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Inkscape Developer Meeting Notes, April 11th 2026
by Martin Owens 11 Apr '26

11 Apr '26

Hey everyone, A smaller meeting from last week, but some heavily topics. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, karliss, Mikekov, Tav, Elendil Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Tav has been fixing bugs with the svg font, a crash. May have found a problem in the regex where strings are defreferenced. We talk about cairo bugs and the need to pay close attention to the versions. We will need fixes from code that isn't even released upstream yet, but we should still specify we need that future version. With a critical problem hanging around for developers, testers and future 1.5 users. Elendil talks about the poppler drama with versions constantly needing IFDEFs and Martin talks about the problems with the upstream poppler design making font interfaces private. We have an indepth discussion about the problem with depedencies and upstreams and how receptive they are to accommodating our needs. Karliss has been doing some pixel alignment and some other issues. Martin has been working on unpicking the Gradient paint servers and trying to allow the rendering engine to work without needing to include th whole of the SPObject tree and SPStyle. These includes prevent proper unit testing. Mikekov has been working on his object properties dialog. We had a longer discussion about the AI policy. Mikekov will probably stop contributing to the project if and when we stop allowing AI contributions. He believes that the project would benifit from having merge request reviewed by AI and that the capabilities of these tools are quite a bit more capable than the project believes. Martin has his own issues with AI and a frank discussion is had about some of the many dimentions involved in the discussion. We get into merge requests and the history of trying to have enough people to review code being submittd to the project. If a proposal is before the project about using a new tool, then we'd be looking for something ethical, pen source and capable; no matter what it's tooling was. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting!

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Developer Meeting Notes; April 3rd 2026
by Martin Owens 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

Hey everyone, Big thanks to everyone who was able to join our dev meeting which happened at the same time as the PLC meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: René, Karliss, Charlotte, mgmax, Philip, Tav, Martin, Vaibhav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ René; update on hiring process for bugfix accelerator, applications are coming in and official deadline is soon. Also updating dependencies for Win/macOS for upcoming release. Pointless reporting of security issues by AI agents who don't understand the codebase and can't answer questions about the problem. MC provides access to Windows ARM, René will test that will look into offloading Windows CI with budget of 150 Euros to pay for cloud provider. Tav asks if Inkscape will run on new "cheap" mac, Rene says yes it should, the architecture is the same. Less powerful chip and 8 GB RAM, but Apple claims to use memory more efficiently. Vaibhav has no problem on 8 GB low-end macbook. Charlotte, has been doing some windows testing. Failed successfully. Philip tried to do a fix for this specific static threading windows bug but it's quite a difficult problem. A couple of people have tried to fix it. He thanks Charlotte for the testing and asks follow up questions. Has a limited machine to do development on. Karliss, pixel alignment related issues. Links us to an issue related to security issues which allows svgs with unsafe problems in them. Philip has looked into this issue too; it's partly an upstream issue in Gio and similar pathways. Martin asks if it's possible to deal with the issues on a case by case basis. Tav; getting back into some old merge requests. Some specific libnrtype changes which now have a merge conflict thanks to some recent unit testing work. mgmax has an old merge request which they were asked to present at the meeting. It's a windows script which sets up everything for you. (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7557) it also allows a virtual machine for testing. Martin has already looked into it, and wants to get more visibility on the changes. René wants to know if this is based on the CI toolchain which is based on making a fixed image with better stability. This new script uses the developer instructions which is a rolling release. Max and Rene will get into contact to get the MR merged and to get the scripts and documentation changed to use a fixed MSYS image instead of rolling release. Vaibhav has continued their performance optimisations, in existing issues. An LPE specific issue using simplify (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7833) the reason is because of update signals that happen on every selection change. Martin has been working on text on path and text in shape to catch up to the big improvements in Krita text handling. Tav and Martin talk about the SVG spec support, and Krita using SVG for their vector layers giving the spec two implemetations which is important. The new text functionality is basically ready, but will need more testing. We talk about the steam issues and move on to talking about our relationship with the SFC. See you all next time! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, March 26th 2026
by Martin Owens 26 Mar '26

