G'day!

Thanks to a great effort from many, it seems most of the Win32 bugs are ironed out, but we need to test some last minute fixes, so we've put up a Win32 only 0.46pre4 on Sourceforge here - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438. This will disappear once the proper release comes, next week we hope.

Please download it and test if you have access to Windows. We are particularly interested in crashes or other show stopper bugs that need to be fixed before release. Please report any issues not mentioned below either to this email list, or on the bug tracker - https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/

Big ticket Fixes: (please test!)

• Printing - New GTK common print dialogue and new Cairo back end had crashes, white blocks over images, and small and/or low resolution prints. Fixed.
  
• Python extensions/effects/help menu items - Spawning processes caused a crash. Python environment settings and temp files problematic. Fixed.
  
• Running Inkscape in a directory with a space in the name stopped extensions with an error. Fixed.
  

Some known bugs:

A few printing bugs that probably won't get fixed before initial 0.46 release:

• Blurs are sometimes misaligned. Workaround - print to bitmap (Print -> Rendering -> Bitmap).
• Masks sometimes don't work/object vanishes. Workaround is the same.

Others that may or may not get fixed:

• Command window still pops up briefly when running extensions. Hmm...
  

Building For Yourself:
If you're a Windows user, but haven't had a go at building, why not give it a try? The wiki notes on compiling make things easier - http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Win32Port. We'd love some more apprentice windows developers or testers, so have a go and ask questions on the dev list, or IRC (irc.freenode.net - #inkscape). Look here for other platforms - http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingInkscape.

• The 0.46  branch source has all the latest high priority win32 patches in packaging\win32\patches (just to be safe)
  
• The trunk is fully up to date with all high priority 0.46 win32 patches committed
  
• For the next day or two, you will need to use patched Cairo dll's to stop a crash and low print resolution fallback print with blurs and gradients. Adrian has posted 2 separate dll's (libcairo-2.dll and libpixman-1.dll used in this build)  here - http://annarchy.freedesktop.org/~ajohnson/cairo-2008-03-26/. These 2 separate dll's are equivalent to the single libcairo-2.dll from the regular devlibs. That means you need to either edit build.xml and put the patched libs in the c:\devlibs folder, or drop the two files in the Inkscape folder after building against March 13 libs.
• Ishmal is going to do a new devlib bundle in the next day or two that will include a patched single libcairo-2.dll. Check here (http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32libs/?C=M;O=D) for a devlibs-2.1.2-{date} package with a date after March 13, 2008.
  

Cheers,

Rygle.