optical size support in pdfoutput. Martin asks to confirm that the optical is applied at document scale and not at zoom scale. Tav confirmed this is how he's done it. Sean is working on merge requests. One issue which he had a question about, the layers and objects dialog current is confused about selecting a layer, and multiple selection of layers and changing a layer in the layers manager. Martin explains the Ux situation and the history for why we are here and then suggests that using shift or other modifiers should always nulifiy layer manager functionality and focus on object selections. A small discussion about pages. Martin talks about his work; reserected the group translucency work which is now ready. A small node editing feature to confine to the curve of the line with cleanups. The rendering engine work is paused but is a bit delayed by the next steps which is going to be the final wiring which will upset a lot of functionality, and a small discussion about the dificulty with reviewing such a large merge request. Roland reports the happenings in the bug accelerator program; 60% done, various testing to make sure we are incorperating a lot of issues to improve the quality of the release. We talk about an AppImage issue that causes tablets not to work in X11. Martin suggests strongly that this shouldn't be a blocker, and shouldn't be on BAP's list since it's a minor issue of a testing build for a small number of users. Tav agrees and wants to have a look at it himself, since he has a tablet and an X11 distro to test in. Josh asks for the new rendering engine merge request to test: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7767 Martin warns that running inkscape won't see much, only runnings tests will exercise it until they can wire in the actual rendering. Thanks everyone for coming to the developer meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, June 22nd 2026
by Martin Owens 22 Jun '26

22 Jun '26

Hey everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Charlotte, Martin, Sean Burke, Mike Terry, Tav Next Meeting: June 30th at the later time: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Martin talked about his rendering engine work, most of the tests are passing. Remaining issues are fixing filter integration, rasters and the conversion from INT32 formats and a couple of other issues. At the end of the meeting Martin gave a demonstration of the test generation python script and some of the ways this helps with the development and testing. Charlotte asked about the performance impact of converting images from INT to FLOAT before being able to render it. This would be easier on the GPU as it's always floating point, but we basically have no choice since cairo can't paint INT to FLOAT and visa-versa so the stack has to keep things consistant. Tav and Martin talked about type conversions and the problem of rendering at 2x scale to reduce artefacts and how that would impact performance. Using the preview to do a better job at rendering for example. Tav has been struggling with how to handle variable font axis opsz (optical size). A newer way of doing size font hinting in a smarter way. We have a font instance at 512x scale and then scale everything ourselves to get the right sizes. But this doesn't work for optical size axis since it changes the shape of the glyph based on how large it is on screen. Martin talks about how to design the API with what we have with make font instances capable and not break a bunch of things. A FontSet object is planned to track font selections more generically. Charlotte discovered that latex won't include pdfs generated by capypdf. Generating reproducable version and will make an issue for it. Roland talks about the Bug Accelerator Program; priority on more serious issues. There's some follow up with some serious developers for some of the issues. Reviewing the 1.4.x issues for moving to 1.5. This week they're removing low priority issues to clear the decks for seeing what the major blockers are. Martin will be making an assessment in a week's time for the extension to the bug accelerator project. Sean reports that there is a crash while it builds it's cache, and it might not be resolvable without refactoring. He recommend that for now the new font dialog should be disabled. Martin adds that the new object properties dialog should also be disabled if the large speed impacts can't be fixed. See you all at the next meeting, June 30th. Best regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes; 14th June 2026
by Martin Owens 14 Jun '26

14 Jun '26

Hey Everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Mc, Martin, René, pbs, Vaibhav Next: Monday 22nd June; https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Marc managed to get access to the windows store and he will upload Inkscape 1.4.4 to the store as soon as he is free. René has been preparing the latest updates. Mason 1.11.x is the highest we can go, Mason 1.12 and above will require a python version which is not available for the macOS versions that we support. Has been investigating how to integrate all the deps, turbo jpeg is using graphics magick instead of image magick 6. PBS reports that capypdf is now available for his android CI which is useful. We want capypdf available for all our platforms and we can't make it available on macOS because of meson, and the C++23 requirements for the PPA and AppImage. We talk about graphics magic instead of image magic and the instability of upgrading Gtk which caused knock on effects. Martin says the icc jpeg profile function could be patched out if we wanted to restrict the version. Marc, René and pbs talk about build systems, windows, macOS and other platforms. Possibly using Nix, or Conan instead which already has a lot of packages available. But questions of it being invasive, although it might make sense for package building and CI. The only part of inkscape that requires image magic at all is a set of internal bitmap extensions; most of them could be either ifdefed out or replaced with internal functions. Philip would like to package caapypdf as a 3rdparty submodule to fix the C++23 and meson requirements which are easy to patch out and makes building for intel mac and PPA much harder. Martin asks that an issue be created upstream to let Jussi know about what we're action we're taking down stream and why. Philip asked Marc for PPA administration access. Marc says ok. The Gtk and Gtkmm versions are always out of sync on debian systems and this causes us problems. We talked about peel some more for the future upgrade path. Martin has been working on outputting images in the command line, for no real reason. Just playing. Thanks everyone for coming this weekend! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting: June 6th 2026
by Martin Owens 06 Jun '26

