June 2005 - Inkscape Users - Inkscape Mailman

Snapping behavior
by Justace Clutter 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

So, I have been making some of the flowcharts that I was talking about and I ran into some issues with the snapping. I have found that the default behavior is to snap to the control points, and +/- .5*the line width. I found this to be very aggravating since there was a "floating" region where the object would fluctuate around. It would be nice if the default behavior was to snap only to the control points unless there was a modifier key pressed where they the object would hover. This would be much like the holding control to keep the aspect correct. So, did I miss something or what are your comments on this problem. Justace

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Flowcharting....
by Justace Clutter 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

So... I did some searching to see if there have been other users out there who have done some flowcharting in Inkscape. I have seen a few pages that mention the openclipart project has clipart symbols, but none that talk about inkscape doing this. I know that this is not the premise of inkscape but I thought that I would see if there is anybody who have had experiance in trying to do this. Is there anybody who has and if so can you give me any pointers as to how you accomplished this in a timely fashion. Notably I would like to know how to get that text in the symbols done correctly. I tried all sorts of stuff. I did do the text flow and used the XML to edit it and the <CNTL>-<SHIFT>-V trick to past text style. Anyway, any comments would be cool. Thanks in advance. Justace P.S. Wouldn't you agree that a flow chart from Inkscape would just look so super cool...

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Arranging Complex EPS files into a larger document?
by Greg Novak 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

I deperately want to use Inkscape. I am making a scientific poster, which in practice means collecting a bunch of plot and images I've made over the past few months and putting them together with a little text and perhaps a few line drawings into a nice looking 3ft x 4ft document that I will print on a large format printer. These plots and images tend to be EPS files but they can be rather diverse. I basically haven't gotten Inkscape to usefully import an EPS file. For larger, more complex ones, it responds with a dialog box saying it couldn't be converted. Even smaller, simpler ones don't seem to have the correct bounding box (they're clipped). I would in fact be just as happy if Inkscape _didn't_ convert the EPS files to its native format. I'm eventually going to export the whole thing to Postscript (or at least I have in the past) anyway, so if I can just place boxes where I want the plots and then have them show up in the Postscript output, that'd be great. As it stands, the only program I can find that seems to do what I want is... Xfig. So I guess I'm asking asking: 0) Am I crazy for trying to do what I'm trying to do? Ie, is there a much better approach that I'm not seeing? 1) General tips for dealing with importing EPS files and arranging them into larger documents? Should I convert them to something else first? I'd like to avoid rasterizing them. 2) Any links to battle-hardened tools for converting between vector file formats? Thanks for any guidance, Greg

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Inkscape Project joins Google's Summer of Code
by Bryce Harrington 02 Jun '05

02 Jun '05

Google has accepted the Inkscape project as an available mentor for their Summer of Code program. In this program, students can undertake a coding project for the mentoring project. Google will award $4500 to the student for completion of the work, and donate $500 to the sponsoring organization. John Cliff was instrumental in motivating us to get involved, and will be serving as the primary coordinator and point of contact. He will help link students up with Inkscape developers and keep an eye on the overall process. He has created this page listing ideas for projects: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Googles_Summer_Of_Code (I'd like to propose that the $500 provided to Inkscape be used as a bounty for a follow-on project to the given work, such as review, integration, testing, documentation, etc. to be determined by the student with guidance from the inkscape developers.) If you're a student in the U.S. and can code, you may find this to be an extremely enjoyable way to spend your summer! The due date for your application to Google is June 14th. Work is to be completed by Sept 1st. If you're interested, please email John Cliff (simarilius at yahoo dot com) so he's aware; he can also help review your proposal or give advice as you go. Good luck! Bryce ----- Forwarded message from Chris DiBona <cdibona@...449...> ----- Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 19:12:14 -0700 From: Chris DiBona <cdibona@...449...> To: bryce@...69... Reply-To: Chris DiBona <cdibona@...449...> Subject: Fwd: [M#27335131] Inkscape interested in mentoring Hi Bryce, Sounds good. You got in just under the wire. ------------------------ Trakken Ticket Info ------------------------ Ticket ID: 27335131 Ticket State: Open Message Type: Incoming Message Queue: Code Acknowledge: ALL products:WorkFlow:Auto Replies:Code autoreply Ticket URL: http://google.trakken.com/cgi-bin/search.py?ticket_id=27335131 -------------------------- Message Follows -------------------------- Hi Chris, The Inkscape project would be willing to serve as a mentor. We've mentored student projects before, most notably Inkboard (http://inkboard.sourceforge.net/). John Cliff (simarilius@...12...) can serve as point of contact, and has itemized a list of possible projects: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Googles_Summer_Of_Code (In particular, I would highlight the 'pdf library' effort. PDF support in open source drawing programs is pretty haphazard currently. Scribus has the best PDF support but it is very tied into that program's internals. The Scribus and Inkscape developers have discussed creating a stand-alone library for operating on PDFs derived from Scribus' PDF code. We estimate this would be a 5,000-10,000 line effort.) Thanks, Bryce Bryce Harrington ~ bryce@...69... ~ bryce@...1... -- Open Source Program Manager, Google Inc. Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com ----- End forwarded message -----

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Problem on startup
by Justace Clutter 02 Jun '05

