ReleaseAnnounce044

This is concept of the Release Announcement for the 0.44 version.

Inkscape Announces 0.44 Release :: http://www.inkscape.org :: Draw Freely

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

Major new features include Layers dialog, support for clipping and masking, improved PDF export with transparency, configurable keyboard shortcuts, innovative "node sculpting" capability in Node tool, and the Outline mode. Significant gains are achieved in performance, especially in screen rendering and Node tool.

Noticeable user interface changes include docked color swatches, interactive style indicator in the statusbar, a redesigned preferences dialog, a text toolbar, and new icons. Our SVG compliance has also taken a step forward, with the added support for the <switch> tag and ICC color profiles for images. This release also includes hundreds of smaller features, usability enhancements and bug fixes.

For several releases, a collection of extension effects was shipped with Inkscape, but the Effects menu to access them was turned off by default. With this release, it has become mature enough, with effects working out of the box on all platforms, so this menu is enabled.

We'd like to thank Google for their sponsorship of five students to work on several Inkscape development efforts: SVG Filters, Inkboard protocol, PDF export with Cairo, and memory optimization.

Download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages:

    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

For many more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.44:

    http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes

Community submitted screenshots:

    http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/

About Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool that uses the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons' metadata, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, text-in-shape, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, PostScript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape's main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with a fully W3C compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and maintaining a friendly, open, community-oriented development process.