Filter effects is a part of [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html SVG specification] and worked on in Inkscape as part of [[Googles_Summer_Of_Code]] 2006 and [http://www.coss.fi/web/coss/developers/summercode COSS's Kesäkoodi] 2007

For more info on this Kesäkoodi project, see [http://fedev.blogspot.com/ the project blog] or [http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/kiirala/kesakoodi/application.html the project plan].

Also, there is an accepted proposal in GSoC 2007 for implementing the user interface for filter effects.

== What works in Inkscape 0.45 ==

Basic support for filter effects is included in 0.45 release. At the moment only gaussian blur is implemented, so while specifications define a bunch of other effects and some other programs can handle them, Inkscape cannot render them yet. Also, tools for editing other types of filters do not exist yet.

Gaussian blur can be applied to an object by using Blur slider in Fill and stroke dialog.

In Inkscape preferences dialog there is a setting controlling the filter rendering quality. Even low quality often produces good enough rendering quality, but it takes a lot less time to render. When exporting an image from Inkscape, the best quality is always used, regardless of this setting.

== Filter Effect support in trunk ==
=== Status of the filter primitives===
{| border="1"
! primitive
! renderer
! user interface
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feBlendElement feBlend]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feColorMatrixElement feColorMatrix]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feComponentTransferElement feComponentTransfer]
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feCompositeElement feComposite]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feConvolveMatrixElement feConvolveMatrix]
|style="background-color:#ddffbb;"| '''Partial implementation'''
TODO:
*edgeMode behaviour
*produce resolution-independent results
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feDiffuseLightingElement feDiffuseLighting]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feDisplacementMapElement feDisplacementMap]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feFloodElement feFlood]
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feGaussianBlurElement feGaussianBlur]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feImageElement feImage]
|style="background-color:#ffffbb;"| '''Work in progress''' - see [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/21524]
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feMergeElement feMerge]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feMorphologyElement feMorphology]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feOffsetElement feOffset]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feSpecularLightingElement feSpecularLighting]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feTileElement feTile]
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|style="background-color:#ffbbbb;"| '''Not implemented'''
|-
! [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/filters.html#feTurbulenceElement feTurbulence]
|style="background-color:#ddffbb;"| '''Partial implementation''' - see [http://fedev.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-can-has-turbulence.html],[http://fedev.blogspot.com/2007/07/introducing-fecomposite.html],[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/21525]
|style="background-color:#aaffbb;"| '''Implemented'''
|-
|}

=== general bugs ===
UI
* Connecting a Filter with itself, connect it to one of the reserved keywords.[https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1762574&group_id=93438&atid=604306]

Renderer
* StrokePaint and FillPaint input images are not supported. [https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1762588&group_id=93438&atid=604306]

* Result from filter is not cut to the shape of filter effects area. Note that filter effects area can be a rotated rectangle or parallelogram when viewed in display coordinates.

* There are many parts in filtering code marked with TODO. Many of these mark unhandled corner cases and places, where the filters generate almost but not quite correct results.

== What next? ==

Now that this one filter works, most of the basic framework needed for filtering exists.

These are the basic steps to create a new filter primitive:
* Write a new document model level class for this filter primitive (see src/sp-gaussian-blur.cpp) - note that while there are basic implementations for many filter primitives, they do need plenty of changes.
* Write a renderer for this filter primitive (see src/display/nr-filter-gaussian.cpp)
* Add a pointer to a function returning an instance of the renderer class to function Filter::_create_constructor_table in file src/display/nr-filter.cpp
(this is likely not an exhaustive list)

Before new filter primitives can be useful, there has to be an user interface for applying them to shapes. A really good thing would also be an UI for creating filters out of filter primitives.

: See [[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1628343&group_id=93438&atid=604309 1628343]] for my filter UI suggestion - [[User:Mauve|Mauve]] 01:44, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

== Mockups of Filter editing and related dialogs ==

Presentation of new Fill and Stroke dialog where user can easily access most frequent actions like changing Blend modes, Blurring and Opacity of an object and select filter for an object or group of objects WITHOUT ability of accessing editing of the same.

[[Image:Fill_and_stroke.png]]

Changing of effect parameters and building sets of same can be done in specialized editor. Maybe next step in pushing ease of effect use further could be loading of contributed sets of effects and their parameters from file user had made himself or downloaded according to his preference from Effect library hosted somewhere on net (inkscape.org?!).

[[Image:Filter_edit_dialog.png]]

Possible benefits of this approach:

- '''Speed-ups''' - no need to redraw canvas for every single effect parameter tweaking

- '''Effect library''' - like noted above; SVG effects can be very hard to deal with for a designer/illustrator without technical background. This way developers can make a small set of commonly used effects like '''''drop shadow, outer/inner glow, etc'''''. Learning curve for such (I think targeted) user will be shorter because he/she will eventually catch up with internal way of dealing with effects by doing simple changes on occasion.

Another possible mock-up of the filters dialogue: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/INKSCAPE_filters_dialogue.svg

-using extra windows to tweak effect parameters (its good for effects with 1 parameter, but most have at least 2. hmm)
[[Category:Developer_Documentation]]

Filter effects internals

2007-12-12T17:25:19Z

Kiirala:

This page describes the internal workings of Inkscape Filter effects subsystem.

== Overview ==

From Filter effects viewpoint, Inkscape is essentially three-tiered system. The tiers are XML representation, SVG document and SVG renderer.

XML representation level is merely an representation of XML tree of the document. It contains XML nodes, which have attributes, content, children etc. At this level these nodes and whatever content they have, don't have any special meaning. Inkscape XML representation layer could be used for any type of XML document, not just SVG.

SVG document layer builds upon the XML layer. This layer gives meaning to XML node names, node attributes, node content etc. Mostly, nodes are handled by different classes depending on the name of the node. For example, nodes named feOffset are handled by SPFeOffset class, which resides in src/sp-feoffset.*

Main tasks for SVG document layer are reading essential parameters from XML tree, parsing parameter values read from XML tree, writing out internal state to XML node and initializing SVG renderer classes.

SVG renderer produces bitmap images from the SVG graphics. Again, there are own classes for most different node names. For example, feOffset node is handled by NR::FilterOffset class, which resides in src/display/nr-filter-offset.*

Note that Inkscape uses two types of classes here: SVG document layer uses GTK style classes, which don't make use of C++ object oriented programming functionality, but are usable in plain C. SVG renderer in turn uses C++ classes.

== Filters in document layer ==

In document layer, the classes responsible for filter effects are SPFilter, SPFilterPrimitive and it's subclasses. Each of SPFilterPrimitive's subclasses handles one type of filter primitive. There is also related code in SPItem, SPStyle, NRArenaShape, NRArenaGroup and NRArenaImage.

=== Reading parameters from XML tree ===

The build method of a filter primitive class should read all possible parameters, that are special for that filter primitive. For example, sp_feOffset_build calls sp_object_read_attr for parameters dx and dy. Any parameters that are common for all filter primitives, should be read in build-method for SPFilterPrimitive, which is superclass for all filter primitive classes.

Note that the build method doesn't need to make any attempt to handle any contents, the read attributes may have. It is handled by the set-method, which is described in next paragraph.

=== Parsing parameters read from XML tree ===

When the parameters in XML tree are modified or read by build method, the set method for corresponding document layer object gets called. This method receives the name and content of the parameter and should set object's internal state according to these values.

=== Writing out XML nodes ===

The write function in filter primitive class should write the relevant parts of object's internal state to given node. Note that many filter primitives don't do this, but instead just duplicate the contents of their XML node. For some examples how do do this right, see sp-shape.cpp or sp-filter.cpp.

=== Initializing SVG renderer classes ===

Each filter primitive class should have build_renderer method, which will add correct type of filter primitive to the filter renderer object and give correct settings for created filter primitive.

=== SPItem ===

Filter renderer uses item bounding box for its calculations, this information is set in sp_item_update in sp-item.cpp.

Also in this file contains sp_item_write_transform, which handles transforming items. Some transformations, like scaling a rectangle, can be done by embedding transform into object's properteries (i.e. changing rectangle width and height) instead of writing out normal transformation. If an item has a filter set, this might give odd behaviour, so this method checks for set filters before embedding transforms.

=== SPStyle ===

Filter effect applied to an object can be considered as a part of object style and in Inkscape codebase it is a natural place to handle such object property.

SPStyle can locate the filter referenced by an SVG item, and provides a pointer to corresponding SPFilter object.

=== NRArenaShape, -Group and -Image ===

While these are renderer level classes, they contain filtering code, that interfaces document level and renderer level.

Here, in set_style method for each class, if the SVG item references some filter, the corresponding SPFilter is fetched from SPStyle and a NR::Filter object is constructed from it.

Specifically, the set_style method calls sp_filter_build_renderer, which will initialize the filter renderer (NR::Filter object).

== Filter effects renderer ==

The filter effects renderer is somewhat more complicated than the document level. The main components are NR::Filter, NR::FilterSlot, NR::FilterUnits and filter primitive renderers, which are NR::FilterPrimitive subclasses.

=== NR::Filter ===

NR::Filter is the main interface to filter effects renderer internals for rest of Inkscape renderer and document level filter effect classes.

=== NR::FilterSlot ===

Temporary images used in rendering the filter effect are stored in 'image slots'. Slots are referenced to by integers. Positive numbers are free to be used for user-defined temporary images. Negative numbers in turn are reserved for special images like SourceGraphic. Each slot may contain one bitmap image.

Slot numbers are created in document level, according to temporary image names given in SVG file. Each user-defined name receives own integer, unique inside that filter, and each SVG defined name is mapped to corresponding pre-defined negative number. See sp_filter_*_image_name in src/sp-filter.cpp and sp_filter_primitive_read in src/display/sp-filter-primitive.cpp for further info.

