Hi, guys, I am Cheng Zhang, a student from graduate university of Chinese Academy of Sciences. I'd like to apply inkscape's project for GSOC 2012. I have been do some works following the instruction of inkscape's wiki page for GSOC 2012. And I have fixed two easy-fix bugs and attached my patches to the comment(Bug #561503 , Bug #941597 ). I am very glad one of them is already been applied.

I am interesting in doing the C++ification job as my proposal for GSOC 2012. Actually I have already understand how important this work is deeply during these days' work on bug fixing. At first, I downloaded some very old codes of inkscape from sourceforge which may stop maintain for one year or more. Though I managed to compile and get it run on my system, I find it too hard to understand. That's why I have spent almost two days to locate lines that lead Bug #941597. In that version of source code, those lines lead the bug are in a file named "nr-arena-glyph.cpp" which is a c/c++ mixed style code file. Though it is easy to know those lines are in this file, I totally lost my direction while I want to understand how those "render"/"update" stuffs work. What's worse, if I want to know how they work, I need to know how the "arena item's" parent to get rendered or updated. But these codes are written mostly in C style and use a tricky way to enable code could work just like C++ codes do. I have to say the tricky is very hard to understand even I have already understand it now. Later on, I learned to download the newest code from bzr and found "nr-arena-glyph.cpp" already disappeared and turned into "drawing-text.cpp" which is a standard C++ code file that is very easy to understand. That is also the reason why I could fix the second bug in half a day. This experience makes me understand that to make code more easy to understand is one of those important reasons to do C++ification work.

I have went through the whole code files of the project and made a rough list about those files are still in c style which could do c++ification work. This is such a long list. As a gsoc proposal, I see it couldn't be to big especially for a guy who get in touch with inkscape for less than a week. So I may choose to do the SP context related C++ification work as my proposal.

I know there may be something I don't see here in do C++ification work. So I am very glad to here any advice from you guys!

Thanks!

zcgucas