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X11R6.8.0 Release Official Announcement (plain text) (fwd)
by Bryce Harrington 11 Sep '04

11 Sep '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 17:39:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Leon Shiman <leon@...531...> To: xorg@...330... Subject: X11R6.8.0 Release Official Announcement (plain text) [the PDF version isn't readable on all readers it seems. here's plaintext] X.Org Foundation Announces X11R6.8 Release of the X Window System _________________________________________________________________ The X.Org Foundation Release Officially Introduces State of the Art Technologies to the X Window System Brookline MA, September 9, 2004 - The X.Org Foundation today announced the second release of the X Window System since the formation of the Foundation in January of this year. The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11, Release 6.8 (X11R6.8) builds on the work of X.org X11R6.7 released in April. X11R6.8 combines the latest developments from many people and companies working with the X Window System and an open X.Org Foundation Release Team. The X Window System X11R6.8 release can be found at ftp://www.x.org/pub and at mirror-sites worldwide. About this Release: In response to user and application developer demand, X.Org's X11R6.8 brings forward widely anticipated fundamental facilities through this release. They include the first official X Window System Release support for: - Translucent windows - Window animation, window decorations like shadows - Support for accessibility applications - Support for 3D immersive user environments like Looking Glass(1) and Croquet(2) - Support for large scale display walls using DMX(3) These new facilities, some of which are still considered experimental, and so not enabled by default, have been under development for several years. Once completed and deployed, they will enable X Window System desktop projects, such as Gnome and KDE, to greatly extend their visual user interface vocabulary while still ensuring uncompromised support for existing applications, even surpassing current state of the art in competing window systems. These facilities will enable easy implementation of thumbnailing, screen magnifiers for accessibility, translucent windows, menus, drop shadows, and even integration of conventional applications into 3D immersive environments. They are the result of open collaboration within the freedesktop.org community, desktop projects, and the X Window System user and developer communities. For some illustrations visit http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/X11R68ScreenShots. Features also included in this release are updates and fixes to: FreeType2, Xprint, Xaw ( new PrintShell class), Mesa, DRI, driver rotation support, Render ( New Trapezoid Extension ), many driver updates, and a broad range of fixes and enhancements. About participation and membership in X.Org Membership in the X.Org foundation is free and open to all participants. Active participants in the further development of the X Window System are invited to visit: http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html to complete a membership application. Participation in the Foundation's Sponsor Group is also available to those who wish to financially support the activities of the X.Org Foundation. Current Sponsors include Hewlett Packard, IBM, ICS, Sun Microsystems, Shiman Associates, and WRQ. About the X.Org Foundation X.Org Foundation L.L.C. is a Delaware company organized to operate as a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of the X Window System technology and standards. The group is currently managed by its Board of Directors that includes: Stuart Anderson (Free Standards Group), Egbert Eich (Novell), Jim Gettys (HP), Stuart Kreitman (SUN Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan (Linux Terminal Server Project), Keith Packard (HP), and Leon Shiman (Shiman Associates). The website for the X.Org Foundation can be found at http://www.x.org/. About The X Window System The X Window System provides the only common networked windowing environment bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's computing. The X Window System is one of the most successful open-source, collaborative technologies developed to date and is the standard graphical window system for the Linux® and UNIX® operating systems. The inherent independence of the X Window System from the operating system, the network and the hardware, as well as its successful interoperability, have made it widely available and deployed with more than 30 million users worldwide. All major hardware vendors support the X Window System and many third parties provide technologies for integrating X Window System applications into the networked computer or personal computer environments including Microsoft Windows®, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS® X. Further, thousands