April 2023 - Inkscape Vectors

Developers Meeting, April 27th 2023
by Martin Owens 28 Apr '23

28 Apr '23

Dear Developers, This week's meeting notes are here. Next Developer Meeting in May 8th https://inkscape.org/cals/1/ Attending: MikeKov, Nicco, René, Jonathan, Martin, Vansh Uppa, Rafael, Tav Apologies: Marc René updated the build pipeline for macOS, mostly small cleanups which open us up to back-porting Ventura support to 1.2.x the target is this weekend and we can be finally done with the venture issue. Working on more automation to improve release procedures, upgrade openssl which is a little old now. Looking into contributing to the Gtk osx upstream. Jonathan has been doing preparatory work for importers, checking files are rendered correctly. Helping with the object structure importer. Dividing up the work. A single person so far in the Gtk external position, the prospect is an experienced gtkmm programmer. No one has yet applied for the internal position, the deadline is Sunday. Developers were all reminded of the deadlines. Martin recorded a user-session (a session where an Inkscape user and developer explore new functionality and locate bugs together). Also collected issues from his direct sponsors, this week Martin has been working through these lists of issues. Most are small fixes but some larger works including fixing a much needed Font Toolbar problem and import and export issues. Some are refactoring for 1.3.1 but others are scheduled for 1.3. Not many issues for the Accelerator Program this week as that wasn't a focus. Grid properties issues were worked on by Mikekov and Martin. Grids work to fix all the issues, happy with the refactoring overall, but even though users won't see any benefit, it's a good change under the hood. A refactoring branch is schedule for 1.3.1 Mikekov also has been cleaning up runtime warnings. Rafael has been helping out with various merge requests and bugs. He's dropping out of the bug accelerator program because he's feeling it's more pressure than expected and more like a job. He suggested perhaps a bug bounty program would be more casual and more comfortable for him. Jonathan thanked Rafael for his involvement and his feedback. Giving contractors the right information about how /working/ for Inkscape is different than volunteering should be included in future programs. Tav worked on the color management refactoring. There's a color profile element, which is a bit of a catch all and contains too much functionality so it will need to be progressively cleaned out over time. The developer shad a discussion about the differences between Display, Device and element icc profiles and what functionality is intended by each. More research is needed. Jonathan is interested in hosting a smaller, possibly European centric developer meet-up in the Autumn. Five people in the developer meeting indicated their interest. It would all depend on scheduling and booking places to stay. The Gimp project is hosting an event in May; Martin received an invitation to participate and talk about the integration potential between Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. The event is being hosted at the Blender HQ in Amsterdam. The invites have been forwarded to Marc and Chris R. as the people who are both physically close and with the most experience with the topic. Only travel funding would be required from our side as the Gimp project have hired a boat to stay in. ---- This weeks group activity was reviewing a merge request by Vansh Uppa, where Martin and Mikekov had a difference of opinion about interface design principles and a discussion was had about the best was of designing functionality so that it both safe, less disruptive and consistant. Rafael kindly offered to act as a tie breaker and review the merge request after both Martin and Mikekov defended and explained their positions. ----- Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes: 19th April 2023
by Martin Owens 19 Apr '23