Each input image name defined in SVG also has a symbolical name like NR::NR_FILTER_SOURCEGRAPHIC, so that developer doesn't need to remember, which negative integer corresponds to which input image. There's also a special value NR::NR_FILTER_SLOT_NOT_SET, which means that input image to be used is not defined in SVG file. If this is the case, the output from previous filter or SourceGraphic is used, per SVG specifications. See src/display/nr-filter-types.h for these names.

=== NR::FilterUnits ===

FilterUnits is a helper class to simplify using different coordinate systems and units in filter effect rendering. Essentially NR::Filter::render initializes a FilterUnits object with information about object's SVG bounding box, current object space to screen coordinates transformation matrix, desired filtering resolution and such. After this, different parts of filtering code like FilterSlot::set and filter primitive renderers can use information derived from information stored in FilterUnits.

This is essential part in making rotating and shearing filtered SVG items work. Many of the filter primitives use lengths, which are defined along object's x- and y-axis. Take for example gaussian blur, for which one can define different blur radius along x- and y-axis. Now, when these items are rotated and/or sheared, object's axis may not point any more to same direction as the axis of the bitmap image being rendered. It wouldn't be feasible to implement the required functionality in all filter primitives, this applies to, so the input image is first transformed to such an coordinate system, where the object's axis are to same direction as image axis.

FilterUnits has functions that provide FilterSlot with necessary transformation matrices to transform input image to a coordinate system, that all filters primitives know how to use and back to original coordinate system.

A filter primitive can indicate, it needs input where the image axis point to same direction as object axis, by returning TRAIT_PARALLER from get_input_traits.

=== Filter primitive renderers ===

Filter primitive renderers are the workhorses of filter effects rendering. Each renderer can render one of the filter primitives specified in SVG.

The basic workflow for rendering a filter primitive is
* Fetch input images from FilterSlot received as parameter
* Read pixel data from these images and write filter result to a new image
* Save the result image to FilterSlot

The filter primitive renderer can use FilterUnits object it has received as a parameter for various tasks related to lengths and coordinate systems. A couple examples:
* FilterOffset uses primitive units to input image coordinates transformation matrix to find out, by how many pixels it must transform the image, when it knows the length in object's coordinate system.
* FilterTurbulence uses the filter effects area transformed to input image coordinates to find out, to how big area it should render to.

== NR::Filter initialization ==

This is a brief explanation on how NR::Filter (filter effects renderer) objects are constructed.

SPFilter has a single method sp_filter_build_renderer, which will initialize given renderer object (NR::Filter) to a correct state. Calling this method is all that needs to be done in those three nr-arena-* classes to set the correct filter renderer state. This method takes in the NR::Filter object instead of returning one, because this way that object can be reserved and freed on the same level in code. Also, this makes it easier to re-use the object instead of allocating new objects.

The inside workings of sp_filter_build_renderer are as follows: each filter primitive (SPFilterPrimitive subclasses) has a build_renderer virtual function that will add the correct NR::FilterPrimitive object in the filter renderer. Before doing any filter specific initialization, this function should call sp_filter_primitive_renderer_common, which will do the part of initialization, which is common for all filter primitives.

== Modification signals for filters ==

This is explanation on how different parts of document tree are notified of changes to filter primitives. This is done so that the display can be updated as the filters are modified.

As the underlying XML representation of the drawing is modified, the corresponding document level objects are notified of the change. Let's suppose, that the changed value was stdDeviation in feGaussianBlur. For the SPGaussianBlur object, this will show as call to sp_gaussianBlur_set method, with key=SP_ATTR_STDDEVIATION and 'value' containing the new value.

After modifying its internal state according to new values, the _set method should pass the update notification onwards - this will allow objects using this filter to update their own state. As for now, this happens by calling ::requestModified(SP_OBJECT_MODIFIED_FLAG) on the filter primitive's parent (which should be SPFilter). This may not be the best way to do this, though.

Filters are referenced from object style. When SPStyle object is built, it subscribes for update notifications from SPFilter it references (if any). Now when ::requestModified is called on SPFilter, these update notifications are also called (eventually, as requestModified only schedules modification event, instead of executing the event immediately).

The SPStyle object in turn knows, which object it's part of - these objects are the actual drawable objects, to which the filters are applied to. SPStyle propagates the modification event to that object, which in turn applies the modifications to its internal state and schedules redraw for itself.

2007-07-24T11:37:03Z

Kiirala: Added 'status of filter primitives' list

Release notes/0.46

2007-07-08T11:54:32Z

Kiirala: /* New filters supported */

=Inkscape 0.46=
'''(not released yet)'''

=Speed and interactivity=

* In this version, Inkscape starts using the [http://www.cairographics.org cairo] library for rendering. It is now used for '''outline mode''' display which, thanks to using cairo and other optimizations, redraws '''faster by about 25%'''. More impressive are memory savings: thanks to cairo, in outline mode Inkscape now takes only about '''50% of the memory''' used by 0.45 for the same file.

* '''Smart redraw directionality:''' With complex images and/or on slow computers, you may have noticed that Inkscape redraws the screen image in horizontal strips, and these strips are painted sequentially top to bottom. Now this direction is automatically changed based on where your mouse cursor is. In particular, if mouse is closer to the bottom of the area to redraw, strips will be painted in the bottom-to-top order. This significantly improves the responsiveness and interactivity in some situations. For example, when you are node-editing the bottom part of a complex path, the entire path needs to be redrawn on each change, but now this redraw starts from the bottom and therefore the you see the effect of your changes at once - i.e. while screen redraw may still lag behind your mouse movement, this lag is less noticeable.

* '''Faster blur''' for exporting and high quality on-screen rendering: Inkscape now uses an IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter for blurring with large radius. This greatly improves the speed of blur redraw at high zooms or in high-resolution export (or simply with very large blur radius). On the other hand, the results are an approximation to a true Gaussian blur, so a drawing may look slightly different from the mathematically precise blur (usually the differences are far from visible, though). This code is mainly based on: ''Recursive Gaussian Derivative Filters'' by L.J. van Vliet, I.T. Young and P.W. Verbeek (see the source code for more detailed references).

* '''Moving the cursor around''' in a file with large and complex paths has become much snappier and more responsive. Previously, in extreme cases Inkscape could freeze for seconds while catching up with the mouse cursor; such delays are now eliminated.

* Several improvements make '''canvas panning and scrolling''' smoother and more interactive in complex slow-rendering documents:

:* When panning by the middle mouse button, Inkscape no longer attempts to redraw the canvas while your mouse button is pressed. Any redrawing only happens after you release the mouse. As a result, the newly revealed parts of the canvas are somewhat more "dirty" but the '''panning is smoother than before''', with few if any "hiccups".

:* Previously, if you start panning with middle button while Inkscape is still redrawing screen in a complex drawing, panning sometimes completely failed or moved canvas just a little step. Now it is '''guaranteed to pan the canvas all the way''' from mouse-press point to mouse-release point in any case, even if sometimes it fails to show the intermediate positions.

:* When pressing and holding Ctrl+arrows to scroll canvas, Inkscape normally accelerates scrolling so that each next scrolling step is bigger than the previous. Previously, in complex drawings this acceleration sometimes got interrupted, which made scrolling annoyingly bumpy and slow. Now this is fixed so that '''scrolling is smoothly accelerated''' even in a slow-rendering document.

:* The default '''starting speed and acceleration''' of Ctrl+arrows scrolling are slightly increased. (They are both settable in Preferences.)

=Tools=

==Paint Bucket tool==

The new Paint Bucket tool works exactly as you would expect: click in any area bounded on all sides and it will '''fill it with color'''. Being a vector tool, however, Inkscape's Paint Bucket just creates a new ''path'' that "fills in" the area in which you clicked.

It is important to note that the tool is '''perceptual''', not geometric. That is, when looking for the boundaries around the point you clicked, it takes for such boundaries any ''visible'' color changes. This means that filling will stop at gradients, blurs, and even the color boundaries in imported bitmaps, but will ignore any paths or other objects that are fully (or almost) transparent or for any other reason do not stand out from the background. In short, it will work exactly as if you were filling a rasterized version of your image in a bitmap editor like Photoshop or GIMP - but will give you a vector object to work with.

For example, now you can scan a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill all its cells with colors even without tracing the bitmap first. This is a very convenient and interactive way of digitizing your paper drawings, making the '''traditional bitmap tracing unnecessary''' in many cases.

Internally, the tool works by performing a bitmap-based flood fill on a rendered version of the visible canvas, then tracing the resulting fill using [[potrace]] and placing the traced path into the document.

It places the rendered path onto the current layer, so you can have a layer on top (for example, "Inks") and select the layer below ("Colors") and do the fills so that they always appear below the Inks.

The '''resolution''' of the bitmap image used to perform the trace is dependent upon your '''current zoom level''' -- the more zoomed in to an area that you are, the higher the resolution of the bitmap-based flood fill. So, if you are got a fill that is too imprecise, has rough corners, or don't go into small nooks and appendices where it is supposed to go, just undo, zoom in closer and repeat filling from the same point. Conversely, if the fill leaks out through a small gap, zoom out to make the gap less visible and fill again.

Like all object-creating tools, the Paint Bucket may use the '''last-set style''' for the objects it creates (this is the default), or it can use its own '''fixed style'''. You can switch between these modes on this tool's page in Inkscape Preferences (Ctrl+Shift+P).

In the tool's '''Controls bar''':

* '''Tolerance''' (set in per cent units) controls how large must be color difference at a point (compared to the initial click point) to stop the fill. Zero tolerance means only the area of strictly the same color will be filled; the larger the tolerance, the easier it will be for the fill to leak into adjacent different-color areas. The default value is 10%.

* You can control the amount of '''inset/outset''' to be applied to the created fill path. Setting a positive outset causes fill paths to be larger than the filled bitmap area (good for eliminating anti-aliasing errors), while setting a negative outset causes the path to be smaller. This works the same as the Outset and Inset path commands.

