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Postscript input extension and skencil
by Denis Leroy 11 Jan '07

11 Jan '07

Hi, The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project. As the Fedora inkscape maintainer, this dependency is somewhat problematic. From a distribution/packaging perspective, it is difficult to justify a hard dependency between inkscape and skencil as skencil is itself another desktop application and also fairly large. It is also somewhat non-intuitive and confusing to the end-user (and as a side-note, skencil might be dropped eventually because it's still based on gtk1). Now, I would still like to have PostScript import work out of the box as that's a feature that was requested by several users. So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ? -denis

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interruptible display
by Alexandre Prokoudine 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

Hi, While testing current Inkscape from trunk I immediately ran into a feature that can easily be perceived as a bug: dragging a gradient slider on 200/400% I see rectangles inside an object come and go all the time. On #inkscape I was told that this is the result of interruptible display introduced to improve responsiveness. My guess is that users might not understand that this is a feature. I see two ways to minimize public confusion: 1. Provide a better explanation in Release Notes. 2. If possible, make this behavior toggleable, ideally -- introduce a Xara-like "Rendering tradeoff" slider ;-) What do you think? Alexandre

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filter bug #1632748
by MenTaLguY 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

FYI, there's a filter bug we need to fix: http://sourceforge.net/support/tracker.php?aid=1632748 All SPFilter children are getting cast to SPGaussianBlur regardless of their actual type. Incorrect rendering + potential crash. -mental

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Inkscape 0.45 About Screen Contest - Community voting results
by Joshua A. Andler 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

Hey there developers... I'm really sorry for how overly-complex I'm probably making this. Hopefully my reasoning will make sense. Following are the top voted items in order of most to least votes. As I figured would happen for the voting (which is why I asked for a "runner-up" vote), we had a tie for a number one pick. The interesting thing is the difference between including the secondary votes... #3 becomes #1, and one of the two that tied for first (#1 in the single) becomes #4. For note, I will be asking the artists for the runner-up entries if we can get them to create screenshots for us with their work. So either way the work won't be "lost" and will be on shown. People did some really great stuff that would be a nice addition to the screenshot page. :) The results based on only going by people's 1st vote (you'll see the tie): 1 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/44792424/ - 10 votes 1 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45360907/ - 10 votes 3 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45363866/ - 9 votes But when you take the secondary votes into consideration, the results are a bit different: 1 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45363866/ - 20 votes 2 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45360907/ - 16 votes 3 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45537505/ - 15 votes 4 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/44792424/ - 13 votes 5 - http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45681921/ - 12 votes I included 1-5 there because what was #1 (tied) in the single was #4 when including the secondary... and hrum's pen was worthy to be included too. ;) So... before voting begins... single or double vote roster? The real difference is it's a top 3 or top 5 we're choosing from (I say 5 choices is better). -Josh

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Release Wardens for Inkscape 0.45
by Bryce Harrington 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

Every release we identify two 'Release Wardens' for the release. We invest these two individuals with nigh-absolute dictatorial authority over the codebase until the release is cut. This way, we as a project can benefit from the control of a central authority temporarily in the critical phases of a release, while being able to remain freeform and decentralized for the vast bulk of our development phases. The pair is always composed of one person from the prior release, and one new person. Aaron Spike was one of the wardens for 0.44, and so would be welcome as the senior warden for 0.45. I would like to volunteer as the junior warden for this release; although I've always been involved in releases, I have not served as a warden before. Bryce

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2 million downloads
by bulia byak 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

In other news, some days ago Inkscape has passed the 2 million total downloads mark: http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=93438&ugn=inkscape… (Could someone publish a front page news item on this?) -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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bounding boxes
by MenTaLguY 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

I've been giving bounding boxes more thought, and it seems like there are actually three different kinds of bounding boxes required in Inkscape: - GEOMETRIC: the bounding box of the path data, without stroking -- this is what the SVG standard means by "bounding box"; it is not reduced by clipping - INTERACTION: the bounding box with stroke, plus (maybe) visual things like the filter effects region; it _may_ be reduced by clipping - VISUAL: the bounding box with stroke, _including miter joins_, and things like the filter effects region, it has to be be reduced by clipping The idea is that GEOMETRIC will be used to satisfy the SVG specification, while INTERACTION defines the region that a user can "grab on to", and VISUAL defines the region within which e.g. all affected pixels fall. -mental

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tutorials cleanup: help needed
by bulia byak 10 Jan '07

10 Jan '07

We have tutorial-calligraphy.pt_BR.svg in share/tutorials, but no corresponding xml file in the doc-docbook module in SVN. Please _everyone_ who has ever translated the tutorials, upload the docbook xml sources to that module, or send them to someone with SVN commit rights asking him to upload it for you. Without that, we can't for example fix the tutorial-calligraphy.pt_BR.svg file which is badly broken. Also, we have much more tutorial translations in SVG than we have HTML tutorials here: http://inkscape.org/doc/index.php. Please remember that if you submit a new translation, you need to generate not only SVG but also HTML (use the make-html script) to be put up on the web site and linked from that page. (Again, if you don't have commit rights for the web site, ask someone to do it for you.) Volunteers are welcome and encouraged to help us sync this all up for the release. Thanks! -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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Announce: Scribus 1.3.3.7 Release
by Plinnell 09 Jan '07

09 Jan '07

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.3.3.7 This release is purely a further bug fix release to the recently released 1.3.3.6. This release adds more translation updates, some bugs were found and fixed, many improvements to the SVG importer. A new splash screen and other artwork were contributed by Kevin Young. One of two major additions to this release is the porting of Scribus to OS/2 by Paul Smedley. This port is lightly tested and there are some known issues noted in the readme for OS/2, along with notes on installation. No major code changes were required and in testing it has been fairly stable. The other is the availability of a new OpenSuse rpm download repository for all Suse versions 9.3+, including SLED 10. To download add: http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/mrdocs/ to your yast/apt/smart source list for the corresponding Suse version. We hope have this for Mandriva and Fedora 5+ shortly. As we announced previously, there will be no more development or bug fixes to 1.2.x series. We now recommend all distributions package only Scribus 1.3.3.x The Scribus Team would also like to thank - Anduin.net/Øverby Consulting and Cardia AS for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites. The Scribus Team would also like to thank the many end users, translators, testers and contributors who helped us with this release. About Scribus Scribus is a cross-platform open source page layout application with a focus on high quality commercial grade PDF and postscript export. Originally developed on Linux, Scribus now runs natively on MacOSX, OS/2, many forms of Unix and Windows 2000/XP. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, spot colors, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Scribus was the first page layout application on the planet to directly support PDF/X-3 output, a rigorous ISO standard. Scribus did so by almost a year. The Scribus Team is made up of a diverse group of developers with significant experience in pre-press and newspaper publishing. Commercial support for Scribus is available for companies and institutions for implementation, training and migration.

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WIN XP: Preferences dialog crashes
by bulia byak 09 Jan '07

09 Jan '07

On XP, the two latest builds: http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/Inkscape0701071623.7z http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/Inkscape0701061515.7z crash when trying to open Preferences dialog. Previous builds are OK. Unfortunately the backtrace I could get on Windows is less than helpful, but on one try I got a message "failed to allocate 1024 bytes"; on other tries it just died silently. Anyone else seeing this? -- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org

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