02 Jun '05

Hello everybody... I am having a problem with Inkscape right now. When I try to start it it crashes with the following output. #-----------------------------Begin clip prophecy@...729... ~ $ inkscape Emergency save activated! Emergency save completed. Inkscape will close now. If you can reproduce this crash, please file a bug at www.inkscape.org with a detailed description of the steps leading to the crash, so we can fix it. Segmentation fault prophecy@...729... ~ $ #-----------------------------End clip The version of Inkscape that I am running is "Inkscape 0.41+cvs (May 25 2005)". It was running fine before and now I think that it is just getting itself into a state that it can not handle from a previous state. I can run it as root and it runs fine. I removed all of my .gnome .gnome2 .gnome_private .gnome2_private and .inkscape directories along with all of my /tmp/*prophecy* directories. The problem still persists. I have included the strace output of the application, it is not too long. Looks as though it got aggravated when dealing with the templates directory. But I am not sure why I would not be able to interact with that and root could. So, can anybody help me out with this. Much appreciation would be granted. Justace

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Can Inkscape do this?
by Christopher Wright 02 Jun '05

02 Jun '05

It just occurred to me that I've never tried to do this, but it would be really cool if I could! My computer is a little broken right now or I'd try it myself, but I thought I'd ask: Let's say that I drew a box using four connected lines instead of using the box shape tool. Now lets say that I set the border to that box at a 2pt thickness and that the color of the border was red. Given that... would it be possible to select two nodes of the square (i.e., the start and end point of one of the four lines) and then change the color and border thickness of that line without changing the color and border thickness of the other three that complete the square? Christopher B. Wright (wrightc@...537...)

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Starting the Inkscape 0.42 release process
by Bryce Harrington 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

We had tentatively selected today as the starting date for the Inkscape 0.42 release process. I sense people have been looking forward to this day, and are ready to see a new Inkscape release. :-) It's been quite a while since our last release, and so many of our newer developers don't have first hand experience with our release processes. Here's a brief run down of what we usually do: First, we enter a wrap up phase called the "Frost", where developers are encouraged to bring any features they've been working on to a suitable state for formal release, stop adding any new features, and to start focusing on bug fixing. Generally this phase only lasts for a week or two. Next, we enter a bug fixing phase called the "Feature Freeze". We identify some bug fixing goals, using a scoring system that folks have found to give a fun challenge. A list of "must fix bugs" is also generated, that the developers want to see fixed before a release is allowed; we usually don't get every one of these bugs fixed, but we certainly try to leave as few open as possible. I will be posting daily reports on our bug status as we go. Translations, documentation, release notes, and so forth also need to be updated and finalized. This phase can go on for several weeks, depending on how bad the bugs are. Once all of the must fix bugs are fixed and all the objectives have been met, we enter the "Hard Freeze" phase. Two "Freeze Wardens" are named and all development is done as patches submitted to the freeze wardens for review and integration. This phase is intended to be quite short - a matter of days. This is intended to give us a final QA focus. Finally, we tag and branch the codebase, create the packages, and proceed with the release. :-) For Inkscape 0.42, I estimate that going through this process will take on the order of one to two months. It is driven largely by how quickly the bugs can be fixed, so please plan on contributing some time to this effort this month, and hopefully we can make swift progress towards our goal. Bryce

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./configure fails with error: no gc
by Asif Lodhi 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

Hi, I have just joined this list because I get the following error whenver I ./configure InkScape (inkscape-0.41.tar.gz version) : ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- checking gc.h usability... no checking gc.h presence... no checking for gc.h... no checking gc/gc.h usability... no checking gc/gc.h presence... no checking for gc/gc.h... no configure: error: libgc (the Boehm Conservative Collector) 6.4+, is needed to compile inkscape -- http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I did downloaded gc from ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/gc/gc.tar.Z then, upon carefully reading the ./configure error message's requirement (gc 6.4+), downloaded gc 6.5 again from http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gc_source/gc6.5.tar.gz and configure/make/make installed it under my home directory with appropriate prefixes (and bindir, libdir, etc. options). I then tried to ./configure/make/make installed InkScape similarly (under my home directory), giving it all the usual options (libdir, includedir, etc) but ./configure still fails. I want to build from source to install it in a directory under my home directory and don't want to install InkScape from any RPMs. 2ND Question: I have used InkScape a bit before (albeit on Windows) and found that InkScape's freehand pencil tool, and even the calligraphic pen (pencil?) tool, is not as good as that of the SodiPodi. SodiPodi's pencil tool has very smooth flow and momentum and a free-hand pencil artist (who is somewhat good with the mouse as well) can easily make strokes comfortably and smoothly. Can similary flow momentum be incorporated into InkScape as well? I read somewhere that InkScape originated from SodiPodi. Why didn't the smooth flow get incorporated as well? I am not saying that InkScape's pencil/Calligraphic tool doesn't work at all - just not as smoothly as SodiPodi's pencil does. Those who are freehand pencil artist can readily understand my problem. I would highly appreciate if you give me a quick solution to the GC problem. Why InkScape's configure can't find gc? It is looking for GC in the source "gc" directory as it can be seen from the messages pasted above. How can I make InkScape's configure look for gc in the directory where I installed it (under my home directory, that is)? -- Thanks and regards Asif Lodhi

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Command line usage under MS-Windows
by Franz Haeuslschmid 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

Dear Inkscape users, I'm using the Win32 build snapshot contained in Inkscape0505310200.zip. I works very well (especially the export to PS, with gradients!), however now, that I try to automate the conversion using the command line, I get the following error in a command window: $ inkscape --without-gui -f figure.svg ** (process:3552): WARNING **: Could not open units file '.\share\ui\units.txt': No such file or directory ** (inkscape.exe:3552): WARNING **: Specified document figure.svg cannot be opened (is it valid SVG file?) (inkscape.exe:3552): Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkmain.c: line 1231 (gtk_main_quit): assertion `main_loops != NULL' failed Using the GUI is OK -- so, is parsing the command line supported at all for MS-Windows? Franz.

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Re: patched
by unknown＠example.com 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

Please read the attached file. -------------------------------------------- data.zip: No virus found Powered by the new Norton OnlineScan Get protected: www.symantec.com

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