* Paint Bucket's perceptual fill can use either all visible colors or specific color '''channels'''. You can restrict the fill algorithm to the following channels:
** Red
** Green
** Blue
** Hue
** Saturation
** Lightness
** Alpha

* An '''auto gap''' setting. When enabled, Paint Bucket will try to close any gaps in the area boundaries that would normally cause the fill to spill out of the desired area. There are four settings to auto gap:
** None
** Small (fill gaps up to 2 pixels in size)
** Medium (4 pixels)
** Large (6 pixels)

* A '''style swatch''' on the far right of the bar shows the style that will be used for the next fill object you create.

The tool's '''shortcuts''' are:

* '''Single click''' performs filling from the click point.

* '''Shift+click''' performs filling from the click point and then unions the resulting path with the selected path. This way, if your first attempt did not fill in all of the desired area, you can Shift+click the remaining corner to fill it in separately and combine the result with the result of the previous fill.

* '''Ctrl+click''' on an object simply changes that object's fill to the current fill color of the tool, and '''Shift+Ctrl+click''' changes the stroke to the current stroke color.

* '''Click and drag''' performs filling from '''all of the points''' that you pass while dragging (you will see your path visualized by a red line). From each point, the fill spreads to the neighbors with the colors similar to that point - in other words, it's like clicking with this tool at each point of the drag path and unioning the results. This lets you easily fill an area occupied by a gradient or blur - just drag from the darkest to the lightest points in the area you want to fill.

* '''Alt+click and drag''' works similarly to simple drag, except from each point of the drag path, the fill spreads to the neighbors (if any) with the colors similar to the ''initial point'' (the point where you started the drag). This lets you fill a series of similarly-colored yet separated areas (for example, multiple cells in a cartoon) by starting the drag in one of those areas, and alt+dragging the tool through all the other areas.

==Gradient Tool==
Stops in gradients can be added, deleted, and edited on-canvas now.
*Stops can be added by '''double clicking''' or by '''Ctrl+Alt+Click''' on the gradient line.
*Stops can be deleted by '''Ctrl+Alt+Click''' on a stop or by the '''Del''' key for all the selected stop(s).
:*When you delete an end stop, the nearest intermediate stop becomes the new end stop of the gradient (without moving - i.e., the gradient span becomes shorter).
:*When you delete an end stop and there are no intermediate stops, the object will be painted with a solid fill taken from the color & opacity of the remaining stop.
*More than one stop can be selected at a time by '''Shift+click'''.
:*Can be moved together if next to each other.
:*Can be deleted at the same time.
:*When you have one of the '''gradient handles selected''', its style (color and opacity) is reflected by the selected style indicator (left of the statusbar) and the Fill&Stroke dialog. Previously, opacity of a gradient handle was reflected as fill-opacity and stroke-opacity; now it is reflected as '''master opacity''' (the "O:" spinbutton in the selected style indicator, the "Master opacity" slider in Fill&Stroke). This makes it much easier to view and change opacity of gradient handles using only the selected style indicator in the statusbar.
:*When multiple gradient stops are selected, the selected style indicator (in the statusbar) displays and controls the averaged color and opacity of the selected stops.
*If the selected object(s) have gradient in fill or stroke, the '''selected style indicator''' in the bottom-left corner of the editing window now displays a '''live gradient preview''' prefixed by '''R''' or '''L''' to indicate Radial or Linear gradients (instead of displaying "L Gradient" or "R Gradient" text labels as before). Also, this and other similar widget now use italic font face to indicate None and bold to indicate Unset.

==Calligraphy tool: Engraver's Toolbox ==

Several new features were added to the Calligraphic pen to make
Inkscape capable of the ancient art of '''line
engraving'''. Traditional engraving is a very labour-intensive
process, and while for a long time it was the only practical way
of reproducing lifelike images in black-and-white print, about a
century ago it was almost completely displaced by automatic
halftone screens. However, line engravings have their
characteristic charm, and there's no reason not to try to
resurrect this art form with the help of Inkscape.

A brief visual guide to the new functionality can be seen on
these screenshots:

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving1.png

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving2.png

===Tracking a guide path with Ctrl===

One of the most common operations in line engraving is
'''hatching''' (or sometimes ''cross-hatching'' when several
hatching grids cross): filling a space with many parallel
straight or variously curved lines (usually of varying width to
represent a gradual shading). You could try to achieve a similar
effect with e.g. path interpolation (blending), but it is rather
cumbersome and limited; manual drawing of hatch lines, on the
other hand, is tedious and nearly impossible to do
uniformly. Now Inkscape provides "assisted hatching" by
'''tracking a guide path''', allowing you to hatch quickly and
uniformly and at the same time giving you sufficient manual
control over the process.

Here's how to do this. First, select the '''guide path''' that
you will track. It may be another calligraphic stroke, any path
or shape, or even a letter of a text object. Then switch to
Calligraphic pen, select the desired parameters (line width,
angle, fixation etc.) and, before starting to draw, press
Ctrl. You will see a gray '''track circle''' centered at your
mouse pointer and touching the closest point on the selected
guide path. (If you have no guide path selected, a statusbar
message will tell you to select it.)

Now move your mouse close to the guide path, so that the track
circle radius is equal to the desired spacing of your hatch
pattern, and start drawing along the guide path. At that moment,
the radius of the circle gets locked; now the circle slides
along the guide path - and the actual stroke is drawn by the
center of the tracking circle, ''not'' by your mouse point. As
a result, you are getting a smooth stroke going parallel to the
guide path and always at the same distance from it.

When the stroke is ready, release your mouse button (or lift
your tablet pen) but '''do not let go of the Ctrl key''' because
as long as you have it pressed, the tool remembers the hatch
spacing you set when you started drawing. Now, you have just
created a new stroke and, as usual with Inkscape tools, it gets
selected instead of what was selected before. In our case, this
means that the newly drawn stroke itself becomes the new guide
path. Next, you can draw a second stroke along the first one,
then a third one along the second, etc. Eventually you can fill
any desired space with uniform hatching.

Alternatively, if you uncheck "Select new path" in the Calligraphy tool preferences, newly created strokes will not be selected, so your original guide path will be kept selected. In this mode, Inkscape will increase the tracking distance after each created stroke so that you can create uniformly spaced hatching by tracking a single guide path.

The attachment to the guide path is not absolute. If you stray
your mouse pointer far enough from the guide path, you will be
able to tear it off (the track circle turns from green to red)
and move freely. This is intentional; this feature allows you,
for example, to continue drawing a stroke past the end of a
guide stroke, thus making your hatching cover a wider area than
the initial guide path. Special care is taken to make such
tearing off as smooth as possible and to suppress violent jerks,
but this is not always possible; the general advice is to not
try to hatch too fast. If jerking and unintended tearoffs still
bother you, try increasing the Mass parameter.

Also, special code is in place to prevent flipovers - accidental
jumps to the other side of the guide path. Brief flipovers are
suppressed, but if you intentionally go over to the other side
and stay there, eventually Inkscape will obey and your tracking
stroke will also flip over to follow you.

Tracking a guide also allows some slight feedback by gradually
changing the tracking distance in response to your drawing
behavior. Thus, if you're consistently trying to draw closer or
farther from the guide than the current tracking distance, the
distance will correspondingly decrease or increase, so you will
get a hatching that is slightly spacing in or out. (The effect
is very slight, however, so as not to become a nuisance.) Also,
note that since tracking follows the edge of the stroke, strokes
of varying width (such as those tracing background, see below)
will result in gradual bending of the hatching pattern as you
proceed.

===Tracing background by stroke width===

There is a new toggle button on the Calligraphy tool's controls
bar, '''Trace background'''. When on, the width of your pen
depends on the lightness of the background under the stroke in
each point, so that white translates into the minimum stoke
width (1) and black translates to the maximum (which is set by the
Width parameter). This can work alone or in combination with
pressure sensitivity, depending on whether the "Use pressure" button
is also toggled.

This feature allows you to not only hatch over an imported
bitmap image or any drawing, but to do so automatically
reproducing the highlights and shades of the background with
your strokes becoming lighter and heavier as needed.

===Thinning/thickening of paths with Alt===

Even with background tracing, the visible lightness/darkness of
a hatching may not correspond too well to your artistic
intention. Also, with guide tracking, the ends of strokes are
often far from ideal - they may be too blunt or have unsightly
bends or blobs. This is where the new thinning/thickening
function is indispensable.

While in the Calligraphy tool, press Alt. You will see a
orange-colored circle indicating the area that will be affected;
this area is 10 times the size of the pen when you draw (so you
can change it by changing the Width parameter on the
toolbar).

Now select some or all of the paths or groups containing paths (as with most
tools in Inkscape, only selected objects are changed), for
example by pressing Ctrl+A, and start '''Alt+dragging''' over
them. Where you touch them, paths become thinner, as if
melting away, up until total disappearance. Conversely,
'''Shift+Alt+dragging''' makes selected paths thicker in places
where you touch them.

As with the Calligraphy pen itself, the '''size''' of the
thinning/thickening area by default depends on zoom; simply
zooming in or out is often easier than adjusting the width if
you want to cover a smaller or larger area.

The '''force''' of
the effect also depends on zoom (or in other words, it stays the
same when measured by screen pixels, same as when you move and
object by Alt+arrow keys). Between the center and the edge of the circle, the force decreases along a '''bell-like curve''', so that the action of the tool on paths is always smooth. Also, if you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, the force of thinning/thickening also
depends on '''pen pressure'''; tapping slightly produces gradual
lightening or darkening of your drawing, while pressing heavily
will work as a kind of quick "erasing" (with Alt) or
"blackening" (with Alt+Shift).

