Mac Design Software News

Please support Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual working conference for the free software graphics application community. Developers from the full spectrum of graphics applications — image editors, photography, 3-D and 2-D animation, vector art, graphic design, typography — collaborate with each other on interoperability, push the state of the art in application functionality and user experience, and get important face-to-face interaction with users.

SVG Open 2010

The annual SVG Open conference is taking place from August 30 to September 1 in Paris. If you live close to the venue and are willing to represent Inkscape as either developer or designer, please register and submit a short abstract of your talk till June 9.

Inkscape project at Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

On May 27-30 annual Libre Graphics Meeting conference has taken place in Brussels. After several years of being underrepresented at the event Inkscape project finally featured many of its superheroes and rock stars: Johan Engelen, Jasper van de Gronde, Felipe Sanches, Tavmjong Bah, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Ivan Louette, Jon Philips, Jakub Steiner, Cedric Gemy and Andy Fitzsimon. Unfortunately, two other very important contributors, Jon Cruz and Donna Benjamin, couldn't make it.

Interview with Inkscape team, progress of the project

Libre Graphics World published an interview with Inkscape developers and contributors who worked on release of 0.48, Google Summer of Code 2010 projects and participated at Libre Graphics Meeting earlier this year. In the mean time some new features have already found their way to development tree for the next version. Thanks to Roland Meuband exchanging position of objects is now possible in Inkscape (via "Align and Distribute" dialog). Johan Engelen also started work on PowerStroke live path effect that will beyond all doubt attract type designers.

SVG Open 2010 in two weeks

While release preparations are full-steam (at packaging stage), we'd like to remind you that annual SVG Open conference is taking place in Paris (France) in just two weeks: August 30 to September 1. The conference traditionally attracts software and web developers, graphic designers, GIS specialists and creators of visualization solutions. This year Inkscape project will be represented by Tavmjong Bah who will demonstrate both upcoming v0.48 and some of Google Summer of Code 2010 projects. For the full list of talks please have a look here.

Inkscape used in schools

In the Los Altos School District in California, they have a Digital Design program to teach the students about graphics software and programming. For the vector graphics course they are teaching the students how to use Inkscape. Here is a gallery of art created by approximately 175 4th grade students of the seven schools that this course is being taught at. There is a link next to each of the images on the following page which will take you to the corresponding sub-gallery.

UniConvertor 1.1.5

sK1 team released new version of UniConvertor — a universal vector graphics conversion tool that Inkscape uses to open documents like CDR (Corel DRAW), WMF (Windows Metafiles) and so on. The new version features file managers integration on Windows and Linux, a simple user interface, support for embroidery files formats (just importing). Other changes involve major internal refactoring, better fonts handling and better color management. The Windows version contains a script that can be used to patch an existing installation of Inkscape to use new external version of UniConvertor.

First shot at Open Source Fashion extensions

During Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 Susan Spencer gave an interesting talk called "Open Source project to enable fashion design using open data formats". Having spoken to various community members during the conference, Susan then dived into Python programming and finally came up with proof-of-concept extensions for Inkscape that allow creating clothes pattern blocks. If you are interested in this further development of this project or maybe wish to participate, keep an eye on the blog. The project now has a new name, TMTP (tau meta tau physica), and there is a dedicated website in works.

Update on state of affairs

There's been several news piling up for last couple of weeks. First of all, About screen contest. The winner is theartcontinuum with this entry. We thank all participants of the contest for their invaluable creative contributions! The next news is about bug hunt. We did reach 300 points goal for this stage of release cycle indeed, so now we only need to disable some features that are not going to make it into 0.48 and release an alpha version. And the last news is a reminder that next week, May 27-30, there will be Libre Graphics Meeting conference in Brussels.

The Inkscape Community Announces 0.48 Release

After 9 months of development, Inkscape 0.48 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings a new Spray tool, multipath editing, superscripts and subscripts in text, as well as numeric control of text kerning, tracking, rotation and more, several new extensions for web developers and first take at adaptive user interface. Check out the full release notes for more information about new exciting features and improvements, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.