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Automatic mention of shortcuts in tooltips
by Jasper van de Gronde 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

I've just added code to automatically add the shortcut key to tooltips of verbs. If you find any problems with tooltips (it lists something strange, a tooltip doesn't show anymore, the shortcut is listed double, whatever) you know where to look first. The main change is that the shortcut is now made part of the tooltip as reported by the verb and that we now use a gtk function to derive the shortcut label instead of our own function (the result seems to be the same). I've tried to check for situations where this would lead to double or unwanted listing of the shortcut, but so far it seems fine.

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Integrating Diffusion Curves
by Jasper van de Gronde 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

I'm working on Diffusion Curves (for master thesis) and will try to get them in Inkscape in the foreseeable future (this calender year hopefully). As I'm slowly getting more grip on the technical side of things (which is what my thesis will be about) I'd love some input (and help) on UI issues. For those who haven't heard about them yet, they're basically a new and very(!) flexible way of specifying color transitions. You just assign colors to curves and let the program fill in the intermediate space using diffusion. This tends to create visually pleasing, smooth, transitions while allowing for a very complex geometry with minimal effort. More information (especially see the references at the bottom for examples): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Diffusion_Curves My current thinking is that it would probably be best to treat diffusion curves as a paint server, allowing people to assign color to nodes (that either coincide with existing nodes or are positioned somewhere on the path). The colors would be linearly interpolated along the path. A scheme like this would fit in well with the idea of expanding the functionality of the gradient tool and having a general color picker. Unfortunately this would sort of limit the ability to blur boundaries to the point that it might not make any sense. But then again, maybe it's a mistake to try and integrate two separate concepts (blur and color transitions), even in the original paper these are treated quite separately (the blur values are diffused separately and then a spatially varying blur is applied). Any thoughts or suggestions would be helpful. Also, would it make sense to apply diffusion curves to strokes? If so, how would that work?

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SVG Open 2010 Report
by Tavmjong Bah 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

SVG Open 2010 was held in Paris, and since I live nearby I offered to give a talk about Inkscape. I would like to thank the organizers for waving the conference fee and even providing a ticket for the conference dinner aboard a boat on the Seine. There were quite a few interesting talks and panels and I learned quite a bit. My overall impression can be summed up easily: SVG has finally arrived. This conclusion was easy to make after talking to the many representatives of the major web browsers, including those from Microsoft who were there in numbers. In case anybody missed the news, IE9 will include comprehensive support for SVG, only missing the filters, SMIL, and SVG fonts modules. Filters will almost certainly appear in IE10; SMIL and fonts might too depending on demand. In case anybody wants to know, it took about 15 developers 15 months to implement SVG support in IE. A good fraction of the discussion was on how SVG fits into HTML5. HTML5 is not a finished standard and there are still pieces to work out. Microsoft is implementing what it can now and has an important message for users: Download and test the IE9 previews and betas. Complain about any behavior you find wrong or undesirable. You have about three months before IE9 gets locked down. It will be hard to change behavior after that as IE9 is expected to be around for 10 years and future versions of IE will maintain backwards compatibility. I'm afraid my notes are quite poor so I will just make a list of some random observations: * HTML5 will be everywhere soon. Firefox 4 and IE9 already contains HTML5 parsers, Webkit (Chrome and Safari) and Opera will have them soon (you can use SVG in XHTML right now). All the browsers support some HTML5 features. * There is a huge desire to have CSS3 apply the same way to HTML as to SVG. This includes things like sharing filters. * SVG is very popular in mapping circles (and not just in OpenStreetMap). * Vector effects are very interesting for maps, especially the ability to share partial paths between objects and for creating complex paths for roads, et cetera. * Most TV set-top boxes use SVG for their displays. * Look for cool SVG demos at SVG-Wow.org. Tav -- Tavmjong Bah Inkscape, Guide to Vector Drawing Program http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/