Of course, thinning/thickening is useful '''not only for calligraphic strokes'''. You can select any simple path (such as
an ellipse converted to path) and start '''sculpting''' it,
spawning smooth treacle-like appendages with Alt+Shift and
melting them away with Alt. Unlike the "node sculpting" mode in
the Node tool, however, this does not require adding new nodes
to the shape or selecting any nodes. This new functionality is
somewhat similar to the "Pucker" and "Bloat" tools in the latest
versions of Adobe Illustrator, except that in Inkscape it works
softer and is easier to control.

'''Known problems with thinning/thickening:''' (1) it is rather
slow; (2) it quickly eats memory; and (3) it is sometimes buggy
- thin calligraphic strokes may suddenly disappear or change
their shape drastically as you're Alt+stroking them. For (3), it
helps to undo the bad change and try again with less pressure on
the pen - if you do your thinning in several light touches
instead of one heavy press, usually you will be able to get the
desired result without the buggy behavior. In general, however,
all these problems stem from the livarot library that we use for
geometric manipulation of paths. Fortunately, livarot is
scheduled for replacement by lib2geom, a new library now in
development, so hopefully these issues will be addressed then.

===Misc features===

* For consistency with other drawing tools, drawing with '''Shift''' in Calligraphy tool automatically '''unions''' the newly created stroke with whatever paths were selected (and selects the result). Thus, you can do a series of overlapping Shift+strokes to create one unioned path object instead of separate objects as before.

* To facilitate changing the Width parameter, the Home/End keys in Calligraphy tool switch you to the minimum (1) and maximum (100) width, correspondingly. (This is in addition to the Left/Right arrow keys that change Width by 1; remember also that you can press Alt+X, type any width, and press Enter.)

==Selector==

* A new selection mode is available: '''selecting by touch'''. In this mode, you draw a freehand path across the objects; when you release mouse button, all objects that are touched by this path get selected. This mode is very convenient in situations where you need to select objects so intermingled that selecting them by the rectangular rubberband is too difficult and so numerous that click-selecting them one by one is too tedious.

:To activate selecting by touch, whenever you are drawing a rubberband rectangle, just press '''Alt''' to switch it to the touch mode. The rectangle will disappear and a red ''touch path'' will be shown instead. When dragging from an empty space, you can press '''Alt''' first and then start to drag to get the touch mode (note that your selection must be empty, otherwise Alt+dragging will move the selected objects instead). To start a touch selection from a point over an object, or to add to existing selection by touching, press '''Shift+Alt''' and then start to drag.

* Horizontal/vertical flipping: So far, flipping a selection made it flip within its bounding box, so that the latter remained fixed. In the move/scale mode of the selector tool, this behaviour remains unchanged. However, in rotate/shear mode flipping now happens about an (imaginary) vertical/horizontal axis through the rotation center. This is very handy, since the latter can be freely dragged around and snaps to all kinds of objects if desired.

==Node Tool:==
[sculpt profiles - bbyak]

* If any of the nodes in the currently selected path is mouseovered, then horizontal/vertical flipping ('H' and 'V' keys), stepwise rotation ('[' and ']' keys) and scaling ('<' and '>' keys) now all use this specific node as center/axis. If there is no mouseovered node, the center of the bounding box is used instead (as is currently the case unconditionally). Nodes that are covered by one of their handles are also detected as mouseovered.

==Text Tool:==
* [text toolbar - deadchip]

=Snapping and grids=

* '''Snapping behavior''' has been implemented or improved for drawing of new shapes, for dragging the nodes of existing shapes, for gradient handles, for images, and for clones. Snapping of text baselines works again. Snapping distance is now set in screen pixels and is therefore independent of zoom. Furthermore, the bug where "node-to-node" snapping caused jerky movement of nodes is fixed; snapping while skewing has been implemented; any object snaps with its rotation axis (which can be arbitrarily moved and whose position is remembered for every object); the aspect ratio is correctly preserved while scaling with snapping turned on; all four bounding box corners now snap instead of only the lower-left and upper-right; snapping while uniformly scaling has been improved.

* The confusing "Default transformations origin" option is removed. Now Inkscape always uses the opposite edge of the object's bounding box as the transformation origin (though the bounding box itself can now be different, see next item).

* A new preference option has been added to specify the kind of bounding box to be used (see Inkscape Preferences, Tools, Selector). You can choose between the visual bounding box (which takes into account the stroke width, markers, and blur margins; this is the default behavior) or geometric bounding box (which encloses only the path itself, disregarding stroke width).

Grids:

* a new tab in the document properties dialog, solely meant for grids; the former grid/guide tab is now solely for guides. I envision a list of guides there in the future, for easier deletion of guides etc.
* more than one grid can be active at the same time, although i am having trouble in finding a usefull case for this
* multiple views on the same document share the same grids, but the grid can be turned off for each view separately. For example: one could have an overview view without grid enabled. Duplicate that window and zoom in on some detail; then grids can be shown only for that view, and snapping will only happen in those views for which grids are enabled. (sorry i am not able to explain more clearly)
* grid information is now stored in SVG as a child of sodipodi:namedview. Can someone please make an extension that converts an old grid definition to the new format?
* axonometric grid (not yet snapping)
* dots instead of lines

From developer perspective:

* implementation of new grids is much easier now; subclassing CanvasGrid and adding an entry in the is enough. Have a peek at how the rectangular grid is implemented (CanvasXYGrid).
* note that there is no longer "the grid", there might be several grids active now!

[Future plans (i will not be working on this soon, due to GSoC Live effects!):
** possibility of enabling not all but a selection of grids for a view. Eg. when there are 4 grids defined in the document, only enable grid2 for a certain view.
** new grids!
** better snapping mechanism to enable snapping to intersections of guides&grids and grids&grids.

A side effect of removal of old gridcode: apparantly the origin of the desktop rules used to be set to the origin of the grid. I find this strange: specifying a grid origin of (2,2) would have me think the origin would be at ruler location (2,2) instead of (0,0) as it is in 0.45.1.
I have commented the grid-origin correction to the ruler range, because now there is not a single grid anymore to correct it for. Isn't there a control somewhere to define the documents origin? Now the ruler origin is set to (0,0) -- johan]

=Filters=

==New filters supported==

* The feBlend filter primitive gives us image blending modes, like in many image manipulation programs. These modes are screen, multiply, darken and lighten. There's a caveat, though: when blending an object against an semi-transparent background, the background will be accumulated twice, resulting in thicker objects under the bounding box of blended object. This is a limitation of current version of SVG format, not a bug in Inkscape.

* The feOffset filter primitive offsets the image by an user-defined amount. For example, this is useful for drop shadows, as the shadow has to be in a slightly different position than the actual object.

==Filters UI==
[nick]

=Effects=

* The new '''Render > Barcode''' extension creates a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode barcode]. Supported types include EAN13, EAN8, UPC-A, UPC-E, UPC-5, Code39, Code39Ext, Code93, Code128, and RM4SCC.

* The new '''Render > Gear''' extension creates a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear mechanical gear] given the number of teeth, the circular pitch (in px units), and the pressure angle.

* The new '''Render > [[Spirograph]]''' extension creates intricate mathematical curves akin to the classic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph mechanical Spirograph toy].

*The '''Whirl''' extension uses the center of view as the center of whirl, so you don't have to enter the center coordinates numerically.

*The '''Render > Grid''' extension has got an extended range of grid spacings, from 0.1 to 1000 px.

*The '''Render > Function Plotter''' extension can now plot using polar coordinates.

=Bitmap export=

* '''Batch export''': The Bitmap Export dialog (Ctrl+Shift+E) got a new checkbox, ''Batch export all selected objects''. This checkbox is available when two or more objects are selected. If it is checked, instead of exporting selection as a whole, Inkscape exports each selected object separately into its own PNG file. This uses each object's export hints (i.e. export filename and DPI) if they are remembered from a previous export; otherwise, the filename is created from the object ID and the DPI is 90 pixels per inch. '''Caution:''' Unlike regular export, batch export overwrites all existing PNG files without warning.

:This makes it possible to implement all kinds of '''image slicing''' and automated export scenarios. For example, if you are working on a web site design, you can create a separate "export" layer. In that layer, "slice" your web page image into separate areas by creating invisible rectangles with no fill and no stroke. Select each rectangle (by Tab/Shift+Tab, or by switching to Outline mode where even an invisible rectangle can be selected by clicking on its outline) and export it into the corresponding filename (which gets saved as that object's export hint). After that, if you do any changes to your graphics, it's very easy to reexport all the slices: just switch to the "export" layer, select all in that layer (Ctrl+A), and export with the ''Batch export selected objects'' checkbox on.

* '''Hide all except selected''': A new checkbox allows you to hide in the exported image everything except selected object(s).

* The Export dialog automatically appends the '''.png''' extension to the export filename you specify.

=Import/Export=

* [new wpg lib - ted gould]

* '''[if enabled! - mental]''' A new cairo-based PDF exporter has been added to Inkscape. Inkscape 0.46 can export shapes, strokes, transparency, gradients, patterns, text, and images correctly to cairo. While clipping paths and masks are known to be faulty or missing. cairo will write a PDF with vector graphics when possible and fall back to raster graphics when needed. What can be exported as vectors and how much of the image will be rasterized when the fallback kicks in depends on your version of cairo. cairo version 1.2 with the pdf backend compiled in is the minimum requirement for any cairo-based PDF exports.

* [cairo ps export - adib]

=Command line=

Several new command line options are added that make Inkscape even more scriptable and automatable than before.

* --verb-list will list all the Verb IDs and their names in Inkscape. This makes writing your own menus and hotkeys much easier as you can easily find out what the choices are.

* --verb followed by a verb ID allows you to specify a verb to be called on every document opened by Inkscape initially from the command line.

* --select followed by a node ID will allow you to add a node to the list of selected objects.

These options can be used, for example, for performance testing. You could do something like this:

$ time inkscape --verb=FileClose my_complex_file.svg

to measure the time it takes to load and display the file.

