- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Inviting you to LGM and Inkscape Hackfest in Toronto
by Bryce Harrington 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hi all, I would like to invite you all to join me in attending the Libre Graphics Meeting in Toronto! It is held April 29 to May 2 at the University of Toronto. Inkscape will also be hosting a Hackfest the three days prior to this event, April 26-28. If you've done any development on Inkscape, and wish to help us plan our future, then definitely please come! ~=> Please let me know ASAP if you can attend! <=~ We have sponsorship available on a limited basis to Inkscape contributors, first come first served, so make sure to RSVP with me quickly. Our community has been coming together with donations specifically to enable developer attendance. We've got $10,000 set aside for this event, and with this hope to assemble 10-12 developers there. Maybe more depending on how the fundraising goes! Speaking of fundraising, please help us spread the word that our project needs more cash donations for this event. Point folks here for details: https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/hackfest/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ * The Libre Graphics Meeting is the major event of the year for FOSS graphics application developers and users. I've only been once myself, but Inkscape has attended many times. It's a great way to network with our peer projects, share ideas, and get inspired. * The Inkscape Hackfest is new this year. It's rare for us to have dedicated time face-to-face to work on Inkscape. We're going to use this valuable time to design some major new features and to plan out a roadmap that will take us to 1.0. Other topics I hope we can work on include designing a new extension system, re-thinking our UI design, improving our pdf/printing capabilities, and all the other things listed as 'Future' on our current roadmap page. Personally, I'm hoping to experiment with running Inkscape with cairo-gl, and test getting Inkscape running as a Wayland client. * Are you located in Toronto and available to help Inkscape? We're looking for someone who can assist with local logistics. Please contact me and let me know your availability. * Sponsorship amounts will vary according to your history with the project. We definitely want everyone but in particular we're hoping to encourage high volume, long term contributors, so will try and skew sponsorship their way. So if you're a long term contributor, you really need to come! Bryce

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Gnome 3 integration
by Gez 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hi, I noticed that some type of dialogs in Inkscape have troubles with Gnome 3. The problems became more visible in Gnome 3.14. The most annoying issue is caused by the default behavior of modal windows in Gnome, which is blocking interactivity in windows below the modal dialog and darkening the background. I guess it makes sense for a modal window to behave like that (after all, the idea behind modal windows is to interrupt the workflow until an action is performed), but it clashes with some uses of modal windows in inkscape, like live preview of effects and extensions. Under gnome 3.14, turning on live preview puts the extension window in the center of the screen and blocks the underlaying UI elements, making it impossible to perform required actions as picking colors from the artwork. The window can't be moved, which means that sometimes it also covers the region the user wants to edit. I took this issue to the IRC channel yesterday, and su_v pointed out that it's really a window manager problem, which is absolutely true. The problem is that even though this default behavior creates problems in inkscape, it wouldn't be accurate to say it's a bug in Gnome, since it's a design choice to make modal windows act actually as modal dialogs. So, this is the situation: Modal windows act like that in Gnome and that affects adversely some features in inkscape. It's quite likely that both parties will suggest that the other party is doing it wrong if this is presented as a bug, so my intention here is open a discussion about possible solutions for this issue. Is there another type of GTK dialog that could be used for extensions and effects during live-preview instead of modal windows? Is it possible to override that behavior? Do you think it's sensible to ask Gnome developers to allow applications to override that behavior? In this bug report Ryan Lerch added some information about the problem (see comments #7 and #9) https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/649441 This is not the only issue with the latest GTK+: Some windows have no decoration, so they can't be closed except by right clicking on the top (color pickers in document properties, preferences). It is a wm problem, but since Gnome is one of the flagship DEs of libre software, it will be affecting a lot of users, so it would be nice if something can be done to mitigate these issues. Kind regards, Gez.

