Dear all,

I have discovered that inkscape 0.47pre4 to 0.48.4 are incompatible with boost versions greater than 1.45.0.

The most noticeable symptom is that text is not rendered properly. This is because it is heavily clipped. The effect is similar to that described in the (dismissed) bug 875469.

To demonstrate this bug, compile inkscape with boost 1.46.0 or above and run it. Pick the text tool, click anywhere on the canvas and start to enter some text. Only the bottom couple of rows of pixels of each character are displayed.

If you convert this text to a path it displays properly.

Another way to demonstrate the bug is to take some text and put it on a curved path. As you modify the nodes of the path it is possible to see the text rendered inside a staircase-like set of clip rectangles.

This problem affects inkview as well as inkscape.

I am compiling with gcc 4.4.7 and configuring it like so:

CC="gcc" CXX="c++" CFLAGS="-O3 -fstack-protector-all -march=i486" \ CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fstack-protector-all -march=i486" \ LDFLAGS="-fstack-protector-all" ./configure

I have tried different versions of all the dependencies of inkscape, including C compiler, libraries and kernel, and the bug is independent of everything but the version of boost. At this stage I have not tried compiling with a lower optimisation level, so it is possible this bug only comes out of the woodwork with -O3. Equally, it is possible this bug only appears on 32-bit platforms.

Yours,

Is.