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.

The Inkscape community announced the release of Inkscape 0.44.1 today. This bugfix version fixes several weeks of work by the community in order to fix some crashes on windows, Mac OS X, and other packaging issues which have come up from our last successfule release, 0.44 which
introduced substantial features like graphical layers, clipping and masking support, and native PDF export with transparency.

The Inkscape community today officially released the latest version of its vector graphic drawing software. Inkscape 0.44 adds many new features, is faster and more usable, better supports SVG, is translated into more languages (17 on last count), and adds a lot of polish and refinement.

Yet another review from Softpedia:
"I’ve known about Inkscape for some time now, but for a reason I can't figure out I haven't used it. Perhaps the reason is that I was afraid of it, because I'm not much of an artist. Actually I'm a newbie regarding vector graphics so maybe this is another part of the problem. I have pretty good knowledge of photo-editing but this is a different thing so I guess I had to start from scrap. For this task I had to choose from a variety of software and the winner was Inkscape

From Inkscape Homepage.... Normally we tend to post news items regarding what new features are showing up in our repository. As people can see, news has been a bit thin for the past couple months... but don't let this fool you. ;)

New Features or improvements added after 0.43 was released:

Outline mode - an oft-requested feature that allows toggling an alternate view mode to see only the outlines of all shapes. That would be as opposed to normal view mode which shows fills an strokes.

Selected style indicator - this indicator is a bit more powerful than implementations you'll see in other software. Inkscape's can give insight into more than color. It can tell you if it's a pattern, radial or linear gradient, if there are multiple styles selected, it can mix multiple flat fill colors, all opacity controls are right there, and much more.

The Inkscape community today releases Inkscape 0.43, an Open Source Scalable
Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing tool available for Unix/Linux variants,
Mac OS X, and Windows.

The focus of this release is on the exciting new features sponsored by Google
through their Summer of Code (SoC) program which provided funding for four
individuals to contribute to Inkscape. The primary additions this release are:

• Connectors: A new indispensable connector tool implements creation,
  editing, and auto-routing (object-avoiding) of connector lines between
  objects. It is indispensable for drawing diagrams. (Google SoC project)

Latest issue of Red Hat Magazine features an introduction to Inkscape and an interview with two of Red Hat's designers on what they like about Inkscape. Inkscape is as you know the vector graphics drawing program for GNOME which utilizes the w3c standarized SVG format. So for your weekly dose of Inkscape news go read the article.

July 26th, 2005 - The Inkscape community today announced the release of Inkscape 0.42, a cross-platform Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing tool.

Inkscape 0.42 is the most feature-filled release to date, with an exceptional number of major and minor new features, usability improvements, and bug fixes. While some of the new features simply fill long-standing functionality gaps, others are truly revolutionary. Inkscape 0.42 is one step closer to full SVG compliance.

Okay, this is just going to be a quickie picture-tutorial, because I've got a very long text-based one coming out "any day now." Meanwhile, I just want to share the joy that is working with Inkscape.

For those that don't know, Inkscape is a free and open source vector image editor, much like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Vector editors differ from photo editors in that your drawings always remain a bunch of parts that get rendered, rather than being saved as pixels. For example, if you draw a circle, the file will contain information about the position and radius of the circle, as well as its color and outline rather than thousands of little dots representing the image.

Read the rest

In this story we'll do a quick primer on how you can get up to speed on Inkscape. Along the way, we'll explore situations where a vector based graphic would be better suited for a job than a raster based picture. In spite of not being an XML or web development expert I think SVG will be important in the future. Read on and you'll see why.

Jakub 'Jimmac' Steiner, GNOME artist extraordinaire, have done a long and detailed review of the current release of Inkscape. Jimmac comes out mostly positive this time around, and it seems the Inkscape hackers might be able to get Inkscape to a level where they can lure Jimmac and other artists away from Illustrator in the upcomming months. In related news, it seems John Stracke might be taking over maintainership of Sodipodi from Lauris Kaplinski.

OSNews has more information about what's new on Inkscape 0.40, coupled with screenshots.

The Inkscape community is proud to announce the release 0.40 of
Inkscape, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing
Tool." This release includes three majorly requested new capabilities:
Layers, Text-on-Path, and Bitmap tracing. In addition, there are many
minor features, a number of usability enhancements, three new tutorials,
and hundreds of bug fixes. This is by far the most feature-packed
release the project has had. This is all due to the strong developers
that have contributed countless hours on Inkscape 0.40.

In a very short time, the Inkscape project has developed into a flexible, solid, and user friendly vector drawing program. To what does the project owe its success? Bryce Harrington, one of the main developers behind Inkscape, reveals in this interview his thoughts on project management and keeping the focus on the big issues in this dot news article.

This week Inkscape celebrated it's first Birthday. Congratulations to the Inkscape developers on all the progress they have made. The next release of Inkscape version 0.40 is due out in the next couple of weeks and as always testers are encouraged to help out in any way they can.