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

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: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