Inkscape 0.44 - Faster, Bigger, Better

bbyakk writes "After 6 months of development, Inkscape 0.44 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features: Layers dialog, docked color palette, clipping and masking, native PDF export with transparency, configurable keyboard (including Xara emulation), Outline mode for complex drawings, innovative 'node sculpting' and lots more. Check out the full release notes, enjoy the screenshots, or download your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X."

No Packages yet

They are waiting to "officially" announce the release when the packages are ready. You can download the tarball now, however.

i dunno

Banner on the site says "Last stable version: 0.43". I'm a little nervous about putting my mission critical doodling on a new release.

Firefox Users

Based on the screenshots, I thought the Inkscape font rendering looked really bad. Turns out, it's only because their screenshots are quite large and Firefox squishes them down to fit on the screen. Firefox ought to use some more sophisticated downsampling algorithm instead of simply discarding rows and columns of pixels, but there you go. If you move your cursor over the pictures and get a magnifying glass, click it to see the real quality of the Inkscape images.

Re:Firefox Users

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I might just code this up. It's been bugging me for years. With 3 Ghz machines, there's really no excuse.

Re:Firefox Users

I just got two Funny moderations. Was it this?

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I wasn't joking, this is exactly how you'd do it correctly. Is this gobbeldygook to your average Slashdotter? Have I been hiding in the lab too much? Is this what grad school does to you?

I need to get out more, apparently.

Re:Firefox Users

No idea why you got a funny, but gaussian isn't really the best choice. There are standard libraries that can do the right thing anyway (libmagick, libgdkpixbuf, etc) so perhaps you should just grab one of them and use that.

Re:Firefox Users

Seconded -- bitmap transformation/scaling has been done to death these days. It'd be insane not to use one of the many existing libraries out there -- and indeed, Firefox 3 will be using cairo for that purpose.

Re:Firefox Users

Slashdot: Where the truth is funny, and the trolltalk is insightful ;)

Packages only availible on SourceForge

Be sure to use the link in the article to get the compiled packages, as the official site has not been updated with them yet.

Re:Packages only availible on SourceForge

'Tis updated now. We're still waiting on RPM and DEB packages. Gentoo users can get an ebuild here (if our wiki survives slashdot): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingG entoo [inkscape.org]

Who's the genius?

So...why announce the software when you can't even download the binaries for it yet? Somebody jumped the gun. Now, 85% of the /. comments are going to be "why is it just a source tarball? Open Source sucks!!!" ...sigh...

If you want to try it out and you don't like compiling, wait another day for the official binaries, then give it a whirl - this Inkscape release really is that good. Very fast, excellent illustration tool. Congratulations to the dev team.

I like plants

I find the L-System Effects really intresting, I'll likely install the application just to play with thoose.

Excellent.

I've really enjoyed watching the progress of this app, along with Scribus and the GIMP. Inkscape has become one of the tools I use day in and day out (especially in conjunction with Scribus) and even though I can run older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator on my FC5 box, I've really come to value Inkscape even though it doesn't have the collection of power tools that the Windows vector apps have (in all honesty, some of the "power tools" in those other guys are just imagesetter-chokers and you're better off leaving them be).

Now that Krita supports CMYK tiff files (with color management) the day has pretty much dawned in which I no longer have to jump over to my lone remaining Windows box to do some sort of previously-necessary file format conversion.

Release Notes

It took forever to load the release notes page. The google cache is over here http://google.com/search?q=cache:Zs9PSqgG0yoJ:wiki .inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes+inkscape +release+notes [google.com]

Screenshot of .44 in action

Been using it for the past few days for a hobby project so I thought I'd post this. It shows the new layers and color palettes.

http://www.friendlyskies.net.nyud.net:8080/inksc reen.png (Mind the space in the address)

Sorry it's in KDE, seeing how Inkscape is GTK...at the moment Skype isn't working in Gnome, so... :(

oh no

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now.

A good program for LaTeX users...

Inkscape 0.43 has a nice export to .eps feature. It's still sort of clunky to use, and the fonts don't always come out quite the same, but I like it a lot better than xfig. Not sure what else I can use for this sort of thing. Looking forward to 0.44.

Did anyone see this?!?!

