- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

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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