of software developers provide X Window System applications, and with the continued growth of Linux and the emergence of Mac OS X, the number of users is growing rapidly. Community Response: "This release of the X.org server incorporates a number of extensions that were developed in consultation with experts in the field," said Bill Haneman, Sun Microsystems, GNOME Foundation board member and member of the FSG Accessibility Workgroup. "This new release removes a number of significant accessibility roadblocks and facilitates considerably improved support for onscreen magnifiers, screen readers, and other assistive technologies." "As one of the original founding members of the X Window System project, HP is pleased to be supporting the X.Org Foundation as a continued sponsor. With the second X.org Foundation release of the X Window System, we once again demonstrate the power of the open source development model to deliver true innovation and value to our customers," said Martin Fink, vice president of Linux, HP. "Open source takes a giant leap into the future with the new X Window System release and Croquet working together," said Alan Kay, Senior HP Fellow, HP Labs. "If anyone doubts the quality of 'Open Source' they only need look to this new release of X," said Peter Winston, President of leading UI development company Integrated Computer Systems (www.ICS.com) and member of X.org. With tens of millions of Linux and UNIX developers around the world relying on the X Window System, X.org has created a new version which users can depend upon and that addresses the new needs of a changing market. The additions of translucent windows and support for large scale display walls will be especially well received by our core customer base of developers building homeland defense applications." "LTSP relies heavily on the X Window System and we are inspired by the continuing development and community involvement that has gone into the latest X.org release." -- Jim McQuillan, LTSP project leader. "Novell welcomes the rapid progress of the X.Org Foundation. We are pleased to support the new release of X.Org in the next SUSE LINUX product offering, which will enable technology enthusiasts to benefit from the latest enhancements in Linux windowing technology, and we will continue to actively contribute to the project." -- Chris Schlaeger, VP R&D SUSE LINUX at Novell "Red Hat is proud to contribute to development of the X Window System technology and standards through continued involvement in and support of X.org's efforts. Red Hat plans to include the X11R6.8 release in the the open source Fedora Core project and upcoming releases of Red Hat Desktop." -- Havoc Pennington, desktop technical architect and engineering manager. "X11R6.8 contains essential features which provide the underlying foundation for the Project Looking Glass 3D window system, such as the Composite and Damage extensions. These timely and well implemented features have significantly accelerated our development effort." -- Deron Johnson, Sun Microsystems, Project Looking Glass. "As the former X.org chair, and current chair of the X.org Sponsor's Group, I'm very pleased to see the X.org Foundation produce the 6.8 release of X11, which includes contributions from many different groups, with different interests and goals, but with a common interest in and focus on advancing the X technology. I believe that as long as that common focus continues, this Foundation and their releases will be of great value to the broad community of X technology users." -- Steve Swales, Senior Manager, Platform Globalization Engineering; X.Org Sponsor Board Chairperson, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "R6.8 rocks! Now Qt/X11 can natively support almost everything developers have come to expect from our Windows and Mac OS X versions", says Matthias Ettrich, Director of Software Development at Trolltech, a cross-platform GUI tool vendor, "Kudos to the X.org team." Notes to editors: (1) Project Looking Glass: http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/ and https://lg3d.dev.java.net (2) Croquet Project: http://www.opencroquet.org/ (3) Distributed Multihead X Project: http://dmx.sourceforge.net/ (4) The Mesa 3D Graphics Library: http://www.mesa3d.org (5) Direct Rendering Infrastructure: http://dri.sourceforge.net/ (6) The Freetype Project: http://www.freetype.org (7) The Xprint Project: http://xprint.mozdev.org/ UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries. LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other company names are trademarks of the registered owners. --------------- For questions, please contact: Leon Shiman, for The XOrg Foundation, at: Shiman Associates Inc (00)1.617.277.0087 leon@...532... _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@...330... http://freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg