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Inkscape.org now using oauth2 for google
by Martin Owens 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

Dear Developers and docs, Please be aware that because google are decommissioning their openid services, we've moved the inkscape.org social auth login from openid to their oauth2 service. If you have trouble logging in using the new service, or find that when you do, you have a new account instead of your original one. Please let me know. Martin,

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Fwd: Automatic pixel art cleaning
by Krzysztof Kosiński 22 Feb '15

22 Feb '15

I finally have something that mostly works. Attached are example input and result. The algorithm I designed works as follows: 1. Compute a sum of Fourier transforms of each row and each column of the image. 2. For both sums, look for the 'base frequency', i.e. the size of the pixel grid. There are two variants here: if the pixel art does not have grid lines, the base frequency is indicated by periodic values very close to zero ("antipeaks"), and if it does, there are periodic peaks. Spacing between peaks / antipeaks corresponds to the number of pixels. I use an empirically derived scoring scheme. 3. Sample the image at the center of grid points. Currently I use bilinear sampling at the center of the pixel, but something more clever would be better to remove defacements. For instance, doing cluster analysis and picking the average of the most numerous cluster should work. 4. Quantize colors. I wanted to avoid having to specify the number of colors in advance, so I used single-link clustering in Lab color space. Complete-link would probably work better. 5. Output the resulting image as PNG. The only tunable value in the algorithm is the clustering diameter; everything else is automatic. A value of deltaE = 8 seems to work fairly well. The algorithm works very well if the following conditions are met: 1. Pixel size is at least 5-6. 2. Image borders are aligned with the pixel art grid. 3. There is no skew or other deformation of the image. We can handle small pixel sizes, e.g. 2-5, by simply checking whether the art pixels given by these grid parameters contain approximately uniform colors. Limitations 2 and 3 could be lifted by preprocessing the image before the FFT step. The Python script posted earlier in this thread can detect the edges of the pixel art, but it doesn't work well in some cases, for example in the case of sketches where the individual squares have jagged edges. However, I think the approach of doing a Hough transform to detect lines and then finding a projective transformation that straightens the image could be promising. Another idea is to find areas of approximately uniform color, mark them using something like flood fill, and then process the edges. I will soon post the code publicly and then integrate this into Inkscape as an optional step in the Trace Pixel Art dialog, but can't give an ETA yet. I think late March is realistic for integration. I will need to factor out a few things which are more universally useful, e.g. conversion to Lab color space and color quantization, or use an external library such as Babl or LCMS. Regards, Krzysztof

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Needed: Hackfest Coordinator
by Bryce Harrington 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

We'll be having a hackfest for the 3 days prior to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Toronto. I'd like to put out a call for a volunteer to serve as event coordinator for this. Responsibilities will include coordinating expense reimbursements, liaising with the LGM coordinators, and handling other misc. tasks that come up. I'll be attending and will be available to help, but I'd like to focus more on technicals so would appreciate a dedicated events person. Contact me off list if interested and we'll sort out details. Bryce

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Needed: Board Executive Secretary volunteer
by Bryce Harrington 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

We're about to enter a busy period for the board. We've got the hackfest coming up, a new charter to decide on and document, a board election to hold, and more. I'm finding myself to be a bit of a bottleneck for proceeding on these items - partly due to a need to ensure everything's properly documented. At Martin Owen's suggestion, I'd like to ask for a volunteer to help me out with various documentarian tasks, such as: * posting news items to the website about board activities * formatting documents into HTML for the website * uploading PDF documents to the website * ensure meeting minutes are posted * drafting vote proposals * copyediting You'll be working closely with me. I don't think it is going to require a huge time commitment - perhaps several hours a week - but I do need someone I can hand stuff off to and rely on to ensure it gets done. In particular, you'll be helping me build out the Governance area of our main website (under the About menu), with various legal documents, policies, procedures, financial docs, meeting minutes, and so on. If you're interested, please contact me off list. Thanks, Bryce

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Tarballs for trunk
by Ryan Lerch 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

I semi-regularly build trunk versions of Inkscape for Fedora, and as part of this process, I generate the tarballs using "make dist". I am now uploading these generated tarballs to here: http://inkscapetarballs.ryanlerch.org/ for people to use. Note that these arent auto-generated or nightly by any stretch of the imagination, but will just appear there when i run a new trunk build for Fedora. cheers, ryanlerch

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Transformation center issues
by Diederik van Lierop 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Hi people, The past weeks I've been trying to fix some transformation center offset regressions, which were caused by the new unit/viewbox stuff. That should all work reasonably well again, but it remains a headache. IMHO this transformation center handling is broken by design, and judging by some comments in the code I'm not the only one to think so. It requires all kinds of special casing everywhere transformations are being applied, due to the transformation center being expressed in horizontal/vertical coordinates, relative to the center of the bounding box. Does anybody know why it was designed like this? If there are no strong objections, then I'd propose to use absolute coordinates, and to apply transformations as if it were simply a point of a path. This would make code much cleaner. We will no longer need to call document->ensureUpToDate() to force an update of the bounding box everytime the center is requested or changed. It might also allow us to get rid of the weird behavior of the transformation center (which should rotate with the item in case an object is rotated!) Not that I'm going to change this now, but I might get to this after the 0.91 release. Diederik

