- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Intro to Inkscape Hacking
by Bryce Harrington 05 Jun '04

05 Jun '04

For those of you just joining us, or who have been with us but are just now getting the itch to work on Inkscape, I thought I'd give some tips for how to get started working in the codebase based on our own experiences. One of the first things most people wonder is "what should I work on". As you may have already noticed, we generally don't "assign" projects. We figure there's plenty more work to do than people to do it, so you may as well work on something that you're either interested in or that adds something of benefit to you; that's extra motivation to get your own itches scratched. If you're really stumped though, we keep a detailed roadmap in wiki that you're welcome to browse through to look for ideas of things to work on. Tasks that do not have names beside them are open for anyone to take; if you want to take ownership of a task, just put your name beside it. Feel free to add or reword tasks as needed, although try not to load up the current milestone with tasks that aren't critical for the release. Feel free to work on stuff that is several milestones down the road; there's rarely any problem with getting stuff done sooner than planned. ;-) We have a process for gaining CVS commit access. The reason is that while it is important that we keep access to the codebase open, we don't want to be crazy and leave it wide open to any random passer-by. The process is that we require that the person make two contributions (patches, documentation, web collateral, etc.) and then make a request to get account access. In general you won't need CVS commit access in order to start doing development, because you can work from an anonymous checkout and create patches. If you've not done this before, you'll need to learn this skill first (basically see docs for `cvs diff`). When you first start hacking on Inkscape code, I wouldn't recommend taking an objective of implementing a specific feature, because you will need some time to familiarize yourself with the codebase, and because you won't really know what features are going to be straightforward to implement and which will be highly challenging. Of course, if you have the time and love adventures, this might be fun way to go. There are four approaches that I've seen people effectively use in getting into the codebase: 1. Write code documentation. Some people who don't mind adding comments to code or writing docs find it useful to just go through code they're interested in working on and writing up what it does. The codebase is in dire need of better docs, so this approach pays dividends well into the future. 2. Fix bugs. Tracing down the cause of reported bugs is an effective way to gain understanding of the codebase in small chunks. Many common bugs can be traced down and fixed in a matter of hours, and often will identify some bit of code in need of refactoring or extension. Note that some of our older bugs are in the system because they're hard to fix, so you'll want to work on the more recent ones. 3. Chip in on a group effort. Occasionally we identify a major refactoring effort (such as when we converted from C to C++), that we encourage lots of people to help on, in the philosophy that many hands makes short work. This work tends to be pretty rote so is not hard for new folks to get involved with; just takes time. We generally have one of these kinds of efforts per release. It usually isn't glamorous work, but in aggregate moves the codebase forward in a major way. 4. Subsystem/module work. Some people want to get their hands in the details quick, so take the approach of developing new code separate from the codebase, to be integrated in later. This generally tends to take a larger time commitment than the other approaches, but can an effective approach in some circumstances. We have a CVS module called 'experimental' that you're welcome to house your work until it's ready for prime time. Beyond that, you're going to find the documentation for the Inkscape code is pretty scarce. We've worked on bits and pieces but unfortunately the vast majority of the code is undocumented. On the plus side, often you can implement the stuff you care about after learning only a limited portion of the codebase. I think you'd find Inkscape an enjoyable Open Source project to work on. There's a huge range of interesting and useful skills that can be learned from it, plus the developers are great guys to participate with. The project itself runs smoothly and puts a premium on keeping things friendly and low-stress, so heated arguments are rare. The users have been great to work with and very appreciative of even small new features and fixes. Plus, since Inkscape is so visual in nature, it's very cool to see how your little changes make noticeable improvements to the app overall. Bryce

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Re: [Clipart] file/magic/mime types for SVG and suggested viewers?
by Bryce Harrington 05 Jun '04

05 Jun '04

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote: > > > On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > > > Is there a MIME type for SVG data? > > > > Yes, it's either image/x-svg or image/svg+xml > > > > > Is there any file(1) magic(5) for SVG images? > > > > Dunno, but if not would you like to help send the file/magic maintainers > > a patch to add it? > > I can submit it. But I don't know if it is possible to create a magic(5) > for SVG since they can start so many different ways. Hmm, good point, though isn't XML by definition supposed to contain indicators of what *type* of XML it is? Perhaps there's a mailing list we could ask on for direction? > Does anyone know how to configure magic so the offset is not forced? (For > example "<!DOCTYPE svg" could be at 141 position or could be at some other > position. Or the "<svg" marker may be at some random place. I'm also CCing to the Inkscape mailing list in case someone there can answer it. > > Thanks, I can add these to the faq, unless you'd like to? I don't know > > the answer for the third, though, so if you run across the answer let me > > know. > > I added the questions. But I don't have the answers. (That is why I posted > to list.) Okay, well for the first two questions I can provide some answers: Viewers - the de facto standard viewer for SVG is Batik. The Adobe SVG viewer plugin is also used, although I think it may only work under Windows. There is also a SVG renderer in library form, called librsvg. There are a number of tools and applications that provide SVG viewing support via that. I understand there is also a svg2png tool, although I've not used it myself. Editing - I put in my plug for Inkscape as a good SVG editor, but there are a lot of other ones out there. In the proprietary world, Adobe Illustrator is very good, although SVG is not its native format as it is with Inkscape. In the open source world, Inkscape, Sodipodi, Sketch (aka Skencil), and Karbon14 are worth looking at. Some additional tools (some SVG, some not) are listed here: http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OtherProjects Also, for programmatic generation of SVG there's a wide variety of libraries available nowdays. For instance, Perl has a number of different SVG modules available via http://www.cpan.org/ Bryce

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problem with using patterns for images
by MenTaLguY 05 Jun '04

