- Inkscape Vectors - Inkscape Mailman

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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Become an Inkscape Project Member!
by Maren Hachmann 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

Dear Inkscape Contributors, it's time to make your Inkscape Membership official! With that come voting rights for all kinds of regular contributors - like translators, social media managers, forum moderators, documentation writers, testers, bug managers, ... - (not only developers anymore!). The first occasion we will be using that for is the Contributor Vote for the ongoing About Screen Contest (contributor voting starts tomorrow, and will end on April 9, 23:59 UTC, there will be a separate email for that!), which is also going to be a bit of a test of the membership system for the upcoming Inkscape PLC election. Read all about it here: https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/inkscape-signs-new-fsa-sfc/ If you have any questions or are looking for people to confirm your membership request, please ask away in the #general rocket.chat channel. In some cases, it will be helpful to state the nature of your contributions to the project, or to approach those directly who know about your contributions. Please approve membership requests of those whom you know to be a contributor by first hand experience, and do not approve other membership requests, as in the worst case, when the person is not a contributor, that can get your own membership revoked. Thank you to the PLC and the SFC for getting that set up for us, to the website team for providing infrastructure for it, and to the Vectors team for writing about it! Maren

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Developer Meeting Notes, March 26th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

Hi Everyone, This is our first online meeting since the hackfest. Last week's meeting was canceled, so don't worry, you haven't missed any previous notes. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Present this week: Lazur, Martin, Jonathan, Tav, Thomas, Jabier, NPJ, Marc, Mikekov, Rafael Next Meeting: Monday, April 3rd # Release Plans The alpha release has been uncertain because of reports of deadly crashes on undo. The reports have been a little anecdotal though. The general consesnsus at the meeting is that we should release the alpha right away and then re-release a new alpha if this issue can be confirmed in the latest versions after several fixes. Users can be asked to be brave so long as they understand the risks. Martin created the 1.3 and 1.3-alpha0 release objects on the website and Marc is planning on pushing the alpha out in the next two days. The mushroom about screen was used as the graphic for the alpha. We have a few outstanding merge requests which we can merge immediately. The developer team spent some time looking at these merge requests for our activity at the end of the meeting to clear the backlog for the release. # Jabier Wants to merge some branches, some are minor fixes but need to have better and more descriptions to help reviewers understand what they do, we managed to merge two and attach reviewers to three others. Martin wanted to make sure the corners LPE upgrade is scheduled for after 1.3 since it's quite large. # Jonathan Some reverse engineering of the AI format and helping Nicco putting together the ai importer. Progress is going well, text is likely to be supportable. Asked tav about the mesh gradient and having a number of nodes on the edges of the patches. Gtk4 proposal is ready and waiting to be sent to the PLC. An email got lost and has been resent to Marc and Tav was asked to push the PLC election, nominating the proctor Pono to run the election. # Marc Has been busy and sick, with appologies. # Martin Recovering from travel. Made a video for the hackfest which has been well recieved. Bug accellerator program fixes are submitted and merge request management and pushing for the alpha release. Some website fixes for the about screen contest voting. # MikeKov Looking at a bug #4186 with the new preserve path functionality and trying to work around a fitting alogorythem. We could detect when it's not going to work well and then try a different method, or try to remove the constraints but with bad output. Bug has been assigned and tagged for 1.3. #NPJ Experimenting with Apple archetecture. #Rafael Worked on bugs as part of the accelerator program. Fixed four issues this week, one fix actually fixed two issues. Currently looking into a regression in patterns, where you can't see a marker using a pattern as a context-fill. Pair up with Martin to look into the problem. #Tav Spent a little time in the last week playing with Gtk4, try out the new Gtk List View, it wasn't performing quite as expected. It only generates widgets for things which are on the screen, but this makes the scrolling weird. Made a lsit of 10,000 items, it would scroll for a little bit but then it would jump around. # Thomas Doing some experiments for how to fix menus in macOS, contuing the work from the hackfest to see if there's an upstream patch that can be created. # Team Activity We looked at five merge requests with the Approve Please tag, and merged two, and assigned the rest to reviewers for further testing. Thanks to everyone for coming to the meeting, see you all next week!

