- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Inkscape Developer Survey 2025
by Martin Owens 24 Oct '25

24 Oct '25

Dear Developers, As a follow up from last year's developer survey, could I get all developers to fill out this year's survey and your experiences with Inkscape as a programmer this year. The goal is to gage how easily it is to contribute, people's thoughts and the ongoing improvements in onboarding and making this work enjoyable: https://forms.gle/HPggfawPou2aHS6i6 Thanks everyone. Best Regards, Martin \owens

1 1

Developer Meeting Notes: Oct 17th 2025
by Martin Owens 17 Oct '25

17 Oct '25

Hey Developers! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Mikekov, Martin, Jabier, Willy, Tav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We kick off with Willy who has two open open merge requests for the developer team to consider. One is the rotation snapping which is ready to be re-reviewed. It uses a regulr Spin Button instead of a Math Spin Button so it's got some regressions still. The second is a 1.4.x patch for the toolbars so the buttons dispear one by one instead of chunking entire groups at a time. We talked about the 1.4.3 issues and the open issues and when we can schedule the release. We suggest a December release with a project wide request to focus on fixing some of the remaining issues for 1.4.3 so make it a really stable release before 1.5 comes out. We talked about the 1.5 release and Martin's idea for releasing 1.5, 1.5.1 and then calling the 1.5.2 Inkscape's 2.0. This is in an attempt to promote stability an give users the time to field trial some of the new functionality before we make a big splash with the 2.0. We talked about freeze policy. Mikekov went through some of the remaining open issues in Gtk4. Martin asked if our Gtk upstream needs help or not or if things are progressing organically at the right speed for our release on macOS, windows etc. We talked about the dificulty of getting program admins who can organise projects that pay people to work on different aspects of our release issues. And our recruitment of volunteers that tends to depend heavily on programmers instead of people who might be more stilled in admin releated organising. Mikekov helped with the Dash2 issues, and doing merge requests. His currently thinking about the preferences dialog. He's been medidating on how to clarify the preferences to reduce the amount of duplicate code and depend on the glade file directly. There's a couple of routes to having preferences paths defined in glade files and widgets constructed with simple APIs, there's a refactoring pathway for how we would get there too. But the ultimate aim would be to remove most of the code until only loading of the glade file remains. We talked about how Gtk custom widgets work so we don't need to load each widget by Id. Tav has been working on color in CSS issues with export. He wants to have a meeting with Martin to talk about Color further. He's looking into the problem of integer artefacts and generating example files in 16bit to test how browsers are currently dealing with the older limitations and if they have been overcome. Some of these artefacts are actically used by filter designers as inputs to produce iteresting results. Report on Bug Accelerator Program, Tav has a few hours left. Martin talked about his engine improvements and walked through the entire plan for filters, color, memory surface management and the stepping stones that are being worked on to get everything in place for CMYK support. Tav and Martin talked about various details in support and what it means for SVG. Tav says that the attendance at the late meeting is very poor. Should we redefine a new time for that meeting so it's easier for other contributors. Martin asked Tav to make a survay for all the new contributors about their availability. Thanks to everyone who was able to come to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

Inkscape Developer Meeting, Oct 1st 2025
by Martin Owens 01 Oct '25

01 Oct '25

Hey Developers, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Youstena, René, Tav Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Martin starts off with a quick introduction, and a short update on the website updates and the downtime people may have experienced. René looking into windows CI, it felt so bad that he felt he had to work on it. The goal is to make it faster and usable as being so slow sucks the joy out of everythig. The 7z archive builder is now running on a persistant runner which René said he would never run one again, but it was required to make it much much faster. The mechanism for depedancies was switched from 7z packaged, to a Microsoft based format which has advantages which can mounted and doesn't need to be 'extracted' as well as being more windows native. There's a bit of work more to do which is how easily it is to build depedencies, moving the config back into the main CI builder itself. Martin Martin talked abut Gtk and the need to keep the version we are building with and targeting for 1.5 will have to be a future version because of the known bugs that will have to be fixed in time for release. Martin's work on filter rendering and unit testing and is currently working on Light sources after completing the ConvolveMatrix work last week. A lot of tricky decisions will have to be made about interpolating in other color spaces but the new code will give us the flexibility to choose. Some backwards compatability will be needed for Integer calculations too. Tav has been working on CSS Color parsing and some of the found bugs, checking over our support introduced by Martin in 1.5. The Lch color conversion was wrong and has now been fixed, case insenstivity, and a range issue on Lch. Tav has questions about the color picker, we're currntly using Luv in the color picker. Martin and Tav had talk about color, rendering, document color space. Talking about how to achieve backwards compatibility and various other issues between Inkscape and SVG for color support. Youstena is a student from Egypt who is interesting in contributing to open source and introduced themselves. We asked around if anyone still needed to claim from the SFC, Tav was waiting on something but he'd put it in later too. We may want to make sure per-deim and travel between events where there is more than one event happening should be in the next vote. Thanks everyone for coming!