Of course, with the ability to select objects, it can be much more useful than
that. You can call effects, or any other verb, then FileSave and
FileClose to automate all kinds of things on your drawings.

=UI=

==Markers==

* stock markers now appear in the "recently used markers" section of the marker selector dropdowns in the Fill & Stroke dialog. Before, any markers with stock id's (including markers modified by the user) were hidden, making it difficult to work with modified stock markers.

== [toolbars - [[JonCruz]]] ==

[calligraphy: menus, tooltips; star; ...]

Switched to stock GTK+ toolbars.

Extra magic secret sauce added.

== [filedialogs - [[JonCruz]]] ==

== Print dialog integration ==

* '''Print Dialog''': The GTK Unix Print Dialog has been hooked up! From the dialog, you can select any of the Postscript-capable printers known to your system and configure them as with any other GTK application.

== Saving window geometry globally ==

Previously, window geometry (size and position of document windows) could only be saved into the document (so that each document stored its own window geometry). Now, a new option is added to save the geometry of the last used window to the preferences and apply this geometry to all new windows. Thus, with the "Save geometry to preferences" option enabled, new windows will open with the shape of the most recent previous window. This mode also remembers and restores the maximized/fullscreen state (unlike geometry saved to documents).

=Even more improvements=

* '''Gnome VFS Improvements''': Gnome VFS Non-Local files are now usable through all of our file choosers in Open, Save and Export. This compile-time option allowed people to open any Gnome-VFS-based URI from the command-line in the past, but not non-local resources (WebDAV, SFTP, etc) and this now allows for all the lovely possibilities Gnome-VFS provides.

* In previous versions, Inkscape didn't allow you to '''group a single object.''' Yet in some cases, this operation is useful (for example, to blur the clipped edged of an object, or apply more than one clippath/mask to an object). Now this limitation is removed; just select any single object and group it to get a single-object group.

* The somewhat cryptic "F:" and "S:" labels in the selected style indicator (at the left end of the statusbar) and in tool's style swatches are now spelled out as '''Fill:''' and '''Stroke:'''. We believe this makes the interface, even if less space-efficient, a bit more friendly for newbies.

* The '''style swatches''' at the right end of object-creating tools' control bars now open the Preferences page of the corresponding tool when clicked. Also, now these swatches display a tooltip explaining its purpose (e.g. "Style of new rectangles", "Style of new calligraphic strokes", etc.)

* After dragging a curve segment in Node tool, Inkscape no longer selects the two adjacent nodes if they were not selected before.

* The '''Tile Clones''' dialog now uses the object's defined '''rotation axis''' (which can be freely moved by Selector tool and which is saved separately for each object) for all rotations (including both symmetry rotations and the Rotation tab rotations), scales, and flips. This renders unnecessary the previous workarounds where you had to group an object with another transparent object to affect how it's rotated by the clone tiler.

* In '''Pencil''' and '''Calligraphic''' tools, pressing '''Esc''' or '''Ctrl+Z''' while drawing cancels the currently drawn path or stroke. When not drawing, these keys work as before (Esc deselects, Ctrl+Z undoes last action). (This is the same behavior as in the Pen tool where it was introduced in a previous version.)

* A set of new verbs has been added to allow the user to easily '''unlock all locked objects''' or '''unhide all hidden objects'''. There are two variants one that operates on the current layer and its children and one that operates globally. While searching for hidden or locked object descendants of locked layers are ignored.

* The list of folder shortcuts in the '''Open''' dialog includes the folder with Inkscape's SVG '''examples''' for easy access. Similarly, the '''Save''' dialog has a shortcut for the user's own '''templates''' dialog making it easy to save the current document as a template (if saved as <code>default.svg</code>, it will be loaded every time you run Inkscape or create new document with Ctrl+N; with any other name, it will be added to the File > New submenu).

* For time-intensive operations such as Paint Bucket and Simplify, the system's busy wait cursor is displayed to indicate to the user that Inkscape is actively working, and not frozen.

* [statusbar updates: save, ...]

* Several improvements in '''inkview''': busy cursor is shown while loading file, the button window stays on top and responds to keyboard shortcuts; several memleaks stopped and bugs fixed. The "slideshow mode" of the main inkscape application (-s or --slideshow command line option) is removed; use inkview instead.

* In Document Metadata dialog, updated Creative Commons Licenses to version 3.0.

=Notable bugfixes=

These are bugfixes compared to 0.45.1; for a list of fixes in 0.45.1 compared to 0.45, see [[ReleaseNotes045|0.45.1 release notes]]

* The '''sodipodi:docbase''' attribute is no longer added to the root <svg> element. This attribute used to keep the latest directory that the document was saved to, and thus represented a mild privacy violation (i.e., by sharing your Inkscape SVG files you allowed others to have a peek into your directory structure). Note, however, that Inkscape does not remove this attribute from old documents it opens; if you want you can remove it yourself. Inkscape just no longer creates this attribute in new documents.

* Inkscape now properly quotes <code>font-family</code> values and therefore can use fonts with various nonalphanumeric characters in their names, which previously failed.

* If you have saved documents with a previous version of Inkscape which used '''right-to-left text''' (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) then the paragraph alignment of non-flowed text has been reversed in this release. This is due to a bug in previous versions - the new behaviour is compliant with the SVG specification and compatible with other editors and viewers. To correct your images, simply reverse the paragraph alignment by selecting the text and clicking the appropriate button on the toolbar.

* A large family of bugs was exterminated where an object's style could only refer other objects (such as gradients, patterns, and filters) that come after it in the document. Now any objects can be referenced from a style regardless of their place in the document. This fixed the disappearance of gradients/patterns/filters after you undo an effect, as well as lots of assorted crashes and misrenderings (mostly on non-Inkscape SVG files).

* A regression in 0.45 caused crashes when undo or redo was attempted before the previous action could complete (e.g. pressing ctrl+z while you are still drawing a rectangle). This is now fixed.

* Previously, if there was a single invalid property in a <code>style</code> attribute, the entire attribute was discarded, i.e. the object lost all styling. Now Inkscape's behavior is more compliant to the CSS specification: it ignores only the invalid property but reads in all the rest.

* Several bugs are fixed in searching for linked images. Now moving SVG documents with their associated images to a different place or a different machine should work more reliably.

* Master opacity did not apply to stroke markers as it should; fixed.

* Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration URI points to right location now.

* Right clicking on a colour swatch now correctly sets the stroke colour.

= Previous releases =

* [[ReleaseNotes045]]
* [[ReleaseNotes044]]
* [[ReleaseNotes043]]
* [[ReleaseNotes042]]
* [[ReleaseNotes041]]
* [[ReleaseNotes040]]
* [[ReleaseNotes039]]
* [[ReleaseNotes038]]
* [[ReleaseNotes037]]
* [[ReleaseNotes036]]
* [[ReleaseNotes035]]

[[Category:Marketing]]

Release notes/0.46

2007-07-08T11:53:00Z

Kiirala: /* New filters supported */

=Inkscape 0.46=
'''(not released yet)'''

=Speed and interactivity=

* In this version, Inkscape starts using the [http://www.cairographics.org cairo] library for rendering. It is now used for '''outline mode''' display which, thanks to using cairo and other optimizations, redraws '''faster by about 25%'''. More impressive are memory savings: thanks to cairo, in outline mode Inkscape now takes only about '''50% of the memory''' used by 0.45 for the same file.

* '''Smart redraw directionality:''' With complex images and/or on slow computers, you may have noticed that Inkscape redraws the screen image in horizontal strips, and these strips are painted sequentially top to bottom. Now this direction is automatically changed based on where your mouse cursor is. In particular, if mouse is closer to the bottom of the area to redraw, strips will be painted in the bottom-to-top order. This significantly improves the responsiveness and interactivity in some situations. For example, when you are node-editing the bottom part of a complex path, the entire path needs to be redrawn on each change, but now this redraw starts from the bottom and therefore the you see the effect of your changes at once - i.e. while screen redraw may still lag behind your mouse movement, this lag is less noticeable.

* '''Faster blur''' for exporting and high quality on-screen rendering: Inkscape now uses an IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter for blurring with large radius. This greatly improves the speed of blur redraw at high zooms or in high-resolution export (or simply with very large blur radius). On the other hand, the results are an approximation to a true Gaussian blur, so a drawing may look slightly different from the mathematically precise blur (usually the differences are far from visible, though). This code is mainly based on: ''Recursive Gaussian Derivative Filters'' by L.J. van Vliet, I.T. Young and P.W. Verbeek (see the source code for more detailed references).

* '''Moving the cursor around''' in a file with large and complex paths has become much snappier and more responsive. Previously, in extreme cases Inkscape could freeze for seconds while catching up with the mouse cursor; such delays are now eliminated.

* Several improvements make '''canvas panning and scrolling''' smoother and more interactive in complex slow-rendering documents:

:* When panning by the middle mouse button, Inkscape no longer attempts to redraw the canvas while your mouse button is pressed. Any redrawing only happens after you release the mouse. As a result, the newly revealed parts of the canvas are somewhat more "dirty" but the '''panning is smoother than before''', with few if any "hiccups".

:* Previously, if you start panning with middle button while Inkscape is still redrawing screen in a complex drawing, panning sometimes completely failed or moved canvas just a little step. Now it is '''guaranteed to pan the canvas all the way''' from mouse-press point to mouse-release point in any case, even if sometimes it fails to show the intermediate positions.

:* When pressing and holding Ctrl+arrows to scroll canvas, Inkscape normally accelerates scrolling so that each next scrolling step is bigger than the previous. Previously, in complex drawings this acceleration sometimes got interrupted, which made scrolling annoyingly bumpy and slow. Now this is fixed so that '''scrolling is smoothly accelerated''' even in a slow-rendering document.