26 Mar '26

Dear Devels, This weeks meeting was quite interesting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Lola Egherman, Mikekov, ltlnx, Vaibhav Ted introduced Lola Egherman to Inkscape at SCaLE; they are a worker for a non-profit which helps people get into Free Software projects and learn to code. Has joined us to learn about how to contribute to Inkscape to hopefully guide people into contributing. We talked about all the conferences in the world like SCaLE, FOSDEM, the difference between cultures in various places and the interesting people who work on FOSS. Martin points to the python extensions as a good introduction to contributing and we talk about the various ways in which you can get into inkscape and how difficult various types of contributions are. Mikekov has been working on the same sorts of things. A paint widget refactoring which uses the SPObject directly was a mistake and this caused Mikekov to have to rethink the solution to the problem. The issues with the style system as a whole was discussed. Martin talks about the problems with getting merge requests approved and merged and we talked about the problems with a lack of senior developers involved in the project as we've had a big attrition this year. Martin has been working on text inside shape and text on path and gives a little demonstration. There's some refactoring and some ancient bugs which have cropped up need fixing but it's fairly nice to use. Vaibhav has been working on speed problems, flame graphs and things are improving. Running individual test units multiple times to get data for speed testing. Ltlnx has been working on some design work and is impressed by the speed of 1.5 compared to 1.4. Has been working on fixing 1.4 issues for 1.4.4. Next meeting is April 3rd, thanks everyone for coming! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, 18th March 2026
by Martin Owens 18 Mar '26

18 Mar '26

Hey everyone, Attending: Tav, Martin, Vaibhav, Mikekov, ltlnx Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Vaibhav has been working on speed, producing flame graphs. Martin and Vaibhav talked about making speed tests for unit testing, with cmake and CI integrations which could be optionally run. Tav is working on Inkscape again and has got their merge requests up to date. Tav and Vaibhav talked about search improvements, especially with speed problems. It's creating a new widget by loading a glade file for every action in the search. Causing significant delays. Tav says there newer widgets that would be useful, Martin says theres ways to use widget tree as a template. For 1.4 it could just be brought into C++ instead of using glade at all. We talk about using ListViews and other such constructs. Martin has been working on a small feature improvement to the Measurement Tool to take a break from all the engine work. It allows angles and curve length to be measured in a more useful way and has involved a bunch of users and designers testing everything. Mikekov has worked on the Document Properties dialog. Now the object properties is more featureful it's useful to rename it to maybe just "Properties". Martin suggests that speed issues would be increasing important as the dialog's main design requires and suggest it should be always open. And thus is should never cause speed issues. Vaibhav did some speed testing already which we reviewed in the meeting. It's building all the patterns, even when patterns aren't being used. Tav and Mikekov talk about tspan updating issues with position and what it all means. Martin tested the issue with x,y coords being ignored in tspans and we narrowed it down to sodipodi:line attributes which cause our svg rendering to diverge from the way the svg would be rendered anywhere else. Ltlnx has been starting the work for 1.4.4 and organising the point release. There's some things to backport. He's negotiating a date with the vector, documentation and translations. This should get these fixes out by end of May. Thanks to everyone who could come to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting March 10th 2026
by Martin Owens 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Hey everyone. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Vaibhav, Tav, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Tav hasn't done much programming but did conclude there wasn't enough people interested in an LGM adjacent event to warrent a seperate event. Instead he'll make a vote to allow contributors to go to LGM itself if they want to. Vaibhav has some questions about how to attend. Vaibhav has been fixing some speed issues trying to learn about flame graphs, profiling and finding out why certain things in Inkscape are so slow. Mikekov and Vaibhav talk about the tooling. Mikekov has been finishing up work on the Object Properties dialog for Text support to allow users to access text properties from the omni data access design¹. He's also looking at information for the document properties. the goal for the document properties is to allow it to be docked on the side without taking up too much space. Martin has been working on removing SPStyle from drawing-rendering, the libNRType is already split out in a new MR so that's waiting to be merged. Last night they added a feature for the measurement tool to measure line segmentss in paths. Thanks everyone, sort meeting this week! Martin, ¹ https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7784

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We're hiring!
by René de Hesselle 06 Mar '26

06 Mar '26

The Inkscape project is looking for two developers 🧑‍💻🧑‍💻 and a bug administrator 🐛 to work with our team on preparing Inkscape version 1.5! Learn all about who we are looking for: https://inkscape.org/news/2026/03/02/inkscape-is-hiring-2026-1/ Applications must be submitted by 📆 April 10th, 2026. #WorkInFLOSS #FLOSS #job #freesoftware

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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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