1 0

Inkscape Developer Meeting, Sept 15th 2025
by Martin Owens 15 Sep '25

15 Sep '25

Hey everyone, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Tav, Martin Mikekov has been working on some beautifcation projects, various things like the roller, gradient editor etc. We collectively talked about the failures at the SFC regarding reimbursements and people who are still waiting on reimbursement for items months and months ago. Tav would like to get into fixing the LPE dialog and converting polylines and lines to paths. Martin is working on filter mechanics involving a new cairo surface image access class with unit testing. We reviewed some merge requests. Short meeting this week, Thanks everyone.

1 0

Forbidden attributes in per-tool and last-used styles
by Henry Wong 15 Sep '25

15 Sep '25

Hello Inkscape devs, I'm looking through the code that sets/reads desktop and tool styles (sp_desktop_set_style, sp_desktop_get_style, etc.), and have some questions on some of the attribute filtering that happens. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of styles (except the 3dbox oddity): * The "last used style": /desktop/style * A per-tool style: /tool/<tool_path>/style For these styles, certain CSS properties are forbidden and are filtered out (e.g,. "shape-inside", "filter", "stop-opacity"). Filtering happens both when reading from the style and writing to the style. For the filters when reading (in sp_desktop_apply_style_tool <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/master/src/desktop-style.cpp?re…>), the list of forbidden attributes are different for the global style and per-tool style. (More attributes are forbidden for the global style than the per-tool style). There is a different list of filters when writing the styles (sp_css_attr_unset_blacklist <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/master/src/style.cpp?ref_type=h…>, sp_css_attr_unset_uris <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/master/src/style.cpp?ref_type=h…>). The rules differ between the global and per-tool style, AND the rules differ from the ones applied when reading the styles. (More attributes are forbidden for the per-tool style than the global style?) Is there a reason the rules ended up this complicated? (Especially the part where the attributes that are writable to the style differ from the set of attributes allowed to be read back.) I'm wondering whether they can be simplified to something like: * Some set of attributes are forbidden from all default styles. Apply the same filter for both reading and writing. Or * Some set of attributes are forbidden for all default styles, and a superset is forbidden for the global last-used style. But the same filters are used for both reading and writing.

2 1

Inkscape Meeting, Sept 7th 2025
by Martin Owens 07 Sep '25

07 Sep '25

Dear Devs, Another week and another great developer meeting: Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Tav, Martin, PBS, ftOmara, MikeKov, Rafal, Ishaan Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ PBS asks Martin abou the page manager, we talked about manager objects, selected pages, and the intention of the manager and it's relationship to sp-page objects. The manager is designed to encapsulate the state of the selected page so most calls shouldn't need to know the selected page directly. PBS has been working on the GSoC project to recolor artwork project. There is a live preview mode which needs to be sorted out. the conflict between the SPObject, xml tree and the display tree. A big discussion erupts between many developers have input into how the functionality could be done. We talked about the way the xml tree and sp object tree works together. This created a debate about about abstractions and various other internal core elements for Inkscape. The general consenus is that we'd like the preview functionality split out into it's own merge request. Martin will ask Adam about the design implication of having the preview change in multiple places or just in one place at a time. Mikekov has been doing some UI beautifucation projects. And we talked about the missing event problems in macOS that might be something we need to get that reported upstream. Martin has continued to work on the rendering engine work. A long term project to improve the capabilities of the rendering engine color support. Ishaan reports that the all four people are going to India FOSS event. There's concerns about how long the process has taken with the SFC as friction continues between us voting to pay for events or materials and people getting reimbursed or getting travel booked in time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