:* The default '''starting speed and acceleration''' of Ctrl+arrows scrolling are slightly increased. (They are both settable in Preferences.)

=Tools=

==Paint Bucket tool==

The new Paint Bucket tool works exactly as you would expect: click in any area bounded on all sides and it will '''fill it with color'''. Being a vector tool, however, Inkscape's Paint Bucket just creates a new ''path'' that "fills in" the area in which you clicked.

It is important to note that the tool is '''perceptual''', not geometric. That is, when looking for the boundaries around the point you clicked, it takes for such boundaries any ''visible'' color changes. This means that filling will stop at gradients, blurs, and even the color boundaries in imported bitmaps, but will ignore any paths or other objects that are fully (or almost) transparent or for any other reason do not stand out from the background. In short, it will work exactly as if you were filling a rasterized version of your image in a bitmap editor like Photoshop or GIMP - but will give you a vector object to work with.

For example, now you can scan a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill all its cells with colors even without tracing the bitmap first. This is a very convenient and interactive way of digitizing your paper drawings, making the '''traditional bitmap tracing unnecessary''' in many cases.

Internally, the tool works by performing a bitmap-based flood fill on a rendered version of the visible canvas, then tracing the resulting fill using [[potrace]] and placing the traced path into the document.

It places the rendered path onto the current layer, so you can have a layer on top (for example, "Inks") and select the layer below ("Colors") and do the fills so that they always appear below the Inks.

The '''resolution''' of the bitmap image used to perform the trace is dependent upon your '''current zoom level''' -- the more zoomed in to an area that you are, the higher the resolution of the bitmap-based flood fill. So, if you are got a fill that is too imprecise, has rough corners, or don't go into small nooks and appendices where it is supposed to go, just undo, zoom in closer and repeat filling from the same point. Conversely, if the fill leaks out through a small gap, zoom out to make the gap less visible and fill again.

Like all object-creating tools, the Paint Bucket may use the '''last-set style''' for the objects it creates (this is the default), or it can use its own '''fixed style'''. You can switch between these modes on this tool's page in Inkscape Preferences (Ctrl+Shift+P).

In the tool's '''Controls bar''':

* '''Tolerance''' (set in per cent units) controls how large must be color difference at a point (compared to the initial click point) to stop the fill. Zero tolerance means only the area of strictly the same color will be filled; the larger the tolerance, the easier it will be for the fill to leak into adjacent different-color areas. The default value is 10%.

* You can control the amount of '''inset/outset''' to be applied to the created fill path. Setting a positive outset causes fill paths to be larger than the filled bitmap area (good for eliminating anti-aliasing errors), while setting a negative outset causes the path to be smaller. This works the same as the Outset and Inset path commands.

* Paint Bucket's perceptual fill can use either all visible colors or specific color '''channels'''. You can restrict the fill algorithm to the following channels:
** Red
** Green
** Blue
** Hue
** Saturation
** Lightness
** Alpha

* An '''auto gap''' setting. When enabled, Paint Bucket will try to close any gaps in the area boundaries that would normally cause the fill to spill out of the desired area. There are four settings to auto gap:
** None
** Small (fill gaps up to 2 pixels in size)
** Medium (4 pixels)
** Large (6 pixels)

* A '''style swatch''' on the far right of the bar shows the style that will be used for the next fill object you create.

The tool's '''shortcuts''' are:

* '''Single click''' performs filling from the click point.

* '''Shift+click''' performs filling from the click point and then unions the resulting path with the selected path. This way, if your first attempt did not fill in all of the desired area, you can Shift+click the remaining corner to fill it in separately and combine the result with the result of the previous fill.

* '''Ctrl+click''' on an object simply changes that object's fill to the current fill color of the tool, and '''Shift+Ctrl+click''' changes the stroke to the current stroke color.

* '''Click and drag''' performs filling from '''all of the points''' that you pass while dragging (you will see your path visualized by a red line). From each point, the fill spreads to the neighbors with the colors similar to that point - in other words, it's like clicking with this tool at each point of the drag path and unioning the results. This lets you easily fill an area occupied by a gradient or blur - just drag from the darkest to the lightest points in the area you want to fill.

* '''Alt+click and drag''' works similarly to simple drag, except from each point of the drag path, the fill spreads to the neighbors (if any) with the colors similar to the ''initial point'' (the point where you started the drag). This lets you fill a series of similarly-colored yet separated areas (for example, multiple cells in a cartoon) by starting the drag in one of those areas, and alt+dragging the tool through all the other areas.

==Gradient Tool==
Stops in gradients can be added, deleted, and edited on-canvas now.
*Stops can be added by '''double clicking''' or by '''Ctrl+Alt+Click''' on the gradient line.
*Stops can be deleted by '''Ctrl+Alt+Click''' on a stop or by the '''Del''' key for all the selected stop(s).
:*When you delete an end stop, the nearest intermediate stop becomes the new end stop of the gradient (without moving - i.e., the gradient span becomes shorter).
:*When you delete an end stop and there are no intermediate stops, the object will be painted with a solid fill taken from the color & opacity of the remaining stop.
*More than one stop can be selected at a time by '''Shift+click'''.
:*Can be moved together if next to each other.
:*Can be deleted at the same time.
:*When you have one of the '''gradient handles selected''', its style (color and opacity) is reflected by the selected style indicator (left of the statusbar) and the Fill&Stroke dialog. Previously, opacity of a gradient handle was reflected as fill-opacity and stroke-opacity; now it is reflected as '''master opacity''' (the "O:" spinbutton in the selected style indicator, the "Master opacity" slider in Fill&Stroke). This makes it much easier to view and change opacity of gradient handles using only the selected style indicator in the statusbar.
:*When multiple gradient stops are selected, the selected style indicator (in the statusbar) displays and controls the averaged color and opacity of the selected stops.
*If the selected object(s) have gradient in fill or stroke, the '''selected style indicator''' in the bottom-left corner of the editing window now displays a '''live gradient preview''' prefixed by '''R''' or '''L''' to indicate Radial or Linear gradients (instead of displaying "L Gradient" or "R Gradient" text labels as before). Also, this and other similar widget now use italic font face to indicate None and bold to indicate Unset.

==Calligraphy tool: Engraver's Toolbox ==

Several new features were added to the Calligraphic pen to make
Inkscape capable of the ancient art of '''line
engraving'''. Traditional engraving is a very labour-intensive
process, and while for a long time it was the only practical way
of reproducing lifelike images in black-and-white print, about a
century ago it was almost completely displaced by automatic
halftone screens. However, line engravings have their
characteristic charm, and there's no reason not to try to
resurrect this art form with the help of Inkscape.

A brief visual guide to the new functionality can be seen on
these screenshots:

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving1.png

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.46-engraving2.png

===Tracking a guide path with Ctrl===

One of the most common operations in line engraving is
'''hatching''' (or sometimes ''cross-hatching'' when several
hatching grids cross): filling a space with many parallel
straight or variously curved lines (usually of varying width to
represent a gradual shading). You could try to achieve a similar
effect with e.g. path interpolation (blending), but it is rather
cumbersome and limited; manual drawing of hatch lines, on the
other hand, is tedious and nearly impossible to do
uniformly. Now Inkscape provides "assisted hatching" by
'''tracking a guide path''', allowing you to hatch quickly and
uniformly and at the same time giving you sufficient manual
control over the process.

Here's how to do this. First, select the '''guide path''' that
you will track. It may be another calligraphic stroke, any path
or shape, or even a letter of a text object. Then switch to
Calligraphic pen, select the desired parameters (line width,
angle, fixation etc.) and, before starting to draw, press
Ctrl. You will see a gray '''track circle''' centered at your
mouse pointer and touching the closest point on the selected
guide path. (If you have no guide path selected, a statusbar
message will tell you to select it.)

Now move your mouse close to the guide path, so that the track
circle radius is equal to the desired spacing of your hatch
pattern, and start drawing along the guide path. At that moment,
the radius of the circle gets locked; now the circle slides
along the guide path - and the actual stroke is drawn by the
center of the tracking circle, ''not'' by your mouse point. As
a result, you are getting a smooth stroke going parallel to the
guide path and always at the same distance from it.

When the stroke is ready, release your mouse button (or lift
your tablet pen) but '''do not let go of the Ctrl key''' because
as long as you have it pressed, the tool remembers the hatch
spacing you set when you started drawing. Now, you have just
created a new stroke and, as usual with Inkscape tools, it gets
selected instead of what was selected before. In our case, this
means that the newly drawn stroke itself becomes the new guide
path. Next, you can draw a second stroke along the first one,
then a third one along the second, etc. Eventually you can fill
any desired space with uniform hatching.

Alternatively, if you uncheck "Select new path" in the Calligraphy tool preferences, newly created strokes will not be selected, so your original guide path will be kept selected. In this mode, Inkscape will increase the tracking distance after each created stroke so that you can create uniformly spaced hatching by tracking a single guide path.

The attachment to the guide path is not absolute. If you stray
your mouse pointer far enough from the guide path, you will be
able to tear it off (the track circle turns from green to red)
and move freely. This is intentional; this feature allows you,
for example, to continue drawing a stroke past the end of a
guide stroke, thus making your hatching cover a wider area than
the initial guide path. Special care is taken to make such
tearing off as smooth as possible and to suppress violent jerks,
but this is not always possible; the general advice is to not
try to hatch too fast. If jerking and unintended tearoffs still
bother you, try increasing the Mass parameter.

Also, special code is in place to prevent flipovers - accidental
jumps to the other side of the guide path. Brief flipovers are
suppressed, but if you intentionally go over to the other side
and stay there, eventually Inkscape will obey and your tracking
stroke will also flip over to follow you.

