- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

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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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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Inkscape Developer Meeting, 18th March 2026
by Martin Owens 18 Mar '26

18 Mar '26

Hey everyone, Attending: Tav, Martin, Vaibhav, Mikekov, ltlnx Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Vaibhav has been working on speed, producing flame graphs. Martin and Vaibhav talked about making speed tests for unit testing, with cmake and CI integrations which could be optionally run. Tav is working on Inkscape again and has got their merge requests up to date. Tav and Vaibhav talked about search improvements, especially with speed problems. It's creating a new widget by loading a glade file for every action in the search. Causing significant delays. Tav says there newer widgets that would be useful, Martin says theres ways to use widget tree as a template. For 1.4 it could just be brought into C++ instead of using glade at all. We talk about using ListViews and other such constructs. Martin has been working on a small feature improvement to the Measurement Tool to take a break from all the engine work. It allows angles and curve length to be measured in a more useful way and has involved a bunch of users and designers testing everything. Mikekov has worked on the Document Properties dialog. Now the object properties is more featureful it's useful to rename it to maybe just "Properties". Martin suggests that speed issues would be increasing important as the dialog's main design requires and suggest it should be always open. And thus is should never cause speed issues. Vaibhav did some speed testing already which we reviewed in the meeting. It's building all the patterns, even when patterns aren't being used. Tav and Mikekov talk about tspan updating issues with position and what it all means. Martin tested the issue with x,y coords being ignored in tspans and we narrowed it down to sodipodi:line attributes which cause our svg rendering to diverge from the way the svg would be rendered anywhere else. Ltlnx has been starting the work for 1.4.4 and organising the point release. There's some things to backport. He's negotiating a date with the vector, documentation and translations. This should get these fixes out by end of May. Thanks to everyone who could come to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting March 10th 2026
by Martin Owens 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Hey everyone. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Vaibhav, Tav, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Tav hasn't done much programming but did conclude there wasn't enough people interested in an LGM adjacent event to warrent a seperate event. Instead he'll make a vote to allow contributors to go to LGM itself if they want to. Vaibhav has some questions about how to attend. Vaibhav has been fixing some speed issues trying to learn about flame graphs, profiling and finding out why certain things in Inkscape are so slow. Mikekov and Vaibhav talk about the tooling. Mikekov has been finishing up work on the Object Properties dialog for Text support to allow users to access text properties from the omni data access design¹. He's also looking at information for the document properties. the goal for the document properties is to allow it to be docked on the side without taking up too much space. Martin has been working on removing SPStyle from drawing-rendering, the libNRType is already split out in a new MR so that's waiting to be merged. Last night they added a feature for the measurement tool to measure line segmentss in paths. Thanks everyone, sort meeting this week! Martin, ¹ https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7784

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We're hiring!
by René de Hesselle 06 Mar '26

06 Mar '26

The Inkscape project is looking for two developers 🧑‍💻🧑‍💻 and a bug administrator 🐛 to work with our team on preparing Inkscape version 1.5! Learn all about who we are looking for: https://inkscape.org/news/2026/03/02/inkscape-is-hiring-2026-1/ Applications must be submitted by 📆 April 10th, 2026. #WorkInFLOSS #FLOSS #job #freesoftware

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Developer Meeting Notes 2nd March 2026
by Martin Owens 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

Dear Devels, Another week and another great developer meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Martin, René, Tav, Peyton Murray, pbs, Vaibhav Next event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ René starts with his CI improvements project for windows. He's made a project at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7796 the main problem for GitLab GI is that it's a type of headless windows system which doesn't have the graphics stack needed event to run -- version. To current solution is René is running a machine in his parent's basement which is unsustainable. He's found a provider who can solve this issue for us. But it will cost us money to run this. We discussed how much compute time we would need and René will make a vote with the plc for a 3 month trial for 150 euros to get a sense of the resources needed. The developer team is in agreement. Tav wants to organise people to go to LGM and maybe meet up beforehand. Martin recommends creating the budget and assessing interest so we know who would like to go. We talked briefly about the hotel costs. Mikekov has been working on a text panel for the object properties which is different from other style properties in it's complexity. Thinks he may have to make a new style handler. Martin talked about the engine work, they are working on separating out the drawing item layer into unit testing involving the SP-Style and NRType interactions. The only issue is pixbuf use in FontInstance which they're working on splitting out. The work on unitising more of inkscape code to improve our ability to maintain the project. Phlip asked about the marker work, is continuing his work on recovering Rafael's marker refactoring code. Tav was asked about the specification for svg for marker. We talk about context style. Refactoring is part of that work which needs to be extracted out. Vaibhav has been finishing the Refactoring LPE Mask branch and would like testing. Is working on the flowed text speed differences between 1.4 and 1.5 there are only small differences. We talk about the best practices for logging and preformance testing. Peyton talks about looking at issues to fix. We talked about the trace bitmap functionality. We talk about the milestones, and the gtk migration and the dificulty of editing ui files now that Gtk no longer. We briefly coverage support and performance testing now we have units. Thanks everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Hiring Help Needed
by Martin Owens 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

