Date: Saturday, May 13th 2023 Present: René, Martin, PBS, Jonathan (presiding) Apologies: Tav

We started talking about the live previewing functionality for the font tool and how the display and canvas items stacks might be modified to support displaying previews without changing the entire document. Extensions already have a live preview and use a whole new document which is fed in from the extension run. A document copy can be expensive, but might be the cheapest way to do it. The alternative is to create a kind of shadow item which would be tightly controlled by C++ destructors and modifier signals. But that was just an idea.

Mikekov's font improvements branch is available for review. It contains a lot of nice improvements, but it looks a bit large.

Jonathan is working with Nicco on the AI exporter. The rewrite is nearly complete and Nicco has been able to work 10-15 hours a week on it. The code structure is better and it's a lot faster, maybe an order of magnitude. Making good progress, we'll have to see as we get to the end of the project and then Jonathan will make a presentation for everyone.

Gtk contracts; Tav was the only internal application and so he's been selected by us. It's with the SFC now, although no response from pono these past few weeks. We now have three applications for the Gtk4 external contractor. Details of who and what are withheld not to bias anyone's decision.

PLC elections are coming up soon. There are 2 confirmed candidates and one person is still deciding. There's very few days left to put your name forwards! Please also review membership requests as soon as possible.

Martin needs his merge requests approved. Paint order one is important since it contains tests to be used in another merge request. Jonathan was able to approve it before the end of the meeting.

Martin changed the dev graphics for the windows builds. Mostly these won't ever be used, but it's better to have branch specific versions instead of the old 1.0 graphics in the branch.

Jonathan highlighted a number of regressions and crashes in the PDF importer. Encouraged to tag them and push their priority up as crashes and regressions are top priority.

PBS worked on the shape builder (well done!) and has now been working on the lib2geom problems. He's trying to read the entire mailing list archive for the whole lib2geom project as well as livarot and learn how it works, why it works, and getting in the head space of the people who were involved in building these libraries.

He says working on some bugs is tricky but they need some more work to complete. But he has made a fork/branch which turns inkscape into a lib2geom toy which shows all the computational shapes and can show the output at each step. There's calculations for the geometric graph and there's parts of it that become out of sync he speculates. Visualiser branch is available here: https://gitlab.com/pbs3141/inkscape/-/commits/flattening-visualiser

He's also thinking about caching in Inkscape. Seeing if caching is actually slowing us down and often turning off cache can actually speed things up. The problem is how often we don't use the cache, but spend time making the cache. He wants to look into ways of fixing it properly.

Requesting feedback for these items.

René discussed spellchecking with Moini and polygon. There's a lot of confusion about how the spellchecker is supposed to work on macOS. In Linux it's easy you just ask the os for one of the available spell checkers. macOS is baked in. But on windows there's a problem because we a building it with Aspell and there are no pre-built dictionaries which people can install themselves, they have to be compiled. We could ship Hunspell instead, and we can depend on what LibreOffice is doing and it downloads the available system.

There's an issue in inbox which Maren created as a summary. René is encouraged to make a non-inbox issue and we can ask some people to help fix it since it's windows based.

This is a sort meeting this week. The developer team activity was: Go outside and have a nice walk (when the sun comes up for those on the other side of the planet)

See you all next week. Sunday May 21st, same time, same place.

Best Regards, Martin Owens