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src/render
by MenTaLguY 11 Sep '04

11 Sep '04

In case you were wondering about src/render -- this is the start of a really simple renderer I'm writing as a side project. No timetable, really; I just need to get it out of my system. Simplicity is the main goal -- it's probably not going to be fast or pretty, but it should work and may provide scaffolding for our future cairo support infrastructure. Right now there are a lot of livarot-isms in the rendering side of things: I think having a second renderer kicking around would help make things more general. Heck, if pluggable renderers come out of this, that would be pretty cool too. -mental

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Re : Various publications about Inkscape.
by Gazal, Geraud (MED) 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

Hi all, here is the sum up of the article I've read in Linux+ (French edition, Number 2, September/October 2004) Title : Inkscape, où vas-tu ? (Inkscape, where are you going ?) Author : unknown Sum-up : The article presents Inkscape as a drawing application, forked from Sodipodi (due to divergent goals and opinions about development-process) aiming at offering a free & SVG compliant software. The author points out that : Inkscape is undergoing a Gtkmm'ification' and that its development process is very open, allowing fast and efficient integration of new features (interface, booleans, autopackage) and in line with developers and users (even beginners) needs. He also notes that a clear Roadmap is identified. Open clipart is mentionned as a fast evoluting sister project. Apart from a few small mistakes (example Gtkmm'ification' is not finished) it provides a very positive feedback about the application If some of you can have an access to / afford buying another edition (English, German, Spanish, Polish...) it might be intersting to compare the different versions/translations I can scan and mail the French article to anyone asking for it. Regards, Matiphas PS : I've added a link about the linuxgraphix tutorial in the wiki. I can add this small review if you want.

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livarot changes
by Carl Hetherington 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

Hi all, I'm doing some cleanup work on livarot ATM. I am testing as I go, as much as possible, but of course I might miss something. If anyone has any weird renderer / livarot problems, let me know and I'll look into them and revert my patches if necessary. Thanks Carl

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word and letter spacing
by Aewyn 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

Hi, I promised, that will help you to solve the firing printing issues, but I have very much work now. I will, I think it is very important, but now is more improtant question: word and letter spacing (tracing) I think this is base. Without it there is no vector drawing suite. Anyone works on it? Is any technical issue, that balk it? If the answers are no, please help me providing any existing info about it. I would like cut this problem shortly. I can code just a little bit, but I will do anything to complete this. Sorry for harrassing you, but I start to work with inkscape, and it -unfortunately- is not an appropriate tool yet. I'd like to help you, I think there is no too many issues to be a very powerful tool. letter and word spacing are such issues. Thanks, Aewyn

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resend: Freetype2/win32 conversion
by Bob Jamison 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

(I had trouble sending this; sorry if it is a duplicate.) Since I am out for the weekend, I thought I would send some notes to the list about Freetype. Well, it looks as though we are on our own, and must convert to Freetype on Win32, whether we like it or not. So I made a few changes: Added more stuff to gtk24.zip (AGAIN! sorry) to include a freshly-built freetype6.dll, the fontconfig lib, and xmlparse.dll (required by fontconfig). Added WITH_XFT to config.h.mingw, but it is commented out. Freetype will not actually be used unless you uncomment this. I added '-lfontconfig' to the LIBS entry in Makefile.mingw.common. Note: the '-lfontconfig' should be changed to '-lfontconfig-1.0.dll' . This is an error that the original builder of freetype6.dll made, that apparently I duplicated perfectly :) . This is likely the reason that the original dll references "fontconfig", and not "fontconfig.dll" or "libfontconfig-1.0.dll" Both of these are because fontconfig's build erroneously put '-lfontconfig' in its pkg-config file, even though the build is dynamic only. Look in /target/lib for the correct spelling of the .dll.a file. (This is also quite likely the reason for the crasher.) Since the freetype6.dll I made has debug info, the crash reported the location to be at base/ftobjs.c, line 789 in the Freetype source. So to debug, someone might want to try putting breakpoints in FontInstance.cpp, and stepping until the crash happens. A font face * passes a NULL check, but fails a pointer->field reference. Sounds like an uninitialized value. Anyway, these are just some notes that I hope might help someone working on this stuff. Bob

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fontconfig on win32
by MenTaLguY 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

Apparently I was wrong; fontconfig has been ported to win32 now.

