[Inkscape-devel] Release Announcement edits by Brian Forte

-- tech writer: http://apac.redhat.com/ columnist: http://www.redhatmagazine.com/category/documentation/ mobile: +61 (0)439 721 274 email: mailto:bforte@...43... ___________________________________________________________________ The Inkscape Community Releases Inkscape 0.46 New York, NY yyyy/mm/dd — The Inkscape community today announced the release of Inkscape 0.46, the newest stable version of their multi-platform, open-source vector graphics editor. This newest Inkscape release includes a plethora of new tools and improvements, beginning with native PDF support. Developed with the assistance of the 2007 Google Summer of Code, and utilising the open source Cairo and Poppler libraries, Inkscape 0.46 provides an easy, open source tool for editing and creating PDF documents. The 2007 Google Summer of Code also produced the new 3D Box tool, the Tweak tool and Live Path Effects. As its name suggests, the 3D Box tool makes it possible to create and edit the perspective of three-dimensional boxes. The Tweak Tool [something other than market speak here: what exactly is the Tweak Tool and what does it do?]. Live Path Effects can be used to create "brushes" and organic effects while keeping the original paths editable. [This needs to be more concrete as well.] As well, gradient editing is now done visually and on-canvas. Gradient stops are depicted as nodes, and multiple nodes can be selected and moved simultaneously. Colour management has also been improved, with initial support for colour spaces other than sRGB, including Adobe RGB and calibrated CMYK. This makes it possible to use calibrated colour values, including CMYK values, that are preserved across applications. The new Paint Bucket Tool allows bounded areas to be filled with colour at the click of a mouse button. This new tool creates a closed-path based on the visible canvas and is useful for quickly colouring line drawings. The Gaussian Blue filter, introduced in Inkscape 0.45, was the first SVG Filter. Inkscape 0.46 expands on this with Offset, Blend, Diffuse Lighting, Specular Lighting and Turbulence primitives. There is also a new, dedicated user interface for creating and altering filters based on these new primitives. Finally, Inkscape 0.46 introduces workflow and user interface improvements. Dialogue boxes can now be docked and minimised to a side-panel, reducing visual clutter and making the relationship between documents and interaction choices clearer, especially when working on multiple documents in separate Inkscape instances. With 0.46 out, the Inkscape community is already working on future releases, including the upcoming 0.47. Full compatibility with SVG Mobile/Tiny is slated for version 0.50 and version 1.0 will include complete W3C SVG 1.1 compliance. Inkscape users have contributed many features and ideas to the project and the community invites anyone to contribute to the project. The more help Inkscape gets, the sooner we reach these goals.