Developer Meeting Notes; Aug 22nd 2025
by Martin Owens 22 Aug '25

22 Aug '25

Hey Everyone! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, Philip, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Martin is eliminating direct access to the cairo surface raw. Philip and Martin talked at length about the Surface API, how to render CMYK, how to deal with speed problems and some different parts of the code and functionality. Some ways in which the cleanup will hopefully open us up to replacing cairo, but maybe not, it depends. Philip has been porting UI extensions to GTK4, including Extensions manager and clip art importer, there's been some issues with the CI which needs to be updating. And working on the start screen lifecycle manager, it's currently held up with testing. He wants to ask Adam for testing but Martin is happy with the testing so far. Mikekov has been looking into the object properties dialog for text, which is a lot more involed than expected. Marc has been looking at the launchpad builds and why they seem to fail. There are test for the cms profile test. The team spend the rest of the meeting investigating the test failures so we can keep things moving. Philip wants to know if the Linux CI job, he wants to to merge it with the AppImage job to save space and CI time. Marc says that the Linux job is a normal build and the AppImage used to have some special sauce, Philip wants to check if this is still true. One builds in a debug and the other builds in release mode. We have decided to remove the linux build. The website releases app will be updated when it is done. Thanks for reading. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

Inkscape Developer's Meeting; August 6th 2025
by Martin Owens 06 Aug '25

06 Aug '25

Dear Developers, This week's developer meeting notes are below. Big thanks to everyone who was able to come. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Carlotte (cfcurtis), Martin, Tav, Ishaan, Jonathan, Mikekov Next Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Martin talked about his work on the rendering engine getting cairo surrfaces with multiple color space rendering. A lot converting, memory management, pre-multiplication, understanding lcms2 input and output limitations an doing a lot of test trials to work out how to effectively test the changes in the engine's handling of Cairo surfaces. Jonthan has been mentoring on the google summer of code project. He's been tracking a number of 1.5 issues which are upstream issue but don't have the required issue in the upstream project. There are some examples needed to be able to replicate the issues more easily for an upstream developer. Mikekov has been looking for various fixes to keep busy. Working on object attributes dialog related features. Tav asks about the speed problems with the Object dialog and being able to backport the fix to 1.4 if it's fixed in 1.5. We talked about node editing and making sure that we're not doing inefficient things. Charlotte haven't done a ton of work, but looking at PDF related issues for import and export. Tested the odf support in capypdf. Martin talked about a gradient export bug in capypdf. Jonathan asked if she's interested in PDF files which don't import cleanly. Ishaan has been working on selections and discovered that some things are not working on master, holding ctrl for example. And some inconsistancies with Alt. We talked about various selector issues. Martin and Mikekov recommend making event systems robust against order of events where possible. Tav has been back bug fixing for 1.4, Jonathan asked about releasing a 1.4.3 after the last blocker is fixed and we are in agreement. We have at leas 35 bugs fixed a bunch of things that are to be backported for 1.4.3 on our todo this. Martin asked Ishaan about the Indian event. They are ordering of travel arrangements and he will be meeting with pono to get the accommodations paid for tomorrow. We did a small tutorial for updating submodules and keeping things correct, sharing commands. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting. See you all next time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

CLI: Extensions need GUI
by Alexander Roalter 30 Jul '25

30 Jul '25

When I run Inkscape in CLI mode, and want to run an extension that needs currently selected elements, the currently selected elements are only passed if the CLI is run in GUI mode (with --batch-process parameter). Otherwise, no IDs of selected elements will be passed to the extension python script. I tracked it down to src/extension/implementation/script.cpp, where the _change_extension method is called from two different methods (both are overloaded Script::effect methods), one is for the case where a desktop is available, the other was added for "pure document version for calling an extension from the command line", and has no desktop. But the current selection still can be extracted from the SPdocument*, so I made this patch that duplicates the passing of the selected elements as parameters to the extension from the other effect() method. -- cheers, Alex

2 2

Developer Meeting Notes: July 29th 2025
by Martin Owens 29 Jul '25

29 Jul '25

Hey Devs, Today's meeting was very light. Just me and Mikekov. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We talked about his recently landed object properties branch into main and what to work on next. Also talked about the road map team and some of the considerations for what that would look like. Mike raised a concern that our reimbursements for Nuremberg were delayed getting processed. One thing I think might help for next time is a small spreadsheet we can share which has all the voted on numbers, and names of people. I, someone else, or Roseanna could pop the numbers in from the reimbursement claim to see if they check out more quickly. We talked about color (I always talk about color), I'm mulling over hosting a video conference between various free software devs working on color in their projects. Might be fun, might be useful. That's it for this week! Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0