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crashes abated?
by MenTaLguY 10 Sep '04

10 Sep '04

It looks like the crashes have all been fixed on my end; how's it look for the rest of you guys? -mental

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weird livarot crash
by MenTaLguY 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

I've been working on some of the groundwork for the layers dialog; doing a routine test build, I discovered that Inkscape had started crashing. Backtrace points to livarot, which I haven't touched at all... The only part of my new code that is actually currently used is the addition of three sigc++ signals to SPReprDoc; so far as I can tell that should not cause Shape::~Shape() to crash.. Can you all review this patch (attached) and see if I'm missing something obvious? I'm at my wits' end here... -mental

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RE: [Inkscape-devel] Re : Various publications about Inkscape.
by Gazal, Geraud (MED) 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

> Any idea who publishes it? Lost of magazines seem to be translated > and reprinted in other languages across Europe but I dont happen to be > familiar with Linux+. Yes : here is their web site : http://www.lpmagazine.org/en/modules/news/ > > The author points out that : Inkscape is undergoing a > Gtkmm'ification' and > > I realy hope the author didn't use the phrase "Gtkmm'ification'" in a > print publication because it is a really terrible (but > convenient) use of > the English language to begin with. He really should have > written that > Inkscape is starting to use the gtkmm libraries (or something > equivalent > in French of course) that would be more widely understandable. No the exact sentence is 'is being converted to Gtkmm' Regards, Matiphas PS : Alan, the scan will be in your mailbox tonight

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Please test win32 plugins
by Bob Jamison 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

This morning I enabled the Win32 side of Ted's plugin mechanism, which includes 'gimpgrad.dll' . Would our Win32 testers be so nice as to test this, by loading a Gimp gradient into Inkscape? Thanks. Bob

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Inkscape mentioned in Linux Magazine
by Alan Horkan 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ArticlesAndPresentations Inkscape is mentioned in Issue 47 of Linux Magazine (published in the UK, and has a sister publication in Germany). It features a a roundup of various vector graphics applications titled "Line by Line". Gestalter, Inkscape, Karbon 14, OpenOffice.org Draw, Skencil (formerly known as Sketch), Sodipodi and Xfig are reviewed. Paraphrase/summary of the section on Inkscape, my comments in [brackets], direct literal quotes are in inverted commas. Inkscape is new. Inkscape unashamedly borrows ideas from other projects. "Some dialogs have been taken directly from Sodipodi" [author seems to have missed that Inkscape started as a fork of Sodipodi] Installation considered complicated, needs gtkmm and libsigc. "Neatly organized main window" Uses SVG, can read many formats (AI, Postscript, Skencil,...) [author doesn't realise this trick is achieved by using Skencil] Seperate window for each drawing ... "meaning the tools are accessible at all times". Fully featured drawing tools, usual primitives also has starts, spirals. Calligraphic lines also supported. Notes the help files and tutorials are in SVG allowing you to experiment with them. [clearly this is an idea that reviewers appreciate] Author has issues with the Grid, complained the snap to grid option did not work (also complained about it in Sodipodi). Eventually mentions that he is using inkscape 0.39, and says despite the version number Inkscape is very stable. Positive information from the other reviews I think is worth noting and might be learned from if we want to get better reviews. multipage support. karbon 14 supports WMF OpenOffice.org Draw PDF export Conclusion section of the roundup says roughly, OpenOffice.org best, most features. After that Skencil, then after that again "Inkscape is probably the best of the rest and has developed into a clear-cut, but powerful illustration tool in a very short time. This is obviously the one to keep an eye on for the future". Sincerely Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

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Inkscape /Scribus IRC meet
by Plinnell 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

Hi all, Bryce , Jon Phillips and I have discussed casually a second IRC meet. Now is a good time. Scribus. 1.2 is done and before we dive into 1.3 we can outline some of our thoughts. Our tentative time date is 19 Sept 2004 1000 UTC. Let me know how this works.... Notes and a draft topic list: http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ScribusInteroperability Cheers, Peter