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Inkscape Mailing List Migration
by Martin Owens 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Hi Devs, In the process of moving away from sourceforge, we have OSOUL on stand by to create replacement mailing lists for us. In order to do this, we need archives. Of course this would create a forking point for each of the lists. The process works like this: * Get the admins on sourceforge give me admin privilages to all existing mailing lists. * A script to take subscriber lists and archive mboxes out is prepared. * The OSOUL ticket for making mailing lists requires them to join irc for some immediate actions. * Once the new list is online, the old one is disabled and a message is sent out to everyone on the list. * A new message is sent out on the new list. Does this make sense? Do you have any ideas? Martin,

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[karen@...3057...: last chance to apply to GSoC]
by Bryce Harrington 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

----- Forwarded message from Karen Sandler <karen@...3057...> ----- Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 01:29:04 -0800 From: Karen Sandler <karen@...3057...> To: project-reps@...3057... Subject: last chance to apply to GSoC Reply-To: karen@...3057... Just a friendly reminder that the deadline for orgs applying to GSoC is today, February 20 at 19:00 UTC! http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2015 karen ----- End forwarded message -----

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SVG Working Group - Sydney report
by Tavmjong Bah 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Hi, I have posted a report from last weeks SVG face-to-face meeting in Sydney: http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1226 It was a very successful meeting: * We worked through many of the remaining issues on auto-flowed text with the participation of the CSS working group. * My proposal for text-on-a-shape was approved. * My proposal for 'auto-closing' of curved paths was approved. * My proposal for 'auto-smoothing' of mesh gradients was approved. * A new "clipped' miter line-join was approved. (Instead of falling back to a bevel line join when the miter-limit is exceeded, the line-join is clipped at the limit.) * How the miter-limit effects the arc line-join was decided. * We resolved most of the important issues blocking moving the SVG 2 spec to the next stage of the specification process and targeted the next face-to-face meeting in June for making the transition. * None of the important features for Inkscape were removed from the core SVG 2 specification (except marker knockouts which still needs a lot of work). Tav

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Wiki account
by Bit Barrel 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Can someone acquainted with the force make an inkscape wiki account for me? It gives me this mesage: "To request an account please email the developer list". I want to update this page as it is totally out of date and broken: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_Eclipse

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IRC meeting: Jenkins
by Johan Engelen 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Hi all, Whoever is interested in Jenkins / testing Inkscape: let's schedule a meeting on IRC, so I can explain what I've set up and how you can use the testing system, help improve things and maintain the testing system. How about Wednesday at 19:00 UTC ? cheers, Johan

