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."

Comments

No Packages yet

[vonFinkelstien]

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

Packages only availible on SourceForge

[onlysolution]

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

[Bryce]

'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

Re:PDF Support

[MenTaLguY]

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:i dunno

[treeves]

I've used it since 0.41 and have been using the development pre-0.44 releases, no problem, WinXP on a ThinkPad. Even 0.43 is pretty cool. 0.44 adds some more functionality. Try it. You'll like it. It looks like the guy who reported it is Bulia Byak, one of the main developers. It's one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net.

Re:Tried it.

[MenTaLguY]

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:Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

[msloan]

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

Re:Memory usage dialog

[MenTaLguY]

(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:Firefox Users

[MenTaLguY]

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:Illustrator

[AC-x]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

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:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

> 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:Did anyone see this?!?!

[ScislaC]

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.

Re:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

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:Red arrows?

[TheModelEskimo]

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.

Re:CMYK

[mughi]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

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 stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.