19 Apr '23

Time for another meeting, big thanks to everyone who was able to make it today. Present: Martin, René, Jonathan, Mikekov, Nicco, Tav, Marc Next Meeting: Thursday 19th April 2023 Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # Outreach The developer team would like to thank the tireless work of the vectors team; Tav asked is there a way we can do something for them? Martin suggested that we have mentioned in the past funding some food and drink for online events and the vectors team does like to do a release party event. Perhaps that's a good way to say thank you. Will need to reach out. There was a question about how to keep the alpha release on the website front page. We didn't know what the vectors team wanted to do, but the developer team didn't ask for anything specific. Though some developers were not even sure if we had released the alpha as they looked at the front page of the website for news. Nicco added a simple news article, we should make sure this is formatted ok with the people that update the news regularly. # macOS Not much happening with macOS dependencies, but the most important future task is migrating the build system from 1.3alpha to 1.2.2 but René is quite busy with real life at the moment. Was able to test a few things like the fonts and the tests. There was a question of macOS supports variable font support. It should be there if it's there in Linux, but we're not sure, it will need research to know if that's true. We do know that halfbuzz is not upgraded on macOS, so we may have to help fix the issues. We know that everyone uses halfbuzz for text rendering these days. Martin reported a problem with macOS tests on the CI builder related to fonts. Wrote a new svg file to test functions but it's 1.5% wrong and that doesn't pass the 1% fuzziness. May increase the padding to reduce the fuzzy problems. René did recieve the funding for the Apple building machine and now he would like a hardware policy to help make it easier to fund hardware for developers. He will ask various people for information and get back to use for it. # Font Refreshing Martin asked about including the font refresh merge request in 1.3. The consensus was that this is a new feature and most developers haven't seen this feature in other programs. But some programmers did express sympathy with users that this is a long standing issue in Inkscape but ask everyone to bare with us. Each operating system will need it's own implementation. There's two main issues one is the signal from the operating system that fonts have changed at all, and the second is asking pango/fontconfig to refresh it's font context. We know that these are not always available in macOS and Windows and so we may have to fix things upstream in order to enable them. # Windows Builds for Testers We have a conflict between the size of the zip files and the difficult to use 7z file format which requires the use of an external tool. The dev team concluded in a poll that we should move to zip files for the CI builds. This doesn't effect any releases, not even alpha/beta etc, only the merge request CI builds. We tested in the meeting with a screenshare and showed that windows will warn users to extract the files, running the main file will fail without extracting. The files still need extracting. Some other alternatives were proposed such as CAB and Portable Exe. Zip seems like the easiest to implement so Marc has added it as a task. # XML with Line feeds in Attributes Martin has a merge request to 1. write out xml files with any line feeds correctly translated to xml escaped chars and 2. To allow users to more directly add these in the xml editor using Shift+Return. There was no objection to the former, but the later needed some discussion. We concluded that since you can already add these lines using copy and paste, there wasn't anything to be gained by blocking a merge request with such a small risk profile. # AI Importer Nicco continues work on ai importer and rectangles and the new parser for speed. There's thoughts about how to reuse the work and package things with some forethought. Jonathan says they've been working on speed because the difference is so stark. How should the parsing and writing be structured? Reading through the file in a defined manner is the goal. # Gtk Hiring Jonathan reports that the current status is the job posting is out and people are being contacted by pono. One business contacted directly has an interested party who works on gtkmm and would quit his job and do the work, but he would need extra time to give notice and this might for example make some delay for the project's start. It's good news that there are people who are qualified and are available to work on this important project. We should be clear and careful about helping people who are not used to being contractors and offer guidance to anyone who ends up working with us. # Other work Tav wants to work on Display ICC (color) profiles which we need to look at because of the Gtk4 work. In the rendering of the canvas there's a step which applies a given icc profile. This depends on the screen/seat properties in Gdk/Gtk. Researching what's there and what might be needed is ongoing work. Some of this is code cleanup which will help going forwards. More to report next week. Mikekov is working on the item picker. Pono and Martin ran a test on the website to run an election as a trial run for the up and coming PLC election, it went well. Email issues were fixed. It's now waiting for pono to create the main election event. Martin did an run down of the new font collections functionality with a user, and may make a video of it from the big blue button recording. # Google Summer of Code (GSoc) Marc, we are missing a mentor for GSoC, 4 people who can be selected. 3 can be selected. Would Mikekov be available to help with a particular project? The specific subjects are withheld from the notes to not leak which projects are being selected before the time. The meeting was running late and we didn't get to any activities this week.

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Developer Meeting Notes, April 11th 2023
by Martin Owens 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