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Teto critique and other
by Jelle Mulder 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Hello Francois, Clearly, you have no clue what SVG is about and don't care about the concept of open standards. I think that is the basis of your problem. That said, I think part of your criticism is justified. On accord of the UI, there is a lot to be desired and it is a problem that needs to be tackled sooner rather than later. I for one am dreaming of a fully customisable UI with SVG widgets that can be scaled to whatever size the end user would desire and alternatively would allow for easy adaptation using CSS style sheets. That would require mainly an API for Inkscape that would allow for Python or Javascript to access functions in the application at the same level as the current UI does. It might even allow for using a different renderer as it could render in a browser that way, lowering dependencies on a single 3rd party library. I also see advantages to move the processing of rendering into a cloud that with multithreading of processing might then do all the dirty work and render your 100.000 object plus Gaussian blur filter with transparency in a mere few seconds. As there are quite a few other issues at hand to be tackled, I can imagine that hiring a team of UI design nazi's to reorganise and mainatain the Inkscape UI is low on the list of priorities. If anything I would suggest to use any proceeds from the fund raiser to try and produce an Inkscape API that would facilitate a total redesign of the UI or enable users a elegant and simple way to change them to their hearts desire. Think about what could be done with that by a team of people that do nothing but UI and UX design, but have no clue about how to run a make file. However, that will not be anytime soon. When you write criticism about software like Inkscape, try to imagine that a multitude of people have dedicated their spare time on this project for the pleasure of creating a usable tool and sometimes going a bit over the top in producing feasibility experiments. The nice thing about Inkscape is that it has some functions you will not find in any other software, simply because nobody ever thought about it or would not bother to spend so much time on it. LPE's are one of them. Now sadly these functions are often the product of a single person who may have a brain for maths but not for design and UI design. The fact they come up with something as usable as many UI objects are I think is quite an achievement, but a lack of consistency is a direct result. But I cannot be clear enough about the amount of respect I have for these people that have managed to come up with a a tool that can compete and in many ways surpasses the abilities of software created by monopolist companies that will deprecate their older file formats at a whim. Inkscape as it is, is an amazing piece of software despite a long list of desires that anyone may have. The mere fact that people like you and me are addressed to when we come with our unhinged remarks is equally amazing. We are addressing their passion child with criticisms while it is reaching a level of maturity that few would have envisioned when they started their endevour to produce the next best thing to cheese. That they react a bit grumpy when we do is to be understood, so would I. On accord of SVG not being the best format for diagrams, I and other clearly disagree with you. SVG is the best format for diagrams, but Inkscape isn't the best tool for it. If you use Libreoffice you can create all the diagrams you want and make an export to SVG that will do most of the work for you. Inkscape has some functionality, but the focus on it is low. Probably also because the nearly completed SVG 2 is about to come with some nifty methods for that to incorporate and it would be waste of time and effort to do that now. Flow text has been a pain for years due to Adobe murdering SVG 1.2. They're one of the reasons you see mainly png, jpg, gif and maybe you can recall they bought Flash at some point that coincides with that happening. One of the nice things of using SVG for instance is that you can extend its functionality if you want. Have a look at this for diagrams and maybe you'll get the point I'm trying to make. Yeah,.. it lacks a nice GUI for sure and it doesn't do artistic things the way you want, but if you understand how to draw your objects in Inkscape and do a <use> object in SVG, you might save yourself some time in producing some really serious diagrams. The user docs (link2) give nice examples. https://github.com/srguiwiz/adj-js http://srguiwiz.github.io/adj-js/user-docs/ And Martin, it really doesn't take 50 million bucks and 9000 programmers. What it takes is a good API for Inkscape with documentation. If there is an API, the lesser gods of programming can take the UI for a spin. It would even be feasible to have a UI design team being addressed by the creators of functions to style a UI for a new function that way, making a separation of skills and thus getting the best results on both ends possible. For complex projects that is a better way to create and maintain it, just like you would do OOP in programming. Guarding a house style visually is easier for many people than good programming styles. If Inkscape has a way for them to not screw it up they will be more daring. Truly, the fund raising text is a bit of a dud. Maybe I can come up with a text along the lines of Alex suggestion that is a bit more specific. I guess it is more in my marketing expertise to do something like that and I want to make this passion child of ours even better than cheese. If you could send me a list of things to be addressed and what benefits there are to be had that would be enough to work on. I guess 3 would be a bit too much work to find. I would suggest making a list of issues, what they solve and have people interested in addressing those issues tag them for interest to work on with a link to their resumes or something like it. That way it would also be easier to assemble teams on a topic once the fund raising target has been met. Some estimate of time involved to tackle an issue would be handy as that can be used to set a fund raising target. It would also allow for companies that have a slump time in the current economic situation to take on an issue. You wouldn't want a single company to be the whole team I guess in case the slump time is over and they have to make some real money again, but it may enable some to pay the wages of a currently redundant employee. I see a win win situation in that. For others it may just be what they need to cover their rent and food bills to get seriously involved in something they always wanted to do, but never had the opportunity to. Not that many people have jobs that allow them time for FOSS development. Let everyone that would like to manage a project create a Gantt chart such a project and scrutinise it with all involved and/or outsiders have a say in this process. Those hours should be billed once the Gantt chart is accepted and the fund raising is completed. That way part of the whole process can start before the end of a fund raising and people can get an insight into the amount of time and effort is involved. It will also set clear targets for everyone. Another advantage of