Dear Inkscape Members, We had a vote to approve hiring three people to work on stabilising Inkscape 1.5. Two programmers and one administrator. but I can't continue with the hiring process because I need one other Inkscape member to volunteer their time to help with the hiring process. The usual senior contributors are really busy and won't be available for this task; so I need to come to you all and ask if you are available to help make sure Inkscape can spend it's money on doing what we need to get done this year. The task is simple, look at applications, perform interviews via video (camera not required) and discuss with me and we pick people to hire. Simple. Are you available? Best Regards, Martin Owens Bug Accelerator Hiring Comittee

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Inkscape Meeting Notes, Feb 14th 2026
by Martin Owens 14 Feb '26

14 Feb '26

Hey everyone, We had a focused discussion this week about the AI Policy, including a demonstration of Mikekov using UI to do work and what that looks like for him. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Vaibhav, Martin, Elendil Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Mikekov gave a full report on his testing of windsurf running claude, the system seems to work well for him for code viewing and understand and then on to planning. The system needs to be driven at each point and driection is added at each point. The output might not be optimal, but with enough prodding he gets good output. Martin has concerns about the ownership and the way in which a Free Software project can reasonable document or recommend tools which are fundermentally unfree. Unfortunatly the amount of hardware needed makes an actually free and capable system unlikely, even for a large project with a shared machine. Vaibhav asked some great questions about the AI system. Martin asked Mikekov to do a demonstration using a task Martin is currenly doing in the rendering engine work. As a team we worked through the prompt and asked Mikekov's personal subscription to work through the small refactoring problem. It's was fairly successful, though Martin will be reviewing it's output for accuracy. We talked about how these tools are available, and their costs. And the ability for summary text to be used in commit messages, and if that is an appropriate way to document code changes or if programmrs should be required to write their own messages. Adding plans and other meta data to the commit or repository or if we should require them to be attached for example with disclosure. We also reviewed a new merge requests for Elendil at the end of the meeting. Thanks to everyone who was able to come. See you next week. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, Jan 29th 2026
by Martin Owens 29 Jan '26