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inksca pe-0.44-outlineview.png [inkscape.org] thats just purely... simply... insane! I wish I had enought time/patience to do something like that.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

Yes, that's exactly right. A lot of beginners try to draw mostly with their wrist and fingers, which doesn't work well and tires you out fast. Most practiced artists do a lot of their drawing motion from their upper arm/shoulder. Of course, you also have to draw larger for this to work well; beginners also tend to draw too small.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

Hehehehe... I can assure you that there was no bitmap tracing done whatsoever. My wife will confirm this as she watched me draw most of it from scratch (what she didn't watch was when I was on my lunch breaks at the office). I actually have a ton of progressional snapshots done during the creation, I need to string them together to show the process for people. It changed a LOT from beginning to end, and will change even more once we have SVG filters in place.

Red arrows?

So is inkscape finally able to produce a red arrow with a red tip? Up to now it was impossible.

Re:Red arrows?

I just tried it. It works fine, and I'm sure it worked in previous versions as well:

1. Create normal arrow
2. Select the curve with the arrow point on it
3. Ctrl+Alt+C or Path --> Stroke to Path
4. Select the arrow tip in node selection mode and color it (both stroke and fill can be colored)
5. Thank you, drive through please.

Illustrator

Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator.
Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?

Re:Illustrator

I major feature that was missing is non-destructive shape unions, intersections and differences. These are in the pathfinder feature of Illustrator and they are pretty much a staple of any serious illustration work. I think it might kind-of be in Inkscape in this release but im not sure.

Next major feature is an effects stack which is needed in GIMP too. Both GIMP and Inkscape have really suffered from the lack of any dynamic non-destructive editing features and separation of various effects and styles from content - these are the way forward and things Photoshop and Illustrator users have had for years, you just cant seriously live without them and its a shame because non-destructive editing and separating content from style is really something the OS world embraces - obviously these two projects feel they have more important things to do, which is why no-one seriously uses either of them.

Just to give you an idea, Photoshop drop-shadow has single-handidly changed the entire web and graphic design fashion for nearly a decade, you can take any layer and add drop shadow - tweak the settings and then go back and change it any time you want, this combines with other effects to make an effects stack that is dynamically applied to layers and objects - this is a very simple principle and is so so incredibly vital I cant even begin to stress how much.

Re:Illustrator

> I major feature that was missing is non-destructive shape unions, intersections and differences.

Non-destructive intersection is now possible, it's called clipping. Other types are not supported by SVG.

> Next major feature is an effects stack

We're working on that. Hopefully 0.45 will have this.

Re:Illustrator

One possibility is to wait for newer versions of SVG. Many good things are being added.

Another possibility is to implement something on top of SVG but in SVG-compatible way. For example, this is how we implement star shapes missing in SVG. This is not always possible, and even when it is, we do this only if it's something simple and limited (i.e. would not require pervasive changes across all of our codebase) or when the need for the feature is really very urgent. I may be wrong but to me, non-destructive unions or intersections do not seem to fall into any of these categories.

On the other hand, we have plans to implement "path effects" (non-destructive effects on shapes and paths) on top of SVG. This is relatively easy to do. Plus, in 0.45 we should have support for SVG filters, thanks to Google SoC.

Re:Illustrator

Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator. Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?

I am not exactly an art guru, but I do use both Inkscape and Illustrator all the time. The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette (I use that in Illustrator a lot to save and reuse colors and gradients). Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.

I don't want to paint an overly grim picture of Inkscape, though. It's really quite good, and I am very eager to get my hands on this new version (but I'll wait for the debs).

Re:Illustrator

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK [w3.org]

It would have been a hideous omission not to include it in the standard, they'd never get anyone working in print to use SVGs without it.

Re:CMYK

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK [w3.org]

Actually, at the moment SVG doesn't support CMYK. However it is proposed that it will at some point. What you cited there was the proposed draft requirements from over four years ago. I think they might be getting close to finally putting 1.2 out, but even in the last rounds of finalizing SVG 1.1 they dropped things, so one mustn't count one's chickens before they're hatched.

In fact, back in April of 2005 they pulled back their draft 1.2 spec and replaced it with a simple placeholder [w3.org] stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.

Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

I can't get the release notes. The page keeps coming up blank. So I have to ask, does this version do anything for stability and memory usage? 0.43 is a beautiful, beautiful piece of Open Source software, but I can make that poor application slow to a crawl by playing with the font size & fill for a large chunk of text. I can send my whole computer into full-on swap frenzy by having Inkscape color-trace a bitmap & then playing with the points of one of the resulting layers.

