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Inkscape 0.45 - A Pretty Blurry Release

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2007-02-05 16:53. Inkscape
Inkscape

The Inkscape community today announces the newest version of its vector graphic drawing software. Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter. Sponsored by Google's Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes, text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects to achieve the "feathered mask" effect.

Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug fixes have been included. A history dialog allows you to browse your change history. Many new extension effects are added including Pattern along Path and Color Effects. There have been performance improvements to rendering speed, on the order of 2-3% in general, and up to 5-10% for drawings using heavy transparency and/or radial gradients. Compositing quality is also improved through the removal of banding seen in gradients. See the Release Notes for full details, and then go try it out yourself.

Inkscape uses SVG

Submitted by Anonymous George (not verified) on Fri, 2007-02-09 10:06.

If you used a version of Inkscape that saved to SVG, then you should be able to view those files with any SVG viewer - Firefox, Batik, Adobe SVG viewer, etc. If those icons look busted in all of those, then it was the saving of the files that was busted, not the loading in a newer version.

That's one of the nice things about using a published standard for your file format - you have other options to verify that your hard work is actually saved in a viable and accurate manner.

And Inkscape, while already excellent, is still very much beta software. It improves release-by-release. It crashes rarely these days for me, even with horrific postscript imports or other complex diagrams. People file bugs, bugs get fixed.

On the flip side, if your icons were fine when loaded in an older version of Inkscape, I recommend that you reinstall that older version and export the icons in a different format. If you have a repeatable and demonstrateable issue, then file a bug report with the Inkscape folks. Complaining on forums doesn't get bugs fixed.

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