29 Jan '26

Hi all! A busy meeting today! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Charlotte, Cesar, Manpreet, Vaibhav, Cesar, René, Mikekov, Philip, ramanshu Next meeting: 6th Feb https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We did some introductions of everyone for anyone new, where we're from and what we interested in. Rene Spend some time in windows related research and CI, we have our own self hosted runner for project members and because Gtk introduced a dependency which isn't available in the gitlab CI runner. Finding alternative ways from new runner infrastructure, a mirror for MSYS2. This is in the research phase. Speed improvements to the windows builder could be improved with downloads and cache collection. The project thanks René for hosting those windows machines. We talked about the windows CI build failing for non-project members and because it's distressing for new contributors, Rene says he'll turn it off for non-project members and it will continue to work for the merge train. We talked about the clang format job and Martin recommended to Philip to talk to the people who set that system up about how strict we should be. Marc was the main contact. For macOS, rene says the current CI doesn't support the latest Tahoe, he's going to wait for infrastructure to catch up. One example of possible future issues is a new icon format we can't generate atm. We talked about an old merge request for a new icon on macOS. René is supporting Gnome by contributing CI and patches as a Gnome Foundation Member. 👍️ Charlotte has been busy, but keeping an eye on some issues, the recent files issue on windows, and some other windows crashes. Mikekov has been working on various UI elements, moving Gtk3 assumptions to Gtk4 technologies for example in themes listing. Mikekov asked René about shipping themes in macOS because the directory contains other things which we don't want to ship for example scss pre- compile CSS. René asked for Mikekov to let him know the details. Mikekov has been working on the transform dialog to separate things out without the refactoring changing functionality. Requests for the merge request to tested before being merged. Philip is replacing the ColorItem with new Gtk4 rendering. Mikekov and Matin suggested API changes which he's going to implement. Martin and Philip talk about the color API, premultiplication and some of the implications for rendering and how values are stored and moved around. Mostly HSL isn't really useful, but Martin is going to allow the widest possible rendering and allow Inkscape to choose what to allow users to do, even if the output is not useful and quite mad. Mikekov wants some more general code for widget rendering and Philip talked about how the code could be separate for ColorItems. Vaibhav has been looking into their merge requests for object properties speed improvements when selecting a lot of path elements in the XML editor for example. We all talk about writing parsers, different ways of writing them effectively and moving away from slower Regex. Manpreet is going to work on the illustrator text support. Martin wanted to know where we are in the support we are and what kind of help or support they might need to get the functionality completed. Ishaan has been dealing with every issue and triaging. ⭐️ Mikekov asked about LGM and events. We don't have a confirmation about events this year, but we can budget and send people to LGM even without an Inkscape specific event. Philip wanted to talk about 1.5 and if it's ready to start scheduling more firmly. Windows has some shop stoppers for 1.5, Charlotte says. Can't type texted, can't resize windows. Upstream Gtk4 issues which aren't getting fixed. Vaibhav reports issues for 1.5 on macOS with windows and drag and drop. Martin is going to push the paid 1.5 Bug Accelerator program forwards in order to get some of this work scheduled. Philip asked about creating an alpha that doesn't impose a hard freeze. Ishaan notes there's a lot of issues for 1.5 already and this isn't prioritised well yet. Hopefully the paid admin position will help with this. René asked about GSoC, but there's no one available to do the admin work and so we're working on No for now. René might be able to do it, but the stars will have to align to allow him to be able to do it. Philip wanted to talk about coroutines and if it would be OK to add out own. Martin says that adding our own should be permissible given the restrictions and advantages, so long as it's done cleanly. The goal is removing the event pumper for file dialog, clipboards and extensions but it will require a lot of refactoring. Dealing with uemf issues now that it's under our control. There's comments from the original maintainer which would be useful to commit as a README. Martin asked that explicit permission be asked before sharing a private communication. That's it for this week. Thanks everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Jan 21st 2026
by Martin Owens 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Hey Everyone, Attending: Martin, Mikekov, Tav This week because it there was a small number of people we did a show and tell. Martin took everyone on a tour of the new rendering engine as it's being built. The audience offered questions and tips on where to improve the documentation to make it all more understandable. Mikekov went through some testing of themes and various issues we might have in Gtk4 for 1.5. Thanks everyone for coming! I was actually a two hour meeting! Martin,

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Developer Meeting Notes, Jan 13th 2026
by Martin Owens 13 Jan '26

13 Jan '26

Hey everyone! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Willy, Mikekov, Charlotte, Martin, Tav Tav hasn't done much but did work on some namespace cleanups. Martin and Tav taked briefly about namespaces and how code should be cleaned up, being verbose vs. moving code into the correct namespace. Mikekov has been working on a text combo box widget. Has a look at the pages toolbar, the page size selector is quite advanced and uses cell renderers. In order to update it for Gtk4 it would require components which aren't supported in C++. The main target for this work is the font family. It increases the speed significantly though doesn't have the flexibility of customisation. Charlotte, started a new semesta and new classes so hasn't had a lot of extra time. But has looked at a few bugs, some windows bugs including the drive letter bug. But isn't as intense at the moment. Willy has been working on documentation to improve how people join gitlab and understand it better. Martin has been working on code reviews, some issue testing and the new engine work which is slowly starting to get unpicked from it's knotty integration into every inkscape layer. It reminds me just how hard it is to keep API and code clean when we work with so many people over so long a history. But it's still going to be important for future development to work on that more. A reminder to everyone to add their comments to the on going discussion about the AI policy: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-board/-/issues/5 Next meeting is the earlier time, on Wed 21st Jan. Thanks everyone. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Jan 5th 2026
by Martin Owens 05 Jan '26

05 Jan '26

Devs! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Tav, Martin, Mikekov, ramanshu, ltlnx, Ramyak Shama, Vaibhav AI Policy is in progress and in research stage, we discussed some experiments various people had done and a lot of the limitations. And the 2FA policy given to us by the PLC couldn't be discussed as no one who deals with that were present at the meeting. Tav, revisiting the color font stuff and hatches improvements but haven't gotten very far. Mikekov has been on vacation, has been working on merge requests reviews and helping things along. ltlnx, has also been on vacation and has been doing some bug management. Martin has been working on DrawingSurface and has some questions about memory management and Mikekov gave advice about how to manage heap vs. stack construction. ramashu brought a question about thier merge request using Gtk and finding the API for Gtk and the best resources. Mikekov and Martin offered some advice about how to look for documentation. We talked about the problems in gtk4 and the cell renderer no longer using CSS to control the nodes. And the missing icons in the layers and objects dialog. ltlnx wants to talk about roadmap policy and has done some research into other project and what hey are doing. Martin talked about previous discussions about roadmap teams and policy. Vaibhav asked after pono about the steam distribution and how we can distribute Inkscape on steam. No further information was available. We talked about various project organisational steps for the future. Thanks for coming everyone, Martin,

