- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

[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 I want to update this page as it is totally out of date and broken: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_Eclipse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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