Gantt charts is that managers understand those and they often have the keys to funds. If they think a project that addresses their problems is feasible, they may be more inclined to throw some serious dough at it. Enthusiasts may also be able to convince their managers with that. I'm also pretty sure I can come up with a good marketing plan to find funds, once we have a good method in place. There are plenty of companies that are less than thrilled with working in the cloud and would for instance support any effort of Inkscape to get good CMYK and Spot color support. Sure there are issues on both that are hard to address, but finding a way to address these issues may be an interesting project in itself. Find a method and I am sure there are people interested in funding that method even if it takes a buck. There are plenty of people that would like to see a bit of competition between Adobe and a viable alternative that would be able to lift the whole project to a new level. I know people may be averse to that, but I see it as inevitable anyway. Inkscape has too much clout and potential not to professionalise like all other projects of this scope. And Francois,.. after all these comments and the time involved in it, I would say that you can at least sent a tenner. If you're smart and capable, you'd sent more as it would probably be faster to make Inkscape do what you'd like it to do than find some nice product that does all. Alternatively hire a team and make it happen by proposing a project of your needs. Other than all the other software you know, this is the one application you can influence to suit your needs. Cheers, Jelle PS And to everyone,.. Happy New Goat! Message: 4 Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 21:19:27 +0100 From: Teto <teto45@...2519...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Good Press for 0.91 To: inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <54E250CF.8060902@...2519...> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Le 15/02/2015 21:19, Alexandre Prokoudine a ?crit : > On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Martin Owens wrote: > >>> why don't we have a single UI for all tools, >> Because it would cost about $50 million and more programmers than are >> possibly available. The amount of energy required to sync up and do >> design properly across such a large and diverse set of programs is >> over 9000! > Martin, I would start with "no team is ready to even approach the > subject beyond a few common user interaction solutions" > > E.g. years ago I did a study, how many hotkeys can be shared between > different applications. Turned out, not too many. Driving apps further > in that direction would imply dramatically changing user interaction > in each of them, and not necessarily for the better (for instance, it > would limit the way that developers can enhance the tools), and some > of the developers would rather die than go for that (the sK1 team, for > instance, is deliberately cloning Corel DRAW's user interaction). > > Even Adobe's suite has known user interaction incompatibilities > between apps. They do try to hunt them down, but the suite is > controlled by a single commercial entity, wheareas Inkscape, GIMP, > MyPaint, Krita, Blender etc. are apps developed by different teams > with different ideas. > > The libre design suite is a dream, but, in my all-but-humble opinion, > having mature design apps that don't share some design decisions, but > are compatible via open standards, is good enough to build production > pipelines. > >> All of the problems you have could be helped with better funding. A >> hard problem, we're working on solving. Would you contribute that $100 >> to making inkscape better? > If you can take just one more comment from me :), I would suggest > thinking of a more detailed agenda for the hackfest. > > "Being together in one room also allows us to work on things that are > harder to do on-line: designing a new plugin/extension system, teaming > up to squash particularly nasty bugs, authoring better user > documentation, and planning where to take Inkscape development in the > future." is a bit specific, but only that much. > > Fundraising works best when people see stuff like this: > > 1) We want to bring X developers together who have shown interest to > work on A, B, C, and D features or fixing this and that infamous bugs. > > 2) Implementing those features/Fixing those bugs will benefit you in > E, F, and G ways. > > 3) We have G,H, I, J, and K developers who epxressed their interest in > participating. They are known for doing L, M, N, and O work, so they > are skillful and already made stuff you most likely benefitted from. > > If you think that at this stage you would be able to do something like > that, it would likely get you more funds. > > Alex Thank you Alexandre for your answer and I'll use it for my answer to all people after my last message : - I thank you for this message because when I read the annoucement for the hackfest I didn't understand what it's about and why I'd give money for having people around a table and talking about Inskcape. I'm serious. So thanks for selling me the concept (better). - Someone talked about Deviantart and something like "that's funny that you said that nothing in deviantart is made with svg, because the logo is made with svg, actually, hahaha, gotcha !". *Sigh*. I think there's some difference between a site made for the most part in svg for graphics, and a site with just its logo. And I was talking about artists that may draw with vector software, but never share their work directly in svg or other vector format, for obvious reasons. Oh, well, never mind. - Also, It's not because svg is the best format for diagrams that it is widely used for them. In my professional work, when people need to make a diagram, they use Powerpoint, or a soft made specifically for diagrams, not a soft like Inskcape that is not designed to draw easily and quickly complex diagrams (I tried, and I had hard time). - Someone told me about giving 100$ to help for development. Yep, sure, except that now I'm sure that Inkscape will never be what I wish. Unify the UI for tools like Filters, LPE and so on ? Don't count on that, you said, because of "debts" and the fact that it's too much work. OK, so you tell me that you'll never touch of those "debts" ? Do you realize that a day or another, you soft will be stuck because of this, and it will be impossible to improve because "really too much work" ? Is it really not possible to change that now, when it's not too late ? (or maybe it's already too late ?) Now I clearly see what Inkscape will be. A soft that can draw in the svg (2, 5, whatever) standard, but with an user interface that is a pain to use for many tools, and limited by its own structure. Sorry, I won't pay 100$ for this. I'll prefer pay that for a soft that fits my """artist""" needs. Don't get me wrong. Again, I don't want fo insult anyone. The soft is great, and fairly perfect for 80% of my needs. But I do know now that for more ambitious drawings I'll need another vector soft, more artist-oriented. There are many cheap softs for painters (really good, and without a standard to follow !), no doubt there will be new softs for vector artists sooner or later (Illustrator doesn't count, too expensive). Cheers, Francois.

