Hi dear Inkscape Developer Community,

I want to submit a proposal for the "UI-Free Inkscape" project idea of this year's Google Summer of Code.

Right now, I am doing a sabbatical (since November 2019) and am enrolled at the Vienna University of Technology. Before that, I was working as a Software Developer for several years mostly on graphics related software (Ogre3D, Unity3D, Augmented Reality Apps, Medical Image Processing, etc.). I really like open-source software, was able to do some small contributions to projects like Emscripten, Ogre3D, and several JavaScript projects. I think the GSOC program is an awesome opportunity to work fulltime on Open Source Software, like yours.

Due to the current pandemic situation, I hand to do re-organize and partly reschedule my Coding Tour I was already starting in the US for the next couple of weeks. This is the reason for my "last-minute" application. Fortunately, I am able to continue the tour online, here from Austria. Here is a link describing my tour, in case you are curious.

Anyway, even though I am behind schedule for my GSOC proposal I hope that I will be able to submit a successful application to you and show you that I am able to succeed in making a UI-Free Inkscape version or at least being able to move this ongoing effort a huge step forward.

The "two patches" rule is a great idea, but as I am a bit late in the application process I wanted to ask if it is required to submit them before the upcoming proposal deadline tomorrow? I definitely will be able to send them within the next 1-2 weeks, it would be great if that would not be a blocker for my proposal (at least not right now).

The reason why I chose the "UI-Free Inkscape" project idea is because I am a huge fan of automating things, and I really like the idea of being able to use Inkscape for several tasks on a server, or in the backend of an application. I think this might increase the usage of Inkscape even more. I saw that this idea is already an ongoing task. It is probably hard to say how much effort there is left, and how likely it is to complete the task within the GSOC time. On the other hand, if the task can not be completed within the time of GSOC, it should be possible to move it a substantial step forward. My idea would be to iterate in small steps and frequently submit those parts for which I was able to remove the UI dependency for review.

There is already a lot of valuable information regarding the GSOC process on the Inkscape wiki, still, I would like to ask if you have any suggestions, tips and/or tricks for my proposal submission?

Thanks in advance for your support,

Harald