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A better LaTeX equation renderer
by Dylan Thurston 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hello, I was annoyed that the LaTeX equation insert mechanism didn't provide a way to control the size of the equation. This makes it needlessly difficult to match the size of the text in the body of a LaTeX document. So I modified that extension. Attached is a revised version that: (a) Allows scaling by a specified factor; (b) Allows typesetting non-equations; (c) Allows customizing the preamble to the LaTeX document; (d) Properly scales the input using the 'viewBox' attribute, rather than relying on the structure of the document; and (e) Uses pdf2svg ( http://www.cityinthesky.co.uk/pdf2svg.html ) rather than pstoedit. On point (e), pdf2svg seemed more reliable to me, though YMMV. I can easily switch it back to pstoedit, although it's harder to control just where the resulting formula ends up. For point (c), I was annoyed by the very limited UI options: it seems hard to either embed newlines in the preamble or give a sufficiently large input area. Is there any hope of fixing this? I could, I guess, have different input boxes for different lines, but that's really horrendously clunky. Any comments are welcome. Of course I'd like to see a version of this in the next release, if possible. Best, Dylan Thurston Assistant Professor, Barnard College

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ui improvements
by Alexandre Prokoudine 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hi, At the risk of starting a holy war... :) A blueprint by Oliver Jan Krylow: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/ui-improv http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/UI_improvements We have a bunch a blueprint in the queue. Would be nice to go through them and at least comment in a sensible way so that there was feedback. Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

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SVG media type registration
by Tavmjong Bah 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hi, The media type registration (MIME) for SVG: image/svg+xml is finally being registered. As part of this registration, information on how SVG content is tagged by clipboards is required. For example, the Windows Clipboard Name is "SVG Image". Can someone tell me how Inkscape tags SVG content on the clipboard for Windows, MacOS, and Linux? As far as I can tell, Inkscape copies the entire SVG content is copied as text. Thanks, Tav See: "Additional information" in http://dev.w3.org/SVG/profiles/1.1F2/publish/mimereg.html

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Increasing performance through OpenCL
by Abhishek Sharma 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hi all, Previously I was discussing on lib2geom the concept of applying OpenCL based refactoring on the code(lib2geom initially). Then on suggestions of some developers I have moved from lib2geom to inskcape on an overall to increase the performance of inskcape in any possible manner. Some earlier suggestions included, Parallelizing the rendering of cairo based implementation. I would love to move forward in the area, but I will be needing some push(in terms of startup) to get started. Like the first and foremost question that lies ahead of me as a wall is, "What is the area of the code that is possible to be parallelized and how much can it affect the performance??" Second question is, What approach should be taken to parallelize the stuff?? Most serial algorithms when implemented in parallel totally change their appearance. So will that be OK or not?? There are other hurdles but it would be better to first proceed forwards with snacks and then go the main feast. I hope the developers will mark their attention to this and kindly come to start this discussion. A hearty Thank You to all the inkscape developers. -- Abhishek Sharma

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comma bug
by Axel Huizinga 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

Hi, looks like a bug to me but I'd like to get some comments before reporting. When I add a drop shadow in my de locale environment on XP even after setting inkscape up to use en the stdDeviation and colorMatrix alpha values are set with comma instead of dot. This causes firefox not to display the object any more. Cordially, Axel

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Text Dialog Not Grabbing Font, Style, Size
by MilesTogoe 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

This has been a recurring problem for us since about vers .45: select a block of text, click on the font dialog toolbar (or choose in menu) - when the dialog appears, font is blank, size is blank, style defaults to normal. edit the text and click apply and get an unexpected font in return. clicking on it into rotation mode sometimes helps pop up with font info or rapid clicking to get it into edit mode sometimes helps - but this is too cumbersome are we missing something or does this need work ?

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interview
by Alexandre Prokoudine 05 Sep '10

05 Sep '10

Hi, Just in case not everyone follows news, there is an interview with Inkscape developers and contributors published a week ago: http://libregraphicsworld.org/articles.php?article_id=24 Many thanks to everyone who agreed to participate. If you find any reviews of the new version (like e.g. http://www.timteatro.net/2010/08/19/review-of-inkscape-0-48/, but could be smaller) in any language, please let me know: I'd like to quote/link to some of them from a news item at inkscape.org. Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

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