05 Jun '04

I finally got around to using the new images-as-patterns feature. Unsurprisingly, Inkscape is subject to the same problem as most renderers -- due to roundoff error, opposite edges of the tile pattern will "peek around". That is almost impossible to avoid when dealing with an exactly-fitted tiled pattern. See the attached image for a visual demonstration of this. I have imported the same image twice; once as a pattern (left), and once as a straight image (right). Note that there is no stroke on the former. Unless we can find a workaround for this that will work in all SVG renderers (i.e. we can't just add a hack to our renderer to account for this case), we CANNOT import images as patterns (certainly not by default). One possible workaround would be to add an amount of empty "padding" around the image in the pattern. That does have its own disadvantages, however: * the tiling behavior is sometimes desirable (once users have the ability to manipulate pattern transforms) * the same roundoff errors could produce gaps between the image in the patterned fill and the stroke (if any) Any other ideas? -mental

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[Announce] Scribus Team Releases Scribus 1.1.7 - "Alyssa"
by Peter Linnell 05 Jun '04

05 Jun '04

Hi all, The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.1.7. The 1.1.7 release is the most stable, feature complete version to date. This release is mostly a bug fix release intended to allow more extensive testing of the new features recently added for the upcoming release of a stable 1.2 Scribus. Although, marked a developer's release, the Scribus team urges all users and distros to use this latest release. The Scribus Team is also pleased to be chosen by Trolltech as one of their "Cool Applications". We on the Scribus Team are honored to be recognized as such and appreciate the recognition. Also, Franz has provided bzip2 tarballs which shrink the download size by about 30%. Expect to see Fedora/RH and Suse RPMs soon, as well as debs provided by our Debian maintainer extraordinare: Alex Moskalenko At the usual place: www.scribus.net Enjoy!

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Statistics
by Bryce Harrington 05 Jun '04

05 Jun '04

http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=93438 Date Page Views D/L 3-june 13,131 603 2-june 29,206 1,185 1-june 3,808 163 31-may 3,032 167 30-may 2,034 87 29-may 1,896 89 28-may 2,764 167 The D/L numbers don't count the 800 or so from Bob's nightly snapshots, nor people who got it through apt-get, emerge, etc. Bryce

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Article followup
by bulia byak 04 Jun '04

04 Jun '04

> > We need more enthusiastic coders! :) > >I'm a coder, and can be enthusiastic from time to time. Great! :) If you want to help, join the jabber chat and discuss what you could do and where to start. _________________________________________________________________ http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

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Re: pangoification (never dies)
by MenTaLguY 04 Jun '04

04 Jun '04

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 14:07, fred wrote: > since you mentioned it, i did a bit of testing with > IBM's ICU. it's quite good, in fact... it does kerning > and deals with opentype seamlessly. might be worth > considering We were actually originally going to use ICU, until I talked us out of it to try pango first (since it wouldn't add any library dependencies). Looks like JonCruz was right, though; I think ICU probably is the way to go. Something we need to look at though is how this will work with Win32 fonts; fontconfig is not an option there. -mental

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RE: [Inkscape-devel] Article followup
by bulia byak 04 Jun '04

04 Jun '04

>than happy to lend a hand. For example, I'd bet an article giving >advice about usability would be well received. An article about >Inkscape internals as they relate to SVG rendering would as well. I >also think a usage-oriented "secrets of Inkscape" article would be >appropriate. So if anyone is interested in authoring an article on any >of those subjects, I would be happy to help in any capacity. I think I might be interested. But not right now, not before 0.39 at least. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Premium helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=ht…

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simple idea to hack around hinting for pango and W32
by Nathan Hurst 04 Jun '04

04 Jun '04

Simply ask pango or whatever to layout text that is say 256* larger font size. Scale the glyphlist back to the correct size. njh

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Revisiting ECMA. Seriously, folks. :)
by Bob Jamison 04 Jun '04

04 Jun '04

I will look at this. However, spec compliance is one of the things we need: http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/escript.html Bob Charles Goodwin wrote: >For Vexi (www.vexi.org) we have a very small, efficient JS library that >is far more lightweight than Mozilla Rhino. It's in Java, though, >although GCJ compiles native binaries these days. > >If you were looking for something with less cruft then it could be an >option, but there are caveats. > >Here's what Brian Alliet, the guy who wrote it, had to say: > >(19:23:17) charlieg: balliet: how suitable would the JS engine be for >anything other than ibex/vexi? >(19:23:41) charlieg: specifically, the Inkscape guys want to integrate >an ECMAscript engine to enhance their SVG compliance >(19:24:02) balliet: very suitable. i've always kept ibex specific stuff >out of org.ibex.js >(19:24:48) balliet: does SVG compliance specificly require ECMA-262? >(19:25:07) balliet: that could be a problem since org.ibex.js isn't (and >doesn't intend to be) fully emca-262 compliant >(19:25:53) balliet: however, if they're just looking for something to >get 90% of the way there then org.ibex.js would be fine >(19:26:14) balliet: if they really need full ecma-262 though they'll >have to go with rhino >(19:26:35) charlieg: what are the major compliance obstacles? >(19:27:32) balliet: classes is the biggest one >(19:27:57) charlieg: simply because we don't need them, right? >(19:28:09) balliet: yeah, and they complicate things significantly >(19:28:22) balliet: it would take major changes to org.ibex.js to suport >them >(19:28:36) balliet: then there are lots of other little things that >would require major changes too. like in ecma-262 null isn't the same as >undefined >(19:29:04) charlieg: does rhino do that according to ecma-262, though? >(19:29:17) balliet: yup >(19:29:32) balliet: and its ridiculously complicated as a result of >it :) > >

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