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not a bug report
by Stevie J 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

Hi there, I've just recently downloaded the latest Windows build of Inkscape. I found it easy to install, easy to use, powerfull and it let me draw exactly what I wanted to easily and quickly. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone involved in the development, you guys done good!!!! :-) Cheers, Steve ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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--disable-gc
by MenTaLguY 09 Sep '04

09 Sep '04

I've introduced a --disable-gc ./configure option to aid in debugging. It disables the garbage collector completely and does not link the executable with libgc at all. note: The same heap corruption is still happening in this build, so this categorically rules out libgc as part of the problem. However, I am leaving --disable-gc in CVS as it is still helpful when debugging (it's not the default; you will have to specify it). Just be aware that a --disable-gc build will leak memory, since it is generally not freed. -mental

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Improvements in command-line PNG export
by bulia byak 08 Sep '04

08 Sep '04

* You can now specify the background opacity (--export-background-opacity or -y). * If no background color (-b) or background opacity (-y) specified, the values from the document (sodipodi:namedview) are used. * You can now export an area corresponding to a single object by specifying the ID of the object with the --export-id or -i switch, for example: inkscape -e mypath.png -i path966 mydoc.svg * When exporting with -i, you can add --export-use-hints or -t to tell Inkscape to use the filename and DPI export hints stored for that object when it was last exported from the GUI. For example, inkscape -i path966 -t mydoc.svg will export path966 to the PNG file with the same filename and resolution as you used for exporting it from wihtin Inkscape, so you don't need to specify them on the command line. These changes (see the man page for full details) allow you to easily script exporting parts from complex documents and to better integrate GUI editing with command-line use.

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default template
by Jon Phillips 08 Sep '04

08 Sep '04

I was just trying to design a default template and wonder if the best place for default templates is in our share folder, a folder (on my install by default that is installed here: /usr/local/share/inkscape and is owned by root:root with 755). Thus, only non-root user can put files into these folders like templates, tutorial, etc. I wonder if we are placing these files in the proper location. Should we not be installing them in the user's home preference folder: ~/.inkscape Even if we don't install all these files here, then we should definitely read for existence of these folders and files, and most importantly templates/default.svg from the user readable/writable preferenes folder. Do you all agree with me? Many users will not have root access, and that is bad for user preferences to be changed at that level. What if we had multiple users on a system, aka, a school that uses Inkscape. Then each user could not have their own preferences for default templates, etc. Jon -- Jon Phillips KOREA.PH.010.3140.7483 USA.PH.858.361.2811 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org Inkscape (http://inkscape.org) Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org) CVS Book (http://cvsbook.ucsd.edu/) Scale Journal (http://scale.ucsd.edu/)

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Trace dialog
by Bob Jamison 08 Sep '04

08 Sep '04

I started a small dialog that sets the parameters of tracing. All it does at the moment is set the brightness threshold for black&white conversion. Others controls will come later. You might try playing with it, using /share/clipart/tux.png. Bob

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Re: [Inkscape-user] Various publications about Inkscape.
by Jon Phillips 08 Sep '04

08 Sep '04

That is great...can you place these onto this page on the Inkscape wiki. We try to collect press! Thanks for finding these! http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ArticlesAndPresentations Also, Ted and others that have been presenting, please put up your presentations and where...MRDOCS...you presented haven't you? Jon On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 20:11, Gazal, Geraud (MED) wrote: > Hi all, > > www.linuxgraphic.org is a French web site dedicated to graphic creation > under linux (strange, isn't it ?). > * Yesterday it has published a small tutorial (in French) dedicated to > inkscape users (but applicable to any graphic creation app, I think) : how > to have a 'mirror effect'. Quite nice. I will ask the site if they are ok if > I translate this doc in English and then make it available from the inkscape > website. > The tutorial is there : > http://linuxgraphic.org/section2d/articles/miroir_Inkscape/index.html > * They've also announced the release of Open Clipart 0.06 on the main page. > > Linux+ (http://www.lpmagazine.org/en/modules/news/) European (Polish) > magazine translated and published in French, English, German, Spanish and > Czech has issued an article on Inkscape too. I have the French version. I'll > produce a sum up + translation in English on mailing list. > > > > Regards, > > Matiphas > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop > FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! > Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5047&alloc_id=10808&op=click > _______________________________________________ > Inkscape-user mailing list > Inkscape-user(a)lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user -- Jon Phillips KOREA.PH.010.3140.7483 USA.PH.858.361.2811 jon@...235... http://www.rejon.org Inkscape (http://inkscape.org) Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org) CVS Book (http://cvsbook.ucsd.edu/) Scale Journal (http://scale.ucsd.edu/)