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Hackfest notes from Pono
by Daniel Pono Takamori 19 Mar '23

19 Mar '23

Hey everyone, Here are some notes I took after collecting some questions from people at the Hackfest. I'll dump them here and here's a link to the markdown file on Nextcloud: https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/62TS2K4obzat4Rd At the end of the week I asked the people here what they liked about the project, what could be improved, how was the Hackfest and what can SFC and I do to better support the project. After I presented these comments and some of my own thoughts about them, we opened the conversation up to discussion and the bits at the bottom are the resulting conversations. Thanks again for having me, and I'm looking forward to building out the in-person events so everyone can come or participate to the best of their abilities. -Pono ## Things to celebrate about Inkscape and it's community There's a good spirit of volunteering and people taking on tasks that are interesting to them. This goes both ways though and sometimes means there are tasks that get left behind for no one to pick up. Liberal code contribution culture which has enabled lots of innovation and creativity. Receptive to new ideas. People are empowered to express themselves, regardless of their position in the world. People focused project, doesn't require lots of technical expertise and has a low bar to picking up. Mature project with lots of good momentum. People love Inkscape! ## Improvements to be made to Inkscape and it's community Diversity of participants was something that came up a lot. Working to have better outreach to make sure all groups and teams are represented. How can we get younger users and contributors? Make it easier for people to contribute non-code (I'm not sure what the processes around documentation, how-tos, etc work). We need better onboarding docs so we don't have to explain "basics" over and over again. "Inkscape on Twitch" - related to other outreach efforts Spending money... we need to come up with a more formal budget to support all teams and I (pono) think that a budget will make it easier to get money to flow since when things are within an accepted budget, it's easier to get things moving. Listening and communicating with users - surveys, forums, Rocketchat, etc. We need more dialogue with users (technical and non). How are artists, scientists and makers using Inkscape? Formalizing subgroups - with fear of over administering, how do we codify the teams so that they can operate autonomously but be included in all decision making processes? **pono idea - seats for each subteam on the PLC and more communication between groups** How do we get Inkscape in schools? This is something SFC has been thinking about in general ## Hackfest ### Things that went well Relationship building is unmatched in person. This was a great opportunity to meet and chat and the travel being handled if needed, was great. Length was good, maybe a long weekend could get more people. In person communication makes it much easier to clear up miscommunications and intentions. The venue was great and everything was made easy to focus on work and relationships. ### Things to be improved Calling it a 'Hackfest' might've discouraged teams from participating and we *need* all teams to participate. 15-25 people would be a better group. More diversity among participants, *pono let's get some scholarships for new and minority contributors* Open space and loud conversations made it hard to focus, providing quiet spaces would help. More thought into how to include remote participants. Have one with users? Does it have to be this event? More regular cadence makes it easier to get people here. ## SFC - how can we do better and what have we done well being clear about our limits SFC is not just an anonymous thing to help with managing things, we need to establish a more close relationship rewarding volunteers financial help was great and improved attendance Pono/SFC is very helpful for networking between FOSS projects, like introducing the right people and thus increasing the chances of successful collaborations Be a sparring partner for discussing policy & fundamental issues, "outside" person that can help when an outsider is need. E.g. CoC issues within the PLC, election proctor Also to escalate things within SFC if progress is slow. SFC should monitor foundations for grant opportunities & forward them to potentially relevant member projects making sure contracts and money flow smoothly SFC done a good job with mediation and spending money ## Notes during discussion hackfest rebuilds energy 5-10 is good for hacking OutreachFest colocating an event? FOSDEM! https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/ conference in Northeast? develop PenPot relationship Jabier and Adam Belis what we need from Inkscape to use PenPot for UI Scribus? Blender? subteams marin - didn't like term leader, have an organizer, contact, representative can switch off! describe as not one person, but a team collectively divvies up responsibilities if you want to be a formal group, you need to meet a set of criteria jonathan and ted thinking about it community building things graphics for teams, hat or graphics mousepads :P vectors, developers, documentaion, testing, translation, UX https://inkscape.org/user/teams/ recognized groups have duties benefits: PLC can delegate technical decisions to dev team, outreach to vectors, etc formalize duties and expectations keep outside FSA probably partners program GNOME has a Sponsors section allows relationship management *ChromeOS* ?? maybe we can talk with Google? how to package for those chromebooks schools helps schools administer the program krita and blender are on steam maybe need someone android? google funding for gtk backend? putting out more video for exposure - Chris attractive to sponsors build up vectors to make more content budget for video how does krita do it? need to try more things what do people like from Inkscape? we don't really know Youtube channel? surveys! demographics working with TuxDigital presskit press list for SFC Plausible website is contributor friendly not marketing slick friendly branding is not a singular thing it's there to tell your story "the only vector software that is a community project" more concious of public image

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Developer Meeting notes for Feb 22nd 2023
by Martin Owens 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