I love Inkscape. It finally did what Sodipodi couldn't or wouldn't do. But right now it's this pretty, crashy thing-with-lots-of-potential. I'd consider stability, speed, and memory management to be huge potential features at this point. What's happening on that front?

Re:Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

Many crashes have been fixed in this version. As for the release notes, I can access them.

Verbatim from the wiki:

Speed

In addition to the Outline mode which makes it much easier to work with complex drawings, this version of Inkscape also provides significant speed improvements in many areas.

• Thanks to optimizations in the renderer, Inkscape's screen redraw is faster by at least 10%, and in some cases (such as complex stroked/dashed paths at high zooms) up to three times faster.
• Optimizations in the Node tool resulted in noticeable speed gains for node editing. Thus, switching to and from the Node tool (with a path selected), as well as selecting nodes in that tool, are now at least ten times faster than before. Other operations, including curve and node dragging and move/scale/rotate operations on multiple selected nodes, are much faster as well. This is especially important when working with complex paths; with these optimizations, paths containing several thousand nodes, though still slow, are much more usable.
• An optimization in the attribute setting method made operations such as moving multiple objects with arrow keys at least 30% faster compared to 0.43. This is especially noticeable when you are moving clones selected together with their original (e.g. a clone tiling), in which case Inkscape now works three to four times faster.
• Interface icons are now rendered in the background (from SVG source in share/icons/icons.svg) when Inkscape is idle, rather than waiting for all the icons in a menu to render the first time you pull it up. This eliminates the annoying delay when opening menus for the first time.
• Previously, zooming in to view a small portion of a path (especially big and complex path), there was a very noticeable slowdown and memory use increased dramatically. We optimized the renderer to only process the visible part of a path, and as a result the rendering speed is now almost the same at any zoom up to the maximum, providing up to 10-40 times speedup compared to the previous version (the closer is the zoom, the greater is the gain).
• The Path > Break Apart command is now dozens of times (up to 100x) faster for complex paths with thousands of subpaths.

bugfixes

• Reading a document with an incorrect namespace URI not only did not cause Inkscape to complain, but could also "pollute" Inkscape's internal namespace table, resulting in an "infection" of subsequently saved documents by the incorrect namespace. This is now fixed, but as a result, documents with incorrect namespace URIs will no longer load. You will have to edit them in a text editor to fix the namespaces.
• With newer versions of GTK, dragging with graphics tablet pen did not work in some tools and contexts (in particular, in Node and Rectangle tools). This is fixed.
• Scaling of objects with stroke in Selector used to cause undesired shifts of the scaled object, as well as scaling it in the dimension which was intended to remain untouched (e.g. slight change in width when you scale only height). All these problems are now fixed, both for interactive scaling by mouse and for numeric scaling via the Controls bar, and for both values of the "Scale stroke with objects" option. Among other things, this means that stroked objects no longer lose snapping on scale, and that the "Default scale origin" option in the Selector tool preferences finally works as designed. Caveat: There may still be problems if you scale a selection that contains objects with different stroke widths.
• Scaling of stroke now works for objects that didn't specify stroke-width; before, they always ended up with the default 1px stroke.
• The bounding box for text and flowed text objects did not include stroke width. This has been fixed.
• Stroke miterlimit on text objects was misinterpreted in absolute units instead of multiplies of stroke width (resulting in miter joins rendered as bevel).
• The

Ink Question

Could Inkscape be used to generate art for a videogame? Are there any libraries to render this stuff?

Terrible summary

Seriously, what's up with the summary? It explains what Inkscape is, so you don't have to go and find out, tells you what's happened, gives you information about the new features, has useful links for stuff that is relevant and that you might be interested in as a result.

This is not what I'm used to on slashdot.

Where are the editors?!

Inkscape versus Xara?

Since Xara has been opensourced and is freely available on Linux, the question arises: which is better? Is there really a big difference between them in terms of speed, features etc? Which one do you recommend?

I call bullshit

"innovative 'node sculpting'"

You mean like the way Flash has been handling it for years?

Glow Effect?

Can someone tell me how to do a glow effect? Its a gradiant where the core is either not filled or solid of the gradiant start color, then fades to the gradient stop color radially, outwards.
Imagine a physical sign, like on a buildingwith neon behind it. You can't see the neon, but you can see the glow on the wall behind the sign.