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man page source?
by bulia byak 08 Sep '04

08 Sep '04

I want to update the man page. Which file to edit? Inkscape.pod seems much more editable, but inkscape.1.in is more recent in the CVS, as pjrm changed it directly: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/inkscape/inkscape/inkscape.1.in?rev=1… So, which one is the real source?

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TAGS broken
by bulia byak 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

Generating tags does not work recently: inkscape/src $ make tags make: *** No rule to make target `refcounted.h', needed by `TAGS'. Stop. Can anyone please look into it? I need tags for editing but I don't know where to look.

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Delay on scripting support
by David Turner 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

Unfortunately, I've unexpectedly had to move house, so I haven't been able to get time to adding scripting support. I had hoped to get to it before now, but I haven't. I'm leaving the country in three days for a month, and I won't have access to a compiler. I'll be unsubscribing from this mailing list after I send this message. I hope that when I get back, my life will settle down a little and I'll be able to hack on Inkscape some more. Sorry for dropping the ball here. -- -David "Novalis" Turner Stalk Me: 617 441 0668 <insert dark NIN lyrics here>

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Re: [Inkscape-user] Line reported to be longer than I expected
by bulia byak 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

> The line is reported to be 2mm longer than I expected (402mm), even > though it touches the bottom and top of the page perfectly, the page is > reported to be exactly 400mm high. Is this a bug or a feature? It's a bug. Lines' bboxes extend beyond line ends by the line width. This is because the bbox is now calculated simply by adding half the stroke width to all 4 sides of the without-stroke bbox, but in this case (for unclosed horizontal line) it should be added only to the top and bottom. It is a very difficult bug to fix because we currently have no code to reliably determine how far the stroke of a given shape extends, which may be affected not only by stroke width but also by (as in your case) shape orientation and closeness, join and cap types, and miter limit. Anyway, I think we don't yet have this in our bug tracker, so please submit it (with my comments).

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Gtkmmification
by Bryce Harrington 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