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Dropping colours from document or into Swatches through colourpicker etc.
by Jelle Mulder 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

As I cannot reach launchpad (with all of China having holidays I cannot even reach Tav's Inkscape manual pages). I'd like to drop this wish/idea here. Ehmm,.. Setting swatches seems less than intuitive to me and I cannot access the manual. Maybe there is a method already that I am not aware of, but how feasible would it be to create a swatch object and then drop the colour into it from the document. Lets say that I'd like to create a number of swatches in a non defined set of colours. I'd make 32 swatches of non defined colour (Additional Button: New) and just pick them up from the screen through the colour picker and change them to my hearts content and save them into a new list. It would make the whole swatch list into a great productivity tool and it wouldn't take too much effort I think to make it possible. In this setup making a new button with a delete function would be logical as well, just to be complete. It is nice to have all those predefined swatches around, but a simple and fast method to create and save your own seems a much better option to me. Also taking a predef swatch list and adding your custom colours to it might be a nice option. Saving the thus created swatch list could force a save as to keep the predefined swatch lists clean. When selecting the names of the swatches in the list, it would be a nice thing if you could reorder them, so you don't have to scroll down to the bottom every time. Maybe a save as and using an underscore _ could be a simple way to force them to the top. Reordering the swatches themselves would also be great to have. One may use 200 or more swatches, but finding the more common ones can be a bit of a hassle. Maybe something like a palette within the swatch docker would be an option. Let the user create a grid of size Columns x Rows and drag his preferred swatches to it. Any option on swatches I actually would expect to find in the swatch menu. Currently the interface has two very similar icons in it. A top menu icon with a left pointing arrow and one a few pixels lower with the same shape giving a drop down menu. How about making the second one a arrow pointing down to make clear it is something dropping down? Could be a nice GSOC project ;-) Cheers, Jelle

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generate guide with certain color in extension ?
by Samuel Dellicour 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

I have build some extensions that generate guides (like guides in a grid with columns and gutters - available here: https://github.com/sambody/inkscape-guide-tools). It works fine, but now that Inkscape 0.91 is out with the ability to change the color (and label) of an existing guide by hand, I had the following question: When I generate a guide in an extension, can I define the color (and label) of the guide when generating ? If yes, how? I'm using a code like this : inkex.etree.SubElement(parent,'{ http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd}guide ',{'position':position,'orientation':orientation}) I tried with just using 'color':'#ff0000ff' as extra parameter, but that didn't work. If setting the color is possible, I could let the user choose a color for the generated guides, different from their default guide color. Thanks. Samuel

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Official release location
by Alex Valavanis 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

Hi All, Please can someone confirm what the official location(s) are for our release files? I guess it's now https://inkscape.org/en/download/ instead of the SourceForge file repo? I ask, because downstream packagers will generally want an official upstream source location to be specified (for automated update notifications etc). Is there a plan to upload the 0.91 tarball on SourceForge, or is that file repository now considered to be obsolete? SF is advantageous for downstream, because the direct-download URL is predictable. Best wishes, Alex

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Inkscape 0.91 in the news
by "Christoph Schäfer" 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

FWIW, the Swiss "Publisher" magazine mentioned the 0.91 release in its current printed issue: http://publisher.ch/news_detail.php?t=Inkscape%2B0.91%253A%2BDie%2BVektoren… As I've written before, a 2-page article will be included in Publisher 2-2015. Christoph

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Good Press for 0.91
by Bryce Harrington 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