This is the one thing I can't figure out how to do. Mostly because of courners. If I peacie it todether, the corners never look even. (Not to mention a huge hassle!)

Donation?

Since this thread is being read by at least one of the developers, I want to say: thanks guys, you rock!.
I have recently founded a company with a few friends and Inkscape 0.44 came just in time, to address some issues
we were having editing large SVG's in 0.43. We badly needed the optimisations to the rendering engine as well
as outline mode.

We hope to make money on our product in a few months and would like to know if you take donations?.

Giving something in return for your excellent work would be nice, but we could not find the usual donation link on your site.

Anyway great work and thanks a lot :)

GIMP

I just wish the Inkscape developers could redesign the UI of GIMP...

Print support

Too bad I dont see any improvements to the printing capabilities in the release notes. Inkscape is really lacking in terms of printing.

Uninstaller?

Does this version have a proper uninstaller on Windows? 0.43 didn't.

Download Statistics

From the Inkscape Website:

June 29, 2006
Just one week after the 0.44 release our software was distributed to over 54,100 users through the SourceForge download servers. The largest share was from the Windows users, who totalled nearly 38,000 downloads. The next highest number was from the Mac users with 9,115 downloads. The Unix/Linux users scored 7,104 downloads.

I find it funny that we have all these people talking about how this will finally be their opportunity to ditch their lone Windows box because they have a viable alternative to Illustrator. And what platform got the largest number of downloads? Windows. Something about Windows users doing the most downloading of an Open Source project (aside from FireFox) seems odd, or funny to me. I'm not too surprised that Mac users came in second (We like not having to shell out for Illustrator too), but the fact that UNIX/Linux came in last is shocking.

Re:Tried it.

What's the problem with the SVG it produces? Just an issue with verbosity, or what?

Re:Tried it.

To be fair, most people never hand-edit AI files. It's more expected for SVG, though.

Inkscape _does_ let you manually reassign ids if you don't like the autogenerated ones, however.

Re:PDF Support

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat.

You heard wrong. :)

We are going to continue to improve our PDF support, but it's not a central part of our mission. Also, whatever PDF support we have is going to be largely limited to that subset of PDF functionality which is representable in SVG.

Re:PDF Support

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat.

Actually, it is the open source replacement for Duke Nukem Forever. It's an understandable mistake.

Re:Tried it.

A subject of a cross platform open source SVG designer comes up and you reccomend a product that doesn't produce SVG, is proprietary and only runs on windows as an alternative?

Come on now, give the astro turfing a rest.

Re:Tried it.

you wrote complex svg drawings in a simple xml editor? got a screen shot of this masterpiece?

you link to an MS app that can't output to SVG in an article about an application that is for greating SVG graphics?

I've been on slashdot for 8 years, and I never truely believed in astroturfing until your post.

Re:Memory usage dialog

(Speaking as the person who wrote the memory dialog)

There's a memory leak in the memory dialog's treeview widget. I've not been able to track it down yet (it may be a gtkmm issue), but I think your guess is roughly correct.

Re:What is the motivation behind this?

Here's hoping your just being sarcastic.

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

Is the mega SVG file size solved in this release?

Is that really a fault of Inkscape of is it just an attribute of using XML?

<reallyLongDescriptiveString>data</repeatingTheRea llyLongDescriptiveStringJustInCaseYouForgotWhatKin dOfElementThisIs>

Re:Test, crumple, throw, return to Illustrator.

> No way to stroke outside or inside a path instead of centered on a path?

SVG limitation, comments to W3C please

> No way to turn off the visibility of the guff that indicates the current selection so that I can tweak layout easily?

Preferences, Tools, Selector, Per-object selection cue: None

Anything else?

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

Have you tried saving as "Inkscape SVGZ" rather than "Inkscape SVG"? Raw SVG, being an XML dialect, is kinda verbose, so there's only so much we can do about that. SVGZ is gzip-compressed SVG, which is (slightly) more reasonable in filesize.

All that said, 20 MB is unusually large in my experience. What exactly do you have in mind when you say "medium-size"?

Wow to the moderators

Latest stable version: 0.43 Download Now!

Moderation: (1, Flamebait)

Just a little lower, we have another (similar) comment:

Banner on the site says "Last stable version: 0.43".

Moderation: (5, Funny).

The wonderful world of /. moderators...