Tracking a guide also allows some slight feedback by gradually
changing the tracking distance in response to your drawing
behavior. Thus, if you're consistently trying to draw closer or
farther from the guide than the current tracking distance, the
distance will correspondingly decrease or increase, so you will
get a hatching that is slightly spacing in or out. (The effect
is very slight, however, so as not to become a nuisance.) Also,
note that since tracking follows the edge of the stroke, strokes
of varying width (such as those tracing background, see below)
will result in gradual bending of the hatching pattern as you
proceed.

===Tracing background by stroke width===

There is a new toggle button on the Calligraphy tool's controls
bar, '''Trace background'''. When on, the width of your pen
depends on the lightness of the background under the stroke in
each point, so that white translates into the minimum stoke
width (1) and black translates to the maximum (which is set by the
Width parameter). This can work alone or in combination with
pressure sensitivity, depending on whether the "Use pressure" button
is also toggled.

This feature allows you to not only hatch over an imported
bitmap image or any drawing, but to do so automatically
reproducing the highlights and shades of the background with
your strokes becoming lighter and heavier as needed.

===Thinning/thickening of paths with Alt===

Even with background tracing, the visible lightness/darkness of
a hatching may not correspond too well to your artistic
intention. Also, with guide tracking, the ends of strokes are
often far from ideal - they may be too blunt or have unsightly
bends or blobs. This is where the new thinning/thickening
function is indispensable.

While in the Calligraphy tool, press Alt. You will see a
orange-colored circle indicating the area that will be affected;
this area is 10 times the size of the pen when you draw (so you
can change it by changing the Width parameter on the
toolbar).

Now select some or all of the paths or groups containing paths (as with most
tools in Inkscape, only selected objects are changed), for
example by pressing Ctrl+A, and start '''Alt+dragging''' over
them. Where you touch them, paths become thinner, as if
melting away, up until total disappearance. Conversely,
'''Shift+Alt+dragging''' makes selected paths thicker in places
where you touch them.

As with the Calligraphy pen itself, the '''size''' of the
thinning/thickening area by default depends on zoom; simply
zooming in or out is often easier than adjusting the width if
you want to cover a smaller or larger area.

The '''force''' of
the effect also depends on zoom (or in other words, it stays the
same when measured by screen pixels, same as when you move and
object by Alt+arrow keys). Between the center and the edge of the circle, the force decreases along a '''bell-like curve''', so that the action of the tool on paths is always smooth. Also, if you have a pressure-sensitive tablet, the force of thinning/thickening also
depends on '''pen pressure'''; tapping slightly produces gradual
lightening or darkening of your drawing, while pressing heavily
will work as a kind of quick "erasing" (with Alt) or
"blackening" (with Alt+Shift).

Of course, thinning/thickening is useful '''not only for calligraphic strokes'''. You can select any simple path (such as
an ellipse converted to path) and start '''sculpting''' it,
spawning smooth treacle-like appendages with Alt+Shift and
melting them away with Alt. Unlike the "node sculpting" mode in
the Node tool, however, this does not require adding new nodes
to the shape or selecting any nodes. This new functionality is
somewhat similar to the "Pucker" and "Bloat" tools in the latest
versions of Adobe Illustrator, except that in Inkscape it works
softer and is easier to control.

'''Known problems with thinning/thickening:''' (1) it is rather
slow; (2) it quickly eats memory; and (3) it is sometimes buggy
- thin calligraphic strokes may suddenly disappear or change
their shape drastically as you're Alt+stroking them. For (3), it
helps to undo the bad change and try again with less pressure on
the pen - if you do your thinning in several light touches
instead of one heavy press, usually you will be able to get the
desired result without the buggy behavior. In general, however,
all these problems stem from the livarot library that we use for
geometric manipulation of paths. Fortunately, livarot is
scheduled for replacement by lib2geom, a new library now in
development, so hopefully these issues will be addressed then.

===Misc features===

* For consistency with other drawing tools, drawing with '''Shift''' in Calligraphy tool automatically '''unions''' the newly created stroke with whatever paths were selected (and selects the result). Thus, you can do a series of overlapping Shift+strokes to create one unioned path object instead of separate objects as before.

* To facilitate changing the Width parameter, the Home/End keys in Calligraphy tool switch you to the minimum (1) and maximum (100) width, correspondingly. (This is in addition to the Left/Right arrow keys that change Width by 1; remember also that you can press Alt+X, type any width, and press Enter.)

==Selector==

* A new selection mode is available: '''selecting by touch'''. In this mode, you draw a freehand path across the objects; when you release mouse button, all objects that are touched by this path get selected. This mode is very convenient in situations where you need to select objects so intermingled that selecting them by the rectangular rubberband is too difficult and so numerous that click-selecting them one by one is too tedious.

:To activate selecting by touch, whenever you are drawing a rubberband rectangle, just press '''Alt''' to switch it to the touch mode. The rectangle will disappear and a red ''touch path'' will be shown instead. When dragging from an empty space, you can press '''Alt''' first and then start to drag to get the touch mode (note that your selection must be empty, otherwise Alt+dragging will move the selected objects instead). To start a touch selection from a point over an object, or to add to existing selection by touching, press '''Shift+Alt''' and then start to drag.

* Horizontal/vertical flipping: So far, flipping a selection made it flip within its bounding box, so that the latter remained fixed. In the move/scale mode of the selector tool, this behaviour remains unchanged. However, in rotate/shear mode flipping now happens about an (imaginary) vertical/horizontal axis through the rotation center. This is very handy, since the latter can be freely dragged around and snaps to all kinds of objects if desired.

==Node Tool:==
[sculpt profiles - bbyak]

* If any of the nodes in the currently selected path is mouseovered, then horizontal/vertical flipping ('H' and 'V' keys), stepwise rotation ('[' and ']' keys) and scaling ('<' and '>' keys) now all use this specific node as center/axis. If there is no mouseovered node, the center of the bounding box is used instead (as is currently the case unconditionally). Nodes that are covered by one of their handles are also detected as mouseovered.

==Text Tool:==
* [text toolbar - deadchip]

=Snapping and grids=

* '''Snapping behavior''' has been implemented or improved for drawing of new shapes, for dragging the nodes of existing shapes, for gradient handles, for images, and for clones. Snapping of text baselines works again. Snapping distance is now set in screen pixels and is therefore independent of zoom. Furthermore, the bug where "node-to-node" snapping caused jerky movement of nodes is fixed; snapping while skewing has been implemented; any object snaps with its rotation axis (which can be arbitrarily moved and whose position is remembered for every object); the aspect ratio is correctly preserved while scaling with snapping turned on; all four bounding box corners now snap instead of only the lower-left and upper-right; snapping while uniformly scaling has been improved.

* The confusing "Default transformations origin" option is removed. Now Inkscape always uses the opposite edge of the object's bounding box as the transformation origin (though the bounding box itself can now be different, see next item).

* A new preference option has been added to specify the kind of bounding box to be used (see Inkscape Preferences, Tools, Selector). You can choose between the visual bounding box (which takes into account the stroke width, markers, and blur margins; this is the default behavior) or geometric bounding box (which encloses only the path itself, disregarding stroke width).

Grids:

* a new tab in the document properties dialog, solely meant for grids; the former grid/guide tab is now solely for guides. I envision a list of guides there in the future, for easier deletion of guides etc.
* more than one grid can be active at the same time, although i am having trouble in finding a usefull case for this
* multiple views on the same document share the same grids, but the grid can be turned off for each view separately. For example: one could have an overview view without grid enabled. Duplicate that window and zoom in on some detail; then grids can be shown only for that view, and snapping will only happen in those views for which grids are enabled. (sorry i am not able to explain more clearly)
* grid information is now stored in SVG as a child of sodipodi:namedview. Can someone please make an extension that converts an old grid definition to the new format?
* axonometric grid (not yet snapping)
* dots instead of lines

From developer perspective:

* implementation of new grids is much easier now; subclassing CanvasGrid and adding an entry in the is enough. Have a peek at how the rectangular grid is implemented (CanvasXYGrid).
* note that there is no longer "the grid", there might be several grids active now!

[Future plans (i will not be working on this soon, due to GSoC Live effects!):
** possibility of enabling not all but a selection of grids for a view. Eg. when there are 4 grids defined in the document, only enable grid2 for a certain view.
** new grids!
** better snapping mechanism to enable snapping to intersections of guides&grids and grids&grids.

A side effect of removal of old gridcode: apparantly the origin of the desktop rules used to be set to the origin of the grid. I find this strange: specifying a grid origin of (2,2) would have me think the origin would be at ruler location (2,2) instead of (0,0) as it is in 0.45.1.
I have commented the grid-origin correction to the ruler range, because now there is not a single grid anymore to correct it for. Isn't there a control somewhere to define the documents origin? Now the ruler origin is set to (0,0) -- johan]

=Filters=

==New filters supported==

New filter effects supported in Inkscape 0.46 are feBlend and feOffset.

feBlend gives us image blending modes, like in many image manipulation programs. These modes are screen, multiply, darken and lighten. There's a caveat, though: when blending an object against an semi-transparent background, the background will be accumulated twice, resulting in thicker objects under the bounding box of blended object. This is a limitation of current version of SVG format, not a bug in Inkscape.

feOffset just offsets the image by given amount. For example, this is useful for drop shadows, as the shadow has to be in a slightly different position than the actual object.

==Filters UI==
[nick]

=Effects=

* The new '''Render > Barcode''' extension creates a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode barcode]. Supported types include EAN13, EAN8, UPC-A, UPC-E, UPC-5, Code39, Code39Ext, Code93, Code128, and RM4SCC.

* The new '''Render > Gear''' extension creates a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear mechanical gear] given the number of teeth, the circular pitch (in px units), and the pressure angle.

* The new '''Render > [[Spirograph]]''' extension creates intricate mathematical curves akin to the classic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph mechanical Spirograph toy].

*The '''Whirl''' extension uses the center of view as the center of whirl, so you don't have to enter the center coordinates numerically.

