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Roadmap for Inkscape 0.93 on Windows - GTK3, devlibs, MSYS2 and support for Windows XP
by Eduard Braun 13 Mar '17

13 Mar '17

Hi all, one of the biggest changes in current trunk is the switch to gtk3. As some of you already know this step will be a hard one on Windows as we have to rely on pre-built development libraries to be able to compile Inkscape: * devlibs currently has no support for gtk3 at all. (There's an experimental branch on which jazzynico was working, but as far as I know he was never able to complete it due to build issues) * devlibs64 includes gtk3 3.19.6 but IMHO it's pretty broken and would require *a lot* of work to get anywhere near being usable As a result we're currently not able to build Inkscape for 32-bit Windows at all (bug 1609954 [1]) and builds with devlibs64 are nowhere close to be usable. *Therefore I want to propose to switch to MSYS2 for compiling Inkscape trunk on Windows!* MSYS2 is a rewrite of MSYS including all the necessary build tools to compile native applications for Windows using mingw-w64 (see official homepage [2] for details). Furthermore it includes the package manager "pacman" (users of Arch Linux will know it) which allows to conveniently install and upgrade packages. The switch would have a *lot* of advantages: * Easier setup of the build system as gcc and all necessary build tools and libraries are included in MSYS2 (currently we require to download gcc + devlibs + cmake separately and procedure varies widely between 32-bit and 64-bit builds) * A solid set of constantly updated libraries (see [3]). * Packages are usually built with a small set of patches to fix compatibility errors on Windows that would otherwise require hours to figure out when building libraries from scratch. * An active developer community. Questions are answered swiftly, bugs in the provided libraries can usually be figured out jointly. * Creating new packages (if it should ever be required) or recompiling existing packages (i.e. to test a fix) is extremely easy. (I recently added libvisio [4] which was the only dependency of Inkscape not yet provided) * 32-bit and 64-bit builds are equivalent. The exact same library versions are used and MSYS2 includes build environments for both that co-exist by default I'm already successfully building current trunk with MSYS2 without any issues at all (there are no code changes needed, only environment variables have to be adjusted and the CMake install target has to be adjusted to pick up the correct libraries). If you're interested you can find the latest builds at [5] (the most obvious change is the Adwaita theme that is now used by gtk3 by default but doesn't look very native. However that's something we can customize going forward as desired). There's one big downside: My builds currently don't work on Windows XP. However I'm afraid this has nothing to do with MSYS2. Many libraries have started to drop support for Windows XP, most importantly gtk3 does not support it after 3.16 [6]. This means we have two possibilites: * Drop support for Windows XP in Inkscape 0.93 * Try our best to somehow (currently I have no idea how!) continue support for Windows XP. This would most likely require us to keep building, maintaining and distributing our own development libraries (however I guess even here MSYS2 would be a huge help). While achieving this might sound favourable keep in mind that it would require us to limit ourselves to old library versions on purpose with all the inevitable downsides like unfixed bugs and growing number of incompatibilities in newer OSs. I thought about this for some time now and although it was not an easy decision I'd vote for the first option. I know people still use Windows XP in productive environments (I have an old Windows XP server running myself - shame on me) but to be realistic it's time to move on. Support for XP ended a long time ago, it's insecure and there's only very few cases where people are actually bound to XP for other reasons than convenience. Weighing all the pros and cons I'd say the pros clearly prevail! *So: Let me know what you think!* Does a switch to MSYS2 as build system sound reasonable to you? Is Windows XP support something we have to keep even if it means a huge amount of additional effort and requires us to limit ourselves on newer platforms on purpose? Looking forward to you thoughts, Eduard [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1609954 [2] http://www.msys2.org/ [3] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages [4] https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/pull/2194 [5] http://download.tuxfamily.org/inkscape/win64/ [6] https://github.com/GNOME/gtk/blob/24483481c1eaa6e3bad9f158e2d4d3ef21505d9b/…

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Nondestructive booleans
by Jabier Arraiza 12 Mar '17

12 Mar '17

Thanks Michael. ping me if you need help with LPE. Cheers, Jabier. On Mon, 2017-02-27 at 15:01 +0100, Michael Soegtrop wrote: > Dear Miguel, Jabier, > > I started to finalize the embroidery stitching LPE (experimenting > with > TSP algorithms) - probably it is smarter to first update the boolean > LPE > branch and add the small changes Jabier requested. I will do so now, > should take less than 2 weeks. > > Best regards, > > Michael > > > On 27.02.2017 09:58, Jabier Arraiza wrote: > > Hi Miguel. > > There is plans to be included in 0.93 by a Boolops LPE from Michael > > Soegtrop. > > > > https://code.launchpad.net/~msoegtrop/inkscape/lpe-bool > > > > Hi, Jabier.