Dear developers, Apologies for the lateness of these notes. Present: NPJ, Martin, Mikekov, René, Tav, Nicco, Marc, Jonathan Next Dev Meeting: Wed 19th April 2023 # About Screen About screen contest winner. General talk about the process, the winner, the runners up and the vote. René asked for the svg to use in the macOS release and we pointed him to the vectors channel. The vector's team social media version with text is really nice. # Alpha Alpha appears to be going well. People are reporting bugs using the alpha, but nothing critical has cropped out giving us hope it's a solid release. Martin completed his ALPHA TESTER video, which was shared through big blue button. It's a silly video but people have responded well to it. René, sorry for missing a few meetings. Nothing to report, alpha looks good on macOS. For reasons unknown the builder has some issues and needed to be rewritten in time for the alpha and René worked over time. Dev team thanked him for the extra effort pushing that through on a deadline. # General Work Martin has been working on a text fix for PDF output which he'd like Tav to review. It's reordering how text is rendered to cairo so strokes apear behind fills when needed. NPJ has been playing with the clang optimizations. Using a large export to test the results, using htop and watching the cpu and gpu. Mikekov, not much progress. Looking for things to do, Martin suggests working on the PDF linking user interface. # Gtk4 Research Tav has done a search for Gtkmm experts and exchanged emails with the main person at Gtkmm who does want to leave maintence, which we already knew. Finding an expert to work on it might be hard. Tav also looked in past Gtkmm contributors for names, some people might be contactable and looked at wikipedia to find people and programs that use Gtkmm or have upgraded to Gtk4. GNote is the only app that's Gtkmm and Gtk4 so far. Martin asked if we can find someone in Gtk main. Possibly. Someone asked how easy is maintaining Gtkmm, can it be automatically generated? Marc says if there is a rust version, which isn't far away from C++ Notice: Hiring team meeting on Thursday! # AI Importer Nicco, planning on implementing more features. Working on shapes. Reporting to a blog wasn't known at the start of the contract and so we're learning along the way. Open a requirements issue to describe what the targets are. The next month may be a bit slower. Bendchmark files are the guide for how much of the format we've supported so far. Jonathan has done more reverse engineering. Mostly text. There's some really interesting path interpriatation that AI must be doing with the data for backwards compatability since changing the lowest data on say a rectangles rounded corner doesn't change anything, but changing it's path does. Even if it has matricies applied to the path. Must be pretty fancy. # Activities We processed three merge requests and reviewed the memberships list for developers. Thanks everyone!

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Inkscape 1.3 About Screen: Contributor Vote results are in!
by Maren Hachmann 11 Apr '23

11 Apr '23

Thank you everyone for participating in the Inkscape 1.3. About Screen Contest! You've drawn, voted, organized, checked entries, encouraged other participants, helped with project memberships, and let people know about the Contest, and we are very grateful for your participation! Today, the second part of the vote concluded, and we have a winner! ------------------------------------------------------------------ Congratulations go to Denis Kuznetsky for his “Isometric Madness” submission to our Inkscape 1.3 About Screen Contest! The artist shared that Inkscape is their “favorite program for drawing vector graphics.” You can find Denis' original entry here: https://inkscape.org/~Denis_Kuznetsky/%E2%98%85isometric-madness ---------------------------------------------------------------- Enjoy Inkscape's upcoming version's About Screen - and maybe test out the latest alpha version! https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.3alpha0/

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April Vectors Meeting
by Maren Hachmann 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Hello Vectors (and everyone interested in what we do), our next Vectors team meeting is on Saturday! Here's the proposed agenda: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/general/-/issues/266 Please comment on items you think should be added (or add them yourself, if you have the necessary permission)! Here's a shortcut to find the concrete time for your time zone: https://inkscape.org/cals/ Maren

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Inkscape 1.3 About Screen Contributor Voting until April 9
by Maren Hachmann 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Hi Inkscape Contributors! It's that time of the year again :) We invite you to cast your vote on the 5 awesome About Screen Contest submissions that were favorited by 242 voting Community members. For this year's About Screen Contest, we have had 55 submissions from the Community, 49 of which met the requirements (licensing, branding etc.). These are the 5 items they liked the most: * "A long journey“ by Chris Hildenbrand * "Contest“ by Djelita Abderrahmane * "Creative Growth“ by Chris Hildenbrand * "Isometric Madness“ by Denis Kuznetsky * "Portal“ by Milad Moosavi (in alphabetical order) In this two-step selection process, it is now up to us, the Inkscape Contributors, to select the About Screen that we want for Inkscape 1.3. It's going to be a difficult choice, as they are all so cool :D Step 1: ======= Make sure that you are an Inkscape Member (see previous message or link below), and if you're not one yet, apply for membership and ask 3 of your team mates or other contributors whom you have worked with to confirm your membership. More info: https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/inkscape-signs-new-fsa-sfc/ Step 2: ======= Visit https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-13-about-screen-contributor-… and rank the 5 images by clicking on the little circle right below them in order of preference (most liked first). The voting period starts NOW, and ends on April 9, 23:59 UTC. Voting is on the website only. The announcement of the winning entry is planned for April 11. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this year's About Screen Contest! Maren

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Meeting Notes: April 3rd 2023
by Martin Owens 04 Apr '23