*The '''Render > Grid''' extension has got an extended range of grid spacings, from 0.1 to 1000 px.

*The '''Render > Function Plotter''' extension can now plot using polar coordinates.

=Bitmap export=

* '''Batch export''': The Bitmap Export dialog (Ctrl+Shift+E) got a new checkbox, ''Batch export all selected objects''. This checkbox is available when two or more objects are selected. If it is checked, instead of exporting selection as a whole, Inkscape exports each selected object separately into its own PNG file. This uses each object's export hints (i.e. export filename and DPI) if they are remembered from a previous export; otherwise, the filename is created from the object ID and the DPI is 90 pixels per inch. '''Caution:''' Unlike regular export, batch export overwrites all existing PNG files without warning.

:This makes it possible to implement all kinds of '''image slicing''' and automated export scenarios. For example, if you are working on a web site design, you can create a separate "export" layer. In that layer, "slice" your web page image into separate areas by creating invisible rectangles with no fill and no stroke. Select each rectangle (by Tab/Shift+Tab, or by switching to Outline mode where even an invisible rectangle can be selected by clicking on its outline) and export it into the corresponding filename (which gets saved as that object's export hint). After that, if you do any changes to your graphics, it's very easy to reexport all the slices: just switch to the "export" layer, select all in that layer (Ctrl+A), and export with the ''Batch export selected objects'' checkbox on.

* '''Hide all except selected''': A new checkbox allows you to hide in the exported image everything except selected object(s).

* The Export dialog automatically appends the '''.png''' extension to the export filename you specify.

=Import/Export=

* [new wpg lib - ted gould]

* '''[if enabled! - mental]''' A new cairo-based PDF exporter has been added to Inkscape. Inkscape 0.46 can export shapes, strokes, transparency, gradients, patterns, text, and images correctly to cairo. While clipping paths and masks are known to be faulty or missing. cairo will write a PDF with vector graphics when possible and fall back to raster graphics when needed. What can be exported as vectors and how much of the image will be rasterized when the fallback kicks in depends on your version of cairo. cairo version 1.2 with the pdf backend compiled in is the minimum requirement for any cairo-based PDF exports.

* [cairo ps export - adib]

=Command line=

Several new command line options are added that make Inkscape even more scriptable and automatable than before.

* --verb-list will list all the Verb IDs and their names in Inkscape. This makes writing your own menus and hotkeys much easier as you can easily find out what the choices are.

* --verb followed by a verb ID allows you to specify a verb to be called on every document opened by Inkscape initially from the command line.

* --select followed by a node ID will allow you to add a node to the list of selected objects.

These options can be used, for example, for performance testing. You could do something like this:

$ time inkscape --verb=FileClose my_complex_file.svg

to measure the time it takes to load and display the file.

Of course, with the ability to select objects, it can be much more useful than
that. You can call effects, or any other verb, then FileSave and
FileClose to automate all kinds of things on your drawings.

=UI=

==Markers==

* stock markers now appear in the "recently used markers" section of the marker selector dropdowns in the Fill & Stroke dialog. Before, any markers with stock id's (including markers modified by the user) were hidden, making it difficult to work with modified stock markers.

== [toolbars - [[JonCruz]]] ==

[calligraphy: menus, tooltips; star; ...]

Switched to stock GTK+ toolbars.

Extra magic secret sauce added.

== [filedialogs - [[JonCruz]]] ==

== Print dialog integration ==

* '''Print Dialog''': The GTK Unix Print Dialog has been hooked up! From the dialog, you can select any of the Postscript-capable printers known to your system and configure them as with any other GTK application.

== Saving window geometry globally ==

Previously, window geometry (size and position of document windows) could only be saved into the document (so that each document stored its own window geometry). Now, a new option is added to save the geometry of the last used window to the preferences and apply this geometry to all new windows. Thus, with the "Save geometry to preferences" option enabled, new windows will open with the shape of the most recent previous window. This mode also remembers and restores the maximized/fullscreen state (unlike geometry saved to documents).

=Even more improvements=

* '''Gnome VFS Improvements''': Gnome VFS Non-Local files are now usable through all of our file choosers in Open, Save and Export. This compile-time option allowed people to open any Gnome-VFS-based URI from the command-line in the past, but not non-local resources (WebDAV, SFTP, etc) and this now allows for all the lovely possibilities Gnome-VFS provides.

* In previous versions, Inkscape didn't allow you to '''group a single object.''' Yet in some cases, this operation is useful (for example, to blur the clipped edged of an object, or apply more than one clippath/mask to an object). Now this limitation is removed; just select any single object and group it to get a single-object group.

* The somewhat cryptic "F:" and "S:" labels in the selected style indicator (at the left end of the statusbar) and in tool's style swatches are now spelled out as '''Fill:''' and '''Stroke:'''. We believe this makes the interface, even if less space-efficient, a bit more friendly for newbies.

* The '''style swatches''' at the right end of object-creating tools' control bars now open the Preferences page of the corresponding tool when clicked. Also, now these swatches display a tooltip explaining its purpose (e.g. "Style of new rectangles", "Style of new calligraphic strokes", etc.)

* After dragging a curve segment in Node tool, Inkscape no longer selects the two adjacent nodes if they were not selected before.

* The '''Tile Clones''' dialog now uses the object's defined '''rotation axis''' (which can be freely moved by Selector tool and which is saved separately for each object) for all rotations (including both symmetry rotations and the Rotation tab rotations), scales, and flips. This renders unnecessary the previous workarounds where you had to group an object with another transparent object to affect how it's rotated by the clone tiler.

* In '''Pencil''' and '''Calligraphic''' tools, pressing '''Esc''' or '''Ctrl+Z''' while drawing cancels the currently drawn path or stroke. When not drawing, these keys work as before (Esc deselects, Ctrl+Z undoes last action). (This is the same behavior as in the Pen tool where it was introduced in a previous version.)

* A set of new verbs has been added to allow the user to easily '''unlock all locked objects''' or '''unhide all hidden objects'''. There are two variants one that operates on the current layer and its children and one that operates globally. While searching for hidden or locked object descendants of locked layers are ignored.

* The list of folder shortcuts in the '''Open''' dialog includes the folder with Inkscape's SVG '''examples''' for easy access. Similarly, the '''Save''' dialog has a shortcut for the user's own '''templates''' dialog making it easy to save the current document as a template (if saved as <code>default.svg</code>, it will be loaded every time you run Inkscape or create new document with Ctrl+N; with any other name, it will be added to the File > New submenu).

* For time-intensive operations such as Paint Bucket and Simplify, the system's busy wait cursor is displayed to indicate to the user that Inkscape is actively working, and not frozen.

* [statusbar updates: save, ...]

* Several improvements in '''inkview''': busy cursor is shown while loading file, the button window stays on top and responds to keyboard shortcuts; several memleaks stopped and bugs fixed. The "slideshow mode" of the main inkscape application (-s or --slideshow command line option) is removed; use inkview instead.

* In Document Metadata dialog, updated Creative Commons Licenses to version 3.0.

=Notable bugfixes=

These are bugfixes compared to 0.45.1; for a list of fixes in 0.45.1 compared to 0.45, see [[ReleaseNotes045|0.45.1 release notes]]

* The '''sodipodi:docbase''' attribute is no longer added to the root <svg> element. This attribute used to keep the latest directory that the document was saved to, and thus represented a mild privacy violation (i.e., by sharing your Inkscape SVG files you allowed others to have a peek into your directory structure). Note, however, that Inkscape does not remove this attribute from old documents it opens; if you want you can remove it yourself. Inkscape just no longer creates this attribute in new documents.

* Inkscape now properly quotes <code>font-family</code> values and therefore can use fonts with various nonalphanumeric characters in their names, which previously failed.

* If you have saved documents with a previous version of Inkscape which used '''right-to-left text''' (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) then the paragraph alignment of non-flowed text has been reversed in this release. This is due to a bug in previous versions - the new behaviour is compliant with the SVG specification and compatible with other editors and viewers. To correct your images, simply reverse the paragraph alignment by selecting the text and clicking the appropriate button on the toolbar.

* A large family of bugs was exterminated where an object's style could only refer other objects (such as gradients, patterns, and filters) that come after it in the document. Now any objects can be referenced from a style regardless of their place in the document. This fixed the disappearance of gradients/patterns/filters after you undo an effect, as well as lots of assorted crashes and misrenderings (mostly on non-Inkscape SVG files).

* A regression in 0.45 caused crashes when undo or redo was attempted before the previous action could complete (e.g. pressing ctrl+z while you are still drawing a rectangle). This is now fixed.

* Previously, if there was a single invalid property in a <code>style</code> attribute, the entire attribute was discarded, i.e. the object lost all styling. Now Inkscape's behavior is more compliant to the CSS specification: it ignores only the invalid property but reads in all the rest.

* Several bugs are fixed in searching for linked images. Now moving SVG documents with their associated images to a different place or a different machine should work more reliably.

* Master opacity did not apply to stroke markers as it should; fixed.

* Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration URI points to right location now.

* Right clicking on a colour swatch now correctly sets the stroke colour.

= Previous releases =

* [[ReleaseNotes045]]
* [[ReleaseNotes044]]
* [[ReleaseNotes043]]
* [[ReleaseNotes042]]
* [[ReleaseNotes041]]
* [[ReleaseNotes040]]
* [[ReleaseNotes039]]
* [[ReleaseNotes038]]
* [[ReleaseNotes037]]
* [[ReleaseNotes036]]
* [[ReleaseNotes035]]

[[Category:Marketing]]

2006-06-21T18:36:50Z

Kiirala: Filter effects moved to Filter Effects

Filter Effects

2006-06-21T18:22:41Z

Kiirala:

User:Kiirala

2006-06-21T17:50:24Z

Kiirala:

Niko Kiirala

Finnish Computing science student.

Participant in Google Summer of Code 2006. Project: [[Filter effects]]