Attending: Marc, Martin, NPJ, Nicco, Johnathan, René, pbs, Mikekov The next developer meeting is 2nd March 2023: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ ---- How the bug accelerator program is going (Martin) Bug list for 1.3 is being used https://gitlab.com/groups/inkscape/-/milestones/11 developer should add the milestone 1.3 if they want issues to be in the mix. The advantage is that this list provides a sorted and updated list and so the blocker issue has been closed and instead people should mark issues as blocker using the tag. Lots of bugs fixed and lots of merge requests are now open waiting for review. When Rafael becomes available merge requests will have a reviewer to move code faster. On the effectiveness side; Martin says other paid contracts have been re-scheduled so time is available to work on Inkscape issues, so it's functioning as intended to create time for inkscape at this early stage. Though this is a self-reported data point. A new blog is available to contributors. This will be used to report on work done in the bug accelerator program, but can be used by other contributors if they want to talk about their work and have it available on the inkscape website. Please contact the web admin for access. ---- The recent Cairo rendering failure is related to Marc's dithering patch. It was suspected that it was just related to using an updated version of cairo, but the patch itself is implicated and Marc things it's becuse of the way the dithering code throws an error which pbs says will cause the whole rendering stack to then reject any other rendering instructions. ---- A Pango problem that has appeared is an upstream issue with the fontconfig backend. To fix this the version is restricted to 1.50.11 for all builds and the windows build is pinned to 1.50.11 for now. The issue has been reported to upstream although they say they can't guarentee a fix. ---- A version suffix was added to inkscape's library file (*.so, *.dll etc) this allows the library file to be placed in predictable places and should make it easier to create C++ extensions which can link against the Inkscape library of a specific version despite not having a stable API. Getting these library files into the right system directories to make them useful is a possible task, as well as providing header files or a -dev type package to allow developers to work without building the entire of inkscape first. - This causes a problem for macOS builds that didn't expect the version to be there. but René is working on a packaging fix. ---- Mikekov is working on a few features and improvements, mostly UI related fixes. A new milestone has been created by Marc so anything that we don't expect to make it into 1.3 can be tagged for the next release and not merged by accident before the branching date. Marc asks if the font collections feature is ready? It needs to be rebuilt, but looks to have problems and may need to be posponed. The original developer may also not be available. --- What kind of plan should we have for Gtk4 migration? After the 1.3 branch (or release) we will allow much more riskier code merges that progress us towards Gtk4 support. So master is expected to break more often, but we want to make sure Inkscape compiles so any changes will still be expected to compile even if they cause large bugs. Having this high risk development policy after the release is most ideal and sets expectations in the whole developer team about what we need to be focusing on. Jonathon is creating a paid contract to hiring people to work on the Gtk4 transition, please join him on rocket chat to look at the proposal draft and see what kind of paid work we need to ask for in order to push hard on getting Gtk4 transition done with the smallest amount of disruption it's possible to have in our development cycle. ---- We were concerned that Nicco had not recieved the contract for the AI importer work. But Nicco was available at the meeting and has recieved the contract. Next is signing it and sending back to the SFC, and Johnathan is organising a date to do onboarding with Martin. ---- The Hackfest is coming up very shortly. There's ongoing discussions with the SFC and René regarding paying for the venue costs upfront so the particpants won't have to pay the large fees that will be due at the end. We are told Karren was unavailable so there may be some delays reviewing the venue contract and sorting out the payment. Though we do want to make sure this happens because we don't have a lot of time now. ---- We are accepted into the GSoC program, number of applicants isn't set yet. You may advertise about our particpation in GSoc 2023, and please make sure to update the list of projects on the wiki https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code ---- We looked at three of the oldest merge requests as part of our regular end of meeting activity: One was assigned to Adam (sorry adam!), two were closed as out of date. Thanks for coming everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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February Vectors Meeting
by Maren Hachmann 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '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/264 Please comment on items you think should be added! Here's a shortcut to find the concrete time for your time zone: https://inkscape.org/cals/ Maren

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January Vectors Meeting & Release Video Discussion
by Ryan Gorley 06 Jan '23

06 Jan '23

Hey All, Tomorrow we're meeting for our January Vectors meeting. Following that meeting we will be discussing how the prior release video process went and how we'll handle such projects in the future. Please come for both and provide your input. * *Time/Location/Agenda*: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/general/-/issues/263 Please feel free to include any items I may have missed. This is an important meeting and I hope you'll come and share your input! Ryan

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