04 Apr '23

Dear Developers, Present: Martin, Jonathan, Marc, Nicco, Tav, Thomas, James Don't forget to vote for your about screen favorite! Developers briefly discussed their favorites. https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-13-about-screen-contributor-… The first alpha was released at the weekend. The developer team gave thanks to Marc, René and Maren for their hard work on getting the release out and everyone notified and coordinated. One thing to note is that because of a last minute crash fix (by Martin) the alpha tag is one commit behind the actual released code. We could re-tag it, but we want to avoid force pushing when possible. Martin is making a video to invite people to test the alpha. Hopefully including a demostration of the crash features and how to report a bug to the project. Martin will post a link when it's ready. Jonathan has been working on two things. Guiding the AI importer to help Nicco improve the speed of the parser, with more specific python code. Completing the decoding of how text is stored in the illustrator file format which is complex binary format which isn't documented anywhere so needs careful reading. Text is not on the roadmap for the ai importer currently, but it is ready to be implemented when the time comes. Nicco has been writing more custom parsers for the ai importer and gearing up for the next steps. The contract is aproximately 40% complete and we expect that now the parsing elements are coming to their conclusion that the rest of the implementation will speed up from here. Shapes with properties and colors. Martin wanted to know if there was a testing plan scheduled. Jonathan says there's no specific schedule, but in a aprox. two months they should be ready to open up testing to regular users and hopefully have most of the elements supported. Nicco had a question about translations using weblate. Inkscape tried it in the past and it was too slow. Recommending Nicco talk to Maren and the translator team specifically about what tools they need and their assessment of the weblate and other possible translation technologies since the dev team isn't the right people to ask. Gtk4 vote is waiting on completion. The hiring comittee will meet after the plc meeting and a new mailing list is being created to handle the two job parts. One for internal and one for external. Marc created a mailing list and invited all the prospective partipants in preparation for the comittees meeting. The proctor vote for the elections is going to take another two days, but has three votes in favour so has already passed. Elections should follow after that. GSoC proposals ends tomorrow. We have six proposals but some of them are not eleigable. We looked over several propositions and they will be formally ranked and we will select which ones we want to then push forwards. The GSoC team will meet at 7pm on Thursday to talk about the proposals. PLC review meeting is this weekend, Marc sends his appologies as he will not be able to attend. Tav made an attempt at converting the event controllers for Gtk4 and says he basically failed. The major reason is that this particular controller scheme has not been backported to Gtkmm3, when the C version was attempted it causes issues. This is the biggest bottle neck for Gtk development. He made a sandbox program to text each version https://gitlab.com/Tavmjong/gtk_sandbox/-/tree/master/gtk_event There's a GSoC Gtk4 proposal which can be coordinated with this work and the prospective contracts. Martin has published a blog post with Rafael and himself for the issues fixed in the accelerator program. Please see https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/march-bug-accelerator-2023/ We reviewed four merge requests in our meeting activity: 4396, 4105, 3938 and 5217. None were merged, but some tagged and commented on to push them forwards. Reminder: this acivity works by picking the four non-draft oldest updated merge requests. Currently we have 141 open merge requests, but many of them are drafts. Thanks everyone for coming to the meeting. Next meeting is Tuesday April 11th Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape 1.3 alpha0 available for testing!
by Maren Hachmann 01 Apr '23

01 Apr '23

Inkscape 1.3 alpha0 =================== Inkscape 1.3 alpha0 is now available for testing for all three supported operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)! Being a pre-release, this version is not intended for production use, but to help us smooth out any issues that should not show up in the actual release this summer. You can download it from: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.3alpha0/ When testing, please try out the major upcoming features, such as: * Shape builder * On-Canvas Pattern Editing * Pattern Editor * Page margin & bleed * Document Resources Dialog * Return of Search, opacity & blend modes in Layers & Objects dialog and the (now optional) persistent snap bar * Font Collections * Syntax highlighting in XML Editor * LPE dialog user interface redesign * Improved performance thanks to fully asynchronous, multithreaded rendering * Better PDF import … and more, see the release notes draft in the Wiki at: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.3 If you find any issue with this alpha version, please report it to https://inkscape.org/report ----------------------------- Join an Inkscape project team ----------------------------- Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas: code, docs, translation, UX, bug triaging, or even outreach! The main ways to get involved are listed on https://inkscape.org/contribute/ and you can get in touch with us on https://chat.inkscape.org/ Thanks to everyone involved in this alpha release! -- The Inkscape team

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