Hi all, We had identified the primary goal for this next release, 0.40, to be the conversion of Inkscape's user interface from Gtk+ to Gtkmm. To date we've been attacking this both from a bottom-up perspective, by working on converting individual dialogs to Gtkmm, as well as a top-down perspective, by starting from the top level Inkscape::Application object and working down. This latter top-down approach is what I've been working on the past few weeks. Here's a summary of where this work is at. The Inkscape::Application class is the top level manager of the main window. It creates and provides the callbacks for the GUI elements such as menus, toolbars, the main canvas, the statusbar, etc. One day, once this is merged into the main Inkscape codebase, it will also own things like the user preferences and the document model itself. You'll notice that the application.h file is pretty terse. This is because nearly all of the Inkscape::Application internals are hidden in a subclass called Inkscape::ApplicationImplementation. This means that the application.h is kept very lightweight, and other parts of the program can include it without including the whole world (only gtkmm/window.h). Inkscape::Dialog is a new abstract class. This provides a general purpose interface that Inkscape::Application can use for interacting with any of the dialogs. If there are stylistic or behavioral aspects that we want to apply to all dialogs in Inkscape, this is where we would do it. For instance, this class will provide common routines for saving the position and size of dialogs in the user's preferences, as well as the transient behavior. If you recall the trouble we had implementing those in each dialog independently under Gtk+, you can imagine how this will help centralize the behavior to one easily maintained place. Inkscape::DialogManager is another new class. This is basically just a container of all the dialogs in Inkscape, that allows us to construct them lazily - instead of creating them all at program startup, we construct them right before they're first used, then cache the dialog until DialogManager gets destructed. DialogManager also provides a set of signals that can be issued to all Inkscape dialogs, such as to show/hide all dialogs. DialogManager hooks these signals to each dialog as it creates them. One of the nifty things about Gtkmm is that it makes it quite easy to create new widgets, and we're taking advantage of this by creating "compound widgets" for sets of widgets that get reused throughout the application. For instance, most of our dialogs are implemented as Notebooks with pages that contain labeled frames within them and a table within that; the Inkscape::NotebookPage widget provides a convenient way to build a dialog using this scheme. LabelledSpinbutton, created by Carl, provides a combination of a label and a spinbutton entry, which is used repeatedly on the preferences dialog. ScalarWidget provides a widget for entering numbers associated with units, such as appears heavily on the transformation dialog and in general throughout the application. Using these widgets, Carl and I have roughed out much of the transformation and application preferences dialogs (although none of the widgets are hooked to anything internally yet). In general, what we can expect from Gtkmm is a) flexibility, and b) reduced linecount. It uses the exact same widgetset underneath, so by and large Inkscape will *look & feel* the same, and there's no plans to redesign the layout of anything (although we may do some small tweaks where it makes things easier). But this will let us do the same stuff in a fraction of the number of lines of code; this will make it easier to maintain and enhance Inkscape's look and feel in the future. This top-down gtkmm work is available in Inkscape's 'experimental' CVS module, in experimental/bryce/inkscape_gtkmm. A simple makefile is included if you'd like to fire it up and try it. If you're interested in working on something related to this Gtkmm work, you'll find this top-down codebase pretty easy to get up to speed on, since there's only about a dozen files of significance. There are examples of both widgets and dialogs, that you can use as guides in developing your own widgets and dialogs. Inkscape::Application has many of the stubs in place for adding menus, toolbars, the statusbar, and the canvas, so if you're interested in working on any of those, the hooks are there for it. If you've never done Gtkmm development, you'll find the tutorial at gtkmm.org to be quite handy - took me only a couple evenings to work through enough of the examples to feel comfortable with it. If you're not sure about your C++ skills, don't worry - gtkmm is designed in a way that allows this work to be done using really basic C++ features, so as long as you're familiar with inheritance, constructors/destructors, and public/protected/private, you should find it pretty clear. Knowledge of templates is helpful, since they're used in various places, but not required - you can learn as you go. There is a PLAN file with some todo's I've identified for myself to work on. At the end of that file, I've also written up some little projects (like implementing the Statusbar or developing Accelerators) that need doing. You're welcome to commit work into this package, although I appreciate hearing what you plan to work on so we can coordinate efforts. The big picture plan for this is to get the structural aspects figured out and examples put in place, then move it into the main Inkscape codebase for further development, with a cmdline flag to indicate which interface to use. I'd like to have at least two dialogs at 100% (including docs!), half a dozen compound widgets fleshed out, some of the canvas integration code stubbed out, so it'll be clear how to plug in the canvas when we get to that point. Bryce

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freehand smoothing?
by bulia byak 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

People keep complaining about the unsmooth freehand drawing in Inkscape and point out Sodipodi's smooth drawing as its advantage over us: http://linuxfr.org/2004/07/20/16864.html (see comment "Sodipodi meilleur que Inkscape ?") I remember this problem was being attacked quite some time ago, and I was under an impression that the solution was near. Peter and Nathan were working on it, as well as the person known as paraprax on jabber. Can someone please update me on the status of that work? How far has it progressed and what is needed to finish it? I would really love to see this issue closed for the next version.

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