I'd like to thank everyone that helped make this release a success. Often times people focus on coder contributions, but software releases are decidedly multi-disciplinary, and I'd like to specially credit four teams in particular for being well organized, thorough, and dependable. Before the release really even got started, a strong foundation was built for us by the Bug Triaging Team. Especially after such a lengthy development period, with such extensive changes, there can be an overwhelming number of bugs. But due to how thorough the triaging was, we actually had very good transparency into what needed fixed the most. In the past, we've learned that packaging of our windows and osx builds can make or break the release, and even a small glitch can throw everything out of wack. We certainly had our share of packaging challenges to overcome, and more that still need solved, but the Packaging Team developed a good strategy for charting us through to the release, to ensure we'd have functional packages for all platforms within two days. Even now the Translation Team is hard at work on the release announcements and our website. This cycle we allocated ample time to their translation of the application, and I think that paid off in spades. I think this may be the first release where our Web Team played such a crucial role. They established a solid infrastructure both for editing the website and for mirror-caching our downloadables; we have exercised both these functions extremely heavily the last few days, and while we've had a few brief (but quickly fixed) glitches, the infrastructure appears to be shouldering all the loads without complaint. ~ ~ ~ Going forward, my plan is to keep us on course to deliver at least a couple new major releases each year. So, like perhaps shoot for a 0.92 release this summer or early autumn. Maybe even more frequently than that, but to achieve this I think we will need to tighten up in a few areas. First is marketing. Unsurprising after 4 years since the last release, our marketing abilities seem to have atrophied quite severely. We recognized this would be a problem and attempted to fix it; it's my fault we didn't get things organized here in time, but fortunately all the other teams filled in. We can try again for 0.92, and I will work harder to ensure we have a good solid marketing team by then. Second is the release mechanics themselves, which are quite byzantine. Fortunately no one else needed to deal with this but me! A number of steps are manual which should be automated, other steps are redundant but can't be skipped for one reason or other, and there's some steps that have to be carried out by specific people or at specific times. The result is that release management requires handling by someone with release experience to know what knobs need turned and levers need pulled, when and by how much. Instead, we need to systematize all this logic in scripts, so that releases become more like a push-button exercise that any one of us could do. A third area is user documentation. The only reason this hasn't been a release issue is because we haven't got any! :-) We get away with not shipping documentation thanks to having a quite excellent tutorial writing community and well-crafted release notes; users also thankfully have a selection of third-party commercial documentation to fill the gap. But to be considered as professional software, a user manual is a must. Since it'll need updated each release, this implies the need to create a Documentation Team. Bryce P.S. here's some of the press we've gotten so far: Our news announcement: https://inkscape.org/en/news/2015/01/30/inkscape-version-091-is-released/ Was rather a last minute rush. Hopefully we can do better next time. Slashdot announcement: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/31/1914255/inkscape-version-091-releas… Amongst the usual comment chaff is some strong praise. "Best of Breed," "One of the handful of apps that together make up a good base set," "One of the coolest things it does [is] converting bitmapped images to vectors," "Have always preferred Inkscape", "Plays nicely with Inkcut - vinyl cutting," "My current business depends on Inkscape. I use Inkscape's 'gcodetools' plugin to generate gcode for a CNC mill." "I spoke with the very helpful people on Inkscape's IRC Channel for this tip." "Is it just me, or is this whole thread making you feel nostalgic for the good ol' Slashdot days when we gabbed about stuff that was a lot more fun to gab about?" Much of the critical feedback is stuff we're already working on: UI design looks out of date, needs porting to Gtk3, needs more functionality before it can supplant Illustrator, Gtk+ is poor on Windows, need a more native L&F on OSX, needs proper CMYK / printing support. http://fedoramagazine.org/inkscape-0-91-released/ An article by our own Ryan Lerch. A great overview of the release, and would have made a much better news announcement than the one we put out. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Inkscape-0.91-Released Unfortunately, this one was a leak of the release before we were ready for it to get out. I suppose they wanted to get the scoop, but with no packages available nor the news release posted, there was little to go on and it caused users some confusion and misunderstanding. I fault myself here for not having the marketing end of things better organized, so we could have kept the release hush-hush until everything was ready to go. http://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/2u6kxi/new_release_of_inksc… Reddit also scooped the news release. But the comments here were a bit more interesting. A lot of pro-Inkscape cheer. A few areas where work is needed: Working with text, Saving as .eps, CMYK spot color. Hopefully Monday we'll see wider uptake of our release.