06 Jun '26

Hey everyone, Great meeting this Sunday Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: PBS, Martin, Elendil, Roland, René Next meeting: June 14th (Sunday) at the later time Link: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We talked about the CI building issues for windows briefly. We talked about the bug accelerator program briefly. Pbs asks about the capypdf static builds and the problem with debian and macOS older versions. We conclude that the best was to tackle it is to have the older versions detect C++23 and disable CapyPDF if not. AppImage tooling issues have cropped up, pbs looked at mterry's fixes. There's a OpenGL bug which causes AppImage to crash. There's a possible solution to include their own version of mesa which is bloated but might be able to fix it. AppImages are mostly used for testing. Roland suggests using DistroBox. Martin suggests using lazy AppImage building instead of building them for every MR. Elendil says that while not useful for every commit it is useful for merges into main for bisecting. René, asks about using CI to get access to macOS for testing with Roland, René will ask Roland in a few days to see how things are going. Martin noticed a pattern with CI pipeine failures for project members. PBS recommends using `git push -o ci.skip` to make sure your own GitLab CI never runs and thus fails. René reports he is burned out and will be taking a break for a few months. Wants to make sure he doesn't leave Max G. with unfinished packaging work, will message him in the issue. Elendil has been looking at the new poppler release, more ifdefs. We talked about the best ways of handling ifdefs in code, he's made compat functions for things like pointers. We talked about how to talk with poppler about a more long term solution with API breakge. Roland talks about the bug accelerator program. Locked in on two specific bugs right now, mterry is working on modifiers est at 10 hours. Seán is working on refactoring. The focus is on crashes and making inkscape 1.5 more stable. Collecting the Gtk4 related issues together for a sprint focused on that with things like menus, popovers and similar. We talk about the lot of Gtk3 issues that need to be closed. Should they be tagged as gtk3 so they can be filtered out. we talk about 1.5 being a special case, while pbs makes the case for closing already fixed issues. Martin talked about their rendering engine work. Pbs asks about rendering with Ints vs. Floats, martin says that having No color space will use Ints and using RGB color space will use floats; to be consistent with previous code. Martin says the code looks to be mostly working how it intends to with some minor differences in rendering output. Pbs and Martin talk about code generation and testing, bounding boxes for glyphs and making a new glyph drawing item for every single drawing object. There's a bunch of work we can do to make text much much faster. Pbs finally asks about the shape builder task Seán is working on; asks for any findings to be documented. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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object-trace: 'stack' parameter ignored in headless/CLI mode — roadmap question
by Mathieu Plessis 28 May '26

28 May '26

Hello Inkscape team, I have been working on a server-side vectorization pipeline using Inkscape 1.4.4 in headless mode on Ubuntu 26.04, and I would like to report a behavior that appears to be a limitation of the CLI interface. When using the object-trace action via --actions in headless mode (with xvfb-run), the 'stack' parameter (position 3 in the argument list) appears to have no effect on the generated SVG output. The command I am using: xvfb-run -a inkscape input.png \ --actions="select-all; object-trace:4,0,1,0,0,1.0,0; export-filename:output.svg; export-do" I tested with both stack=1 and stack=0 and compared the results: The fills are identical in both outputs No clip-path elements are generated in either case The stacking behavior visible in the Desktop UI (Multicolor > Stacked) is not reproduced In the Desktop version, enabling 'Stacked' produces clip-path elements that allow color layers to overlap correctly. This is important for logos and illustrations where adjacent color regions need to stack rather than be cut out. My questions: Is this a known limitation of the current CLI/headless implementation? Is there a workaround to enable stacking behavior from the command line? Is full CLI parity for object-trace parameters on the roadmap for a future release? Thank you for your work on Inkscape. It is a fantastic tool and the CLI capabilities are extremely valuable for server-side automation 🙏🙌 Best regards, <https://lanaworks.com/> Mathieu Plessis — Lanaworks WEB, ECOMMERCE & STRATÉGIE DIGITALE Agence web spécialisée dans la création et le développement de sites WordPress et PrestaShop. Plus de 15 ans d’expertise pour concevoir des plateformes sur mesure adaptées à vos objectifs. Conseil et accompagnement e-commerce, optimisation de votre présence en ligne et stratégies marketing digitales.

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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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