Release notes/0.48

Inkscape 0.48

(not released yet - AnnouncePlanning048)

Release highlights

(TODO)

Tools

Node Tool

(TODO - Krzysztof)

For now, see GSoC2009 Node Tool Rewrite

Spray Tool

To use the spray tool, you first need to select one or several items and then click on the Spray icon.

Three modes are available.

• Spray Copy mode : each sprayed item is independant from the others.
• Spray Clone mode : each sprayed item is a clone of the selected item. Changing the properties of the original item will affect the clones.
• Spray Single Path Mode : everything you spray is in a single path. You may need to convert your item into a path to make it work properly.

Spray options

• Population : probability of apparition of an item.
• Standard Deviation : for the gaussian spraying, it sets the width of the gaussian.
• Mean : it sets the center of the gaussian. More precisely, it is the distance to the center of the cursor.
• Scale : you can choose to scale your items taller or smaller than the original one. The scale is set between two values (Min and Max).
• Rotation : you can rotate randomly your items. The rotation angle is set between two values (Min and Max).

You can also spray items by scrolling.

The Spray tool is a perfect match for the transforming, duplicating, and deleting modes of the Tweak tool.

Extensions

New and improved extensions

• The new Render > Wireframe Sphere extension draws the globe as a collection of ellipses representing a sphere's latitude and longitude lines. The number of lines is adjustable, as well as the tilt and rotation. There is an option to hide the lines at the back of the sphere.

• The new Render > Barcode - Datamatrix extension renders a DataMatrix 2D barcode, as specified in BS ISO/IEC 16022:2006. The number of rows and columns of the DataMatrix is adjustable. If more data is given than can be contained in one DataMatrix, more than one DataMatrix will be produced.

Other features

• Arch paper sizes are added in the Document Properties dialog

• Displaying the font samples in the drop-down list of the Text tool is now optional. In Inkscape Preferences, go to Tools, Text, and uncheck "Show font samples in the drop-down list" if you don't want to see the samples. This will speed up displaying the list the first time you open it.

• Items in the File > Open Recent menu, when mouseovered, show tooltips with the full URI of each file in the list. Also, files that are in the list but are missing or unaccessible are automatically hidden.

• When a flowed text is truncated (i.e. the frame is too small for the entire text), the frame is shown red, and the statusbar hint includes [truncated]. You need to resize the frame to see the truncated end of the text. Analogously, if the path of a text-on-path object is too short to display the entire text, the statusbar will report it as [truncated].

• Clicking the text alignment buttons (Left, Center, Right) on the Text tool's controls bar now does not let the text jump: it stays within the same bounding box as before, only changing the alignment.

• The position of text's baseline anchor (the small square) is now dependent of the alignment: for left-aligned text it is, as before, at the left end, for centered text in the middle, and for the right-aligned text it is at the right end of the text's first line (this is for horizontal text; for vertical, it is correspondingly at top, middle, or bottom of the first column). This allows snapping, aligning and distributing of text relative the side to which it's aligned.

• Snapping of gradient handles has been improved and now behaves similar to the snapping of all other handles and objects

Extended input device configuration

The stock Input Devices dialog has been replaced with a completely redone version that provides a more useful representation of settings. It also contains a simple area for testing different inputs of different devices.

Additionally hardware setup itself has been separated from general settings to allow for easier dynamic switching of settings appropriate to the task at hand.

User interface

Adaptive UI

(In progress JonCruz)

Notable bug fixes

• The 3D tool no longer inserts an inkscape:perspective element into SVG when it is not needed (i.e. when the document has no 3D box objects).

• Wrong masks with cyclic recursion (i.e. masks that refer to themselves via other masks) no longer crash Inkscape.

Previous releases

• ReleaseNotes047
• ReleaseNotes046
• ReleaseNotes045
• ReleaseNotes044
• ReleaseNotes043
• ReleaseNotes042
• ReleaseNotes041
• ReleaseNotes040
• ReleaseNotes039
• ReleaseNotes038
• ReleaseNotes037
• ReleaseNotes036
• ReleaseNotes035