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Inkscape and Eclipse on Windows
by Bit Barrel 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

I want to compile, and most importantly, debug (single stepping etc.) Inkscape on windows but I am stuck at some of the instructions. I followed this: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_Eclipse Then this: http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrEclipse/Installation But at this step there is nothing like "bazaar" in the project window: Go to: *File* --> *New* --> *Project*<<BR>Eclipse opens the new project dialog Under *Bazaar* select *Project From Bazaar* and click *Next*. Eclipse shows the *Eclipse Project From Bazaar* dialog. I installed Eclipse 4.3 Kepler (recommended), but at the download site, there are several sub versions: http://eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/Kepler/SR2 It is not mentioned which sub version of eclipse you are supposed to download. I downloaded "Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers", but maybe that one is not correct?

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Text Highlighting
by Martin Owens 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Dear Developers, I've got a request here from one of my clients to add text-highlighting to inkscape/inkview. The y've got a batik extension to do the following to text and tspan elements: background-color: colour value, default is 'transparent' background-mode: [ line-height | bbox ] background-outline: width of padding outside background color (similar to margin in html) background-outline-{top,right,bottom,left}: specific version of above. line-height: default: 'normal' i.e. font-size *1.1 otherwise size expression, used when background-mode is line-height. In which case background color is proportionally divided between ascent/descent to obtain line-height. Tav - The client claims it's not a part of the svg standard, but have talked with some people about adding it into future versions. Before I did any work, I'd like to nail down exactly what you think will happen (so we don't create something that doesn't make it into the standard) I'm attatching the batik extension file for reference. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Regarding Inkscape in Indian languages
by chandrakant dhutadmal 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Hi All. We have submitted requests for bringing out localized Inkscape for Indian languages through various bugs filed. List of all such bugs filed can be looked at https://bugs.launchpad.net/~cpdhutadmal. We have also submitted translations for those languages. Would like to know from the community if we have considered making builds for Indic languages. If so, when are we going to do it. If not, can we have a discussions surrounding the topic ? RegardsChandrakant DhutadmalPune, India.

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Cairo 1.14
by Alex Valavanis 12 Feb '15

12 Feb '15

Hi All, As discussed previously, are there any objections to bumping the Cairo version dependency to >=1.14 in trunk, now? AV

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[lance@...2167...: Re: [Hosting] ns2.osuosl.org Emergency Maintenance]
by Bryce Harrington 12 Feb '15

12 Feb '15

If these hosting emails are of interest to you, please subscribe to the mailing list at: http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/hosting ----- Forwarded message from Lance Albertson <lance@...2167...> ----- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 21:52:10 -0800 From: Lance Albertson <lance@...2167...> Cc: hosting@...2167... Subject: Re: [Hosting] ns2.osuosl.org Emergency Maintenance Just an update: We got this back online on newer hardware and it appears to be stable. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the system. We'll likely do the same with ns1 fairly soon since its on similar aging hardware. Thanks! On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Jordan Evans <jordane@...2167...> wrote: > ns2.osuosl.org (140.211.166.131) has suffered some hardware failure, > and it will be replaced shortly. This is the same machine as > ns2.auth.osuosl.org(140.211.166.141) > > We're currently busy with a few other things, but will be migrating > ns2 at 5:00 PST, or 0100 UTC. The new machine will be up with the same > ip addresses as the old > > ns1 and ns3 are both still up and operating as normal, but if you have > any machines > that hit ns2 first, you'll see some slowdown on dns until ns2 comes back > online. > > Another email will be sent to this list when the new ns2.osuosl.org is > up and running. -- Lance Albertson Director Oregon State University | Open Source Lab _______________________________________________ Hosting mailing list Hosting@...2167... http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/hosting ----- End forwarded message -----

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Connect figures like ms visio or dia.
by avk 12 Feb '15

12 Feb '15

Hello! I've just downloaded Inkscape and found It very nice. There is all I need which is not lacked in Ms visio. But only one thing dissapointed. Paths connection between figures are static, so while moving figure, connecting path is'nt been updated. I would like to make extension which aggressively snaps path to object. But I can't find propper manual. I suppose to make by analogy with existing exts. So where I can find info about path snapping classes and methods? Or maybe it better to do by parsing xml and dynamically update paths? Also how to acces inner xml? Is it possible to use cpp .dll code in inkscape?

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