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Last change to Edit: Sponsor Levels
by Martin Owens 12 Mar '17

12 Mar '17

Dear all, This is the last chance before I contact our sponsor requests and point them to this page: https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/sponsors/ We can't do a lot about the css (some things) but the text is what's important and it sounds like that's done. But please check over just in case. Thanks for all your help to review. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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RSVP: Inkscape Hackfest, Portland Oregon Apr 28 - May 3, 2017
by Bryce Harrington 12 Mar '17

12 Mar '17

You're invited! We will be hosting a hackfest in Portland Oregon this spring for 5 nights. Tell me ASAP if you might be interested in joining us. We're trying something a bit different for this hackfest. We're renting a house that's been set up for business meetings, with a front unit and a rear unit. We've reserved one unit, and if enough people will be coming we'll grab the other as well. The event will focus on stabilization of the 0.93 branch and infrastructure development. Depending on attendance, we'll also do planning of fundraising activities and brainstorming of outreach efforts. I will send further information soon (the Board is currently voting on a few details), but for now please drop me an email if you might be able to participate. Bryce

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Spam on answers?
by Windell H. Oskay 12 Mar '17

12 Mar '17

Can anything be done about the torrent of spam on the Inkscape answers page? (https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape) Windell H. Oskay, Ph.D. Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories 175 San Lazaro Ave, STE 150 Sunnyvale CA 94086 http://www.evilmadscientist.com/

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GSoC 2017 project idea 5 - Better data structure for selections
by Minglangjun Li 12 Mar '17

12 Mar '17

Hi all, I'm a student and I'm going to apply for GSoC this year. I'm interested in the project idea [1] about selections. But after a quick look at the code of class ObjectSet I found that ObjectSet has already been implemented using Boost::multi_index_container. So is the information on the wiki up-to-date? [1] http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code#P5._Better_da… Regards, Minglangjun

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Specify interpreter's version for Python extensions
by Minglangjun Li 09 Mar '17

09 Mar '17

Hi all, Today many distros make Python 3 as a default. While some existing Inkscape python extensions are not Python 3 compatible (or vice versa). So maybe I think its better to encourage extension developers to write code that support both Python 2 and 3 at somewhere on the website or wiki. For those existing scripts, we can either use 2to3 to make them compatible or extend our support of Python interpreter to both Python2 and Python3 (currently only "python" is supported in INX files). I prefer the former way, though. What do you think? Regards, Minglangjun

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Trying to improve the performance of dragging objects in complex documents
by Minglangjun Li 08 Mar '17

08 Mar '17

Hi all, I notice that dragging objects in Inkscape becomes slow when the document contains a lot of objects. And there's already a bug report (#1198317 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1198317>) complains about it. It remains unresolved, though. I love Inkscape so I am willing to contribute. The big problem is Inkscape's codebase is too large for me. Currently I only find the following lines which may potentially be optimized (haven't tested). === modified file 'src/seltrans.cpp' --- src/seltrans.cpp 2016-10-24 22:58:43 +0000 +++ src/seltrans.cpp 2017-03-07 15:07:24 +0000 @@ -280,9 +280,13 @@ // (The special points are the handles, center, rotation axis, font baseline, ends of spiral, etc.) // First, determine the bounding box - _bbox = selection->bounds(_snap_bbox_type); _visual_bbox = selection->visualBounds(); // Used for correctly scaling the strokewidth _geometric_bbox = selection->geometricBounds(); + if (_snap_bbox_type == SPItem::VISUAL_BBOX) { + _bbox = _visual_bbox; + } else { + _bbox = _geometric_bbox; + } _point = p; if (_geometric_bbox) { In the previous mentioned bug report they said that the performance dropping has something to do with the bounding box computation. I don't get it. For simple shapes like circles, how can we compute their bbox. more efficiently? Another question is why should we compute the bbox. of the background objects when we drag an object? I think it's the real source of the performance issue. Am I right? Any help is appreciated. Thanks. Regards, Minglangjun

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Question for extension development
by Lukáš Haberzettl 08 Mar '17

08 Mar '17

Hello, I have a question about Inkscape extensions UI options. I need textarea input (not only one line for text input, but something like textarea html element), but as far as I studied the documentation I haven’t find out how to do this. Is there any option how to add this type of input to interface of extension? Original of my question can be seen here : https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/470626 <https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/+question/470626> Thank you for your reply, Lukas Haberzettl

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Inkscape Advocates organizational meeting ~ Fri Mar 10th
by Bryce Harrington 07 Mar '17

07 Mar '17

Would you like to contribute to Inkscape by helping spread the word about it? Whether you're new to Inkscape or an old hand, we'll be getting together on IRC to chat about ideas for promoting Inkscape to other communities and to the world at large, and we would love to have you there! This advocacy meet-up will be next week on Friday, March 10 in the #inkscape-devel IRC channel and will kick off around noon Pacific time. Our aim is to establish a new regular team in the Inkscape community chartered to undertake outreach efforts, write and distribute marketing materials, and/or announce our releases. Training classes, merchandise, tradeshows, social media actions, press releases, and more are all possibilities on the table. Exactly what we do will be decided by the group itself, so if you have opinions come share them. Date: Friday, March 10 Time: Noon Pacific Place: irc://irc.freenode.org/#inkscape-devel If you've not used IRC before, you'll need an IRC program for your platform (tons are available), or you can use Inkscape's web IRC portal here: https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/ Thanks, and hope to hear your ideas come Friday! Bryce

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