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AI Use Policy Discussion
by Martin Owens 03 Jan '26

03 Jan '26

Dear PLC, Charlotte has kicked off this discussion by creating an issue for us: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-board/-/issues/5 the first round is to collect examples of other projects having such policies. If you know of any good examples, can you add them to the issue? Thanks everyone! And thanks Charlotte for running with this important work. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Meeting Notes, Dec 28th 2025
by Martin Owens 28 Dec '25

28 Dec '25

Dear Devels, There was a problem with our chat server, so most people didn't know about today's meeting. As well as it being in the mid yule tide. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Charlotte We talked about AI policy and the growing trend of projects to state explicitly how they deal with AI generated code, AI merge requests and AI reviews. A lot of open source projects are rejecting contributions directly, while some are warning that they will give less time to verbose and overwraught AI contributions than real human ones. We currently do not have an AI policy at all. We also talked about the pdf importer code and a decent plan to refactor it so we reduce the amount of poppler's code that we copy from upstream (Gfx.cc, Font etc) to improve maintainability. Short meeting, but a great one on one conversation. ⭐️ See you all next time! Monday Dec 5th at 10am EST Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape 1.4.3 is out!
by Maren Hachmann 26 Dec '25

26 Dec '25

Inkscape 1.4.3 ============== Inkscape 1.4.3 is now available for all three supported operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)! You can download it from: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.3 BUGFIX and MAINTENANCE RELEASE ------------------------------ Inkscape 1.4.3 is be a maintenance and bugfix release, which brings you fixes for many critical or irritating bugs, and even a few new features. The most important fixes and changes in this release are: * 24 crash/freeze fixes many of which prevented users from opening certain files or exporting certain objects with Inkscape 1.4.2 * almost 100 bug fixes and small improvements, among them: * JPEG/JPG export works again on Windows. * The problem with user interface text showing up as rectangles ('tofu') instead of letters if certain fonts are installed on macOS is finally resolved. * Ungrouping big groups is faster again. * All pasting options ('on page', 'width'/'height'/'size'/…) are now accessible from the right-click menu on canvas. * The Measure tool snaps again at its end point, so you can make accurate measurements again. * The LPE dialog now offers to convert Line, Polyline or Polygon SVG objects to paths before applying a path effect to them * When resizing the Inkscape window, the buttons in the Commands bar (copy, paste, open, dialog shortcuts) show up one by one instead of waiting for the window to get big enough to show the second half at once. * When converting strokes to paths, patterns and gradients are no longer lost. * Aligning on a circle or arc now works more reliably. * Text on Path now also works with rectangles. * Many improvements have been made to the PDF import. * Results from path operations no longer end up at the bottom of the object stack unexpectedly and the Split Path operation has learnt to better handle nested shapes. * The current layer by default is now the one where you have last selected an object (might need a preferences reset to apply). * Whether the current page is changed when you select an object on it has been made optional. * You can now make small changes to how Inkscape looks without needing to modify the full theme file. * The bug that sometimes made it impossible to make gradients and patterns fully opaque has been prevented from reaching adulthood (it has been around since 2007!). * and 25 updated interface languages as well as 13 updated documentation languages! See the release notes for more information (also about known issues and workarounds): https://inkscape.org/doc/release_notes/1.4.3/Inkscape_1.4.3.html Inkscape 1.4.3 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. 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: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/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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Inkscape Developer Meeting Dec 21 2025
by Wen-Wei Kao 20 Dec '25

20 Dec '25

Hi devs, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Willy Martin and Tav discussed about a potential 1.4.4 release, and when 1.5 could be in shape to be released. We also talked about some ideas for a potential 1.5 bug accelerator program. Willy raised the last blocker issue in this release, the tab dragging bug, and we devided that we'll do our best to pinpoint the commit of the bug and report upstream. But due to it being an upstream bug, also affecting other programs, and affects platforms none other than Wayland+Linux with GTK 3.24.49+, it won't be a blocker. The 1.4.3 release will go on schedule, which will be released on December 26, 2025. The date was decided on by the Vectors due to the unavailability of volunteers on the holidays. Thanks everyone for coming, and happy holidays! -- Willy

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