On Sun, 2011-12-04 at 23:16 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
Hey all,
Anything in particular people are looking to add or refactor which they haven't discussed yet? Development has greatly slowed and I am curious if it's related to lack of interest, time, or people not wanting to hold up a possible release by adding new features. Note, a release is unfeasible at this time anyway, so we're really still game for new code currently. Related to this, Tavmjong's gradient mesh branch is pretty nice (and still has bugs) atm... if anyone is interested in helping out with it, please let him know. It would be awesome if we could see that work stabilized and available in the next release. Just checking in...
I definitely could use some help! There are really two separate items that need to be tackled:
The first is the actual implementation of the gradient meshes. This includes figuring out the best way to integrate meshes with the existing linear/radial gradient implementation which uses two separate gradient elements, one for the "vector" of colors and one for the geometric positioning. It also includes work on the user interface and on exporting the mesh to PDF, etc.
The second is how Inkscape should handle items that are not yet in a published specification. This is not just a mesh gradient issue. There are a bunch of interesting things coming up in SVG 2 that would be nice for Inkscape to implement. One key one is solid colors (or named colors, borrowed from the SVG 1.2 Tiny spec). This will eliminate the need to to use one-stop gradients for custom palettes (and hopefully simplify our code). We will probably need to keep new things temporarily in the Inkscape name space and then choose an SVG "level" when saving the file: SVG1.1, SVG2_experimental, SVG2. We don't want to be burned again by the flowed text issue from the dead SVG 1.2 Full spec.
Tav