Hello,
As I am sitting on the train returning from LGM 2010, I thought I would give you all a summary of the conference. There where many nice talks and it was great to finally meet many Inkscapers who I only knew by name. There were also very nice endorsements of Inkscape. The Fedora design team made a big point of expressing how much they LOVE Inkscape. Inkscape appeared all over the place at the conference, from designing icons to designing fonts. I am sure I have forgotten somethings as my memory needs a serious upgrade... so other Inkscape attendees, don't hesitate to correct me.
Here is a summary of talks by Inkscapers about Inkscape or other topics.
Friday:
Jasper van de Gronde: Diffusion curves (gradients defined by values specified along the defining paths).
Felipe Sanches (JucaBlues): GNU LibreDWG to read DWG files from AutoCAD.
Saturday
Jakub Steiner: Icon Workflows with Inkscape.
Alexandre Prokoudine: Digital photography workflow on Linux with darktable.
Andy Fitzsimons: Inkscape for everybody.
Elisa de Castro Guerra: Workshop for Inkscape beginners (in French and English).
Sunday
John Phillips: Aiki framework. As a side note, he used Inkscape for his presentation, putting all his slides on one page and then zooming in and out on individual ones.
Other Inkscapers present included Ivan Louette, Gemy Cedric, and Johan Engelen.
My only critique is that it would have been nice to have had a demonstration of some of the new features of the upcoming Inkscape release.
The list of other interesting talks is long. You can look at the website for a list of talks and the videos of all the talks should be online soon if not already. Some of the crowd favorites were the talk by the NodeBox2 group and the talk by Tom Lechner who showed a very impressive demonstration of putting images on a sphere and then unwrapping it.
During the talks and at informal gatherings, there was quite a bit of discussion about what users need from Inkscape. Here is a list of requests:
1. Hyphenation support in the text tool. 2. Faster loading/displaying fonts in the menu. 3. Command line interface without opening the GUI. 4. Trapping for commercial work. 5. Fixes for bugs #167809 (Linked offset performance issues) and #270983 (Terrible performance node editing even in outline mode). In general there is a desire for more SPEED! 6. Shortcuts in tooltips (especially for tools). 7. Don't muck up imported SVG, e.g. turning ellipses into paths. This is important when planning to animate things.
Many people design with Inkscape and then use Scribus for preparing files for commercial printing.
Members of the SVG working group were present which lead to a number of useful discussions. They will hold a working group meeting tomorrow. Here are a number of topics that were covered:
1. Support for multipage documents. The proposal for multipage documents has been dropped from SVG 1.2 due to many negative comments. The proposal was too complicated for simple uses and not sophisticated enough for advance uses. If we push, a simplified version could be added to SVG 2.0.
2. Support for patterns along paths. Coming out of the discussion on Power Strokes lead by Johan Engelen, Doug Schepers of the SVG standards group expressed a great interest in pursuing this as it would allow some LPE like effects to be animated. Doug, in general, would like to see greater ability to edit/animate SVG.
3. Support for diffusion curves.
4. SVG Fonts: Firefox and IE at the moment don't have any interest in supporting, preferring to focus on WOFF implementation. It was pointed out by several people that SVG Fonts are much more useful for artistic purposes as one can imagine animating the glyphs or adding special effects to them.
5. Increasing the bit depth for some of the filters to avoid artifacts (e.g. the displacement filter or lighting filters). There is a need to balance requirements for small devices (small memory) with the need for large ones (smooth/accurate displays) but perhaps a compromise could be made (I've suggested adding an optional second byte to the bump maps).
6. Standardizing layers (Inkscape currently uses tagged groups for layers).
Other SVG news is that Adobe is again interested in supporting the standard and that IE9 will support all of SVG except SVG fonts and filters. Finally, the SVG working group really stressed the need for community participation, especially from Inkscape. I have volunteered to help represent Inkscape in the group. So let me know on this list or off of any thing you want raised with the group. You can also join the SVG mailing list (www-svg@...157...). Jasper is already a member and I just joined.
One of the more interesting talks was about trying to develop Open Source tools for fashion design. It seems that there is a need to develop adjustable patterns for those who don't have the petite bodies the industry designs towards. The industry just scales up the patterns for bigger women, leading to poor fit. After hearing the talk, someone has already created an Inkscape extension to help with the work. See:
http://www.sew-brilliant.org/wiki/index.php?title=Projects
Finally, several venues for LGM 2011 have been proposed. The leading candidate seems to be Ho Chi Min City, Viet Nam. Montreal is also a possibility. Felipe was encouraged to think about Brazil for 2012.
Tav
PS. Thanks to Jasper for reading a draft of this summary and making many corrections.