Google Summer of Code

Welcome to Inkscape!

For a few years Inkscape was successful in participating in Google Summer of Code.

GSoC is a program where Google funds the development of specific features in open source software by university students. You don't need to be a Computer Science student to apply. Features to be developed are picked by Inkscape administrators from the pool of proposals submitted by students.

We've mentored about half a dozen students a year since GSoC started. Many students enjoyed their work and continue to be involved; perhaps your mentor will be a past GSoC student! We have a high rate of acceptance of student code into the core codebase. Indeed, GSoC projects have been a key source of some of Inkscape's best features in the past several releases.

The Inkscape team plans to focus this summer on codebase cleanup and refactoring. This will affect the type of projects we can accept this year; we're looking for ones that either won't affect core code too significantly (such as Extension scripts, or File Input/Output formats) or that would actually result in improving the state of the codebase (adding tests, modularization, etc.). Students who have already been active developers in Inkscape previously will be allowed more latitude to work on core code (particularly if it will result in cleanup/refactoring of their past work).

Student Applications

• Google program information
  • Summer of Code Application form
• Inkscape-specific information
  • SOC Application Template
  • Inkscape Roadmap - to see our overall objectives
  • SOC Writing Project Proposals - some guidelines for proposals
  • SOC Selection Criteria - how we rate applications

Student Applications for GSoC 2012 must be submitted to the GSoC site by 19:00 UTC on April 6th 2012

The "two patches" rule

We require two patches from each potential GSoC student, before accepting the student for GSoC participation (it is the same requirement as for obtaining rights to commit changes to the Bazaar code repository). The reason for this requirement is that you can show us that you have succeeded in building Inkscape on your PC, and that you have understood a little piece of Inkscape's code and are able to improve it. Inkscape is a large project, and you really should not try to understand all the code. Many (all?) developers know only parts of the program code! You can join our jabber/IRC channel and ask developers for help. To get you started on Inkscape development, here is a list of (probably) easy-to-fix bugs or small improvements that require very little knowledge of the whole program.

Suggested "easy" bug fixes or improvements

Search our bug-tracker for bugs tagged with 'easy-fix'!

Suggested Ideas

Please note that your project proposal must be realistic: if you promise too much, we will most likely think you have not understood at all what it is about and will reject your proposal.

Generic ideas

• Font editing and creation features, e.g. designing SVG fonts using styles
• 'New From Template' dialog
• kidscape - Condensed version of Inkscape aimed at young kids and small form factor devices
• Cutter control - Enable Inkscape's use with vinyl cutters.
• Guides Improvements - Especially a dialog that lists all guides and allows operations on them would be very very nice.

Import/export projects

• Importing of 3D scene files in 16 file formats using Open Asset Import Library
• xar-to-svg converter - Converter for Xara Xtreme to Inkscape
• KML SVG translation - For use of Inkscape with Google Earth or Maps

Internal work & performance improvements

• Improve startup time and performance.
• Continue C++ification.
• Improving 2Geom where necessary (e.g. boolops and python bindings).
• ICC Color Management for cairo outputs - Would allow Inkscape to produce CMYK PDFs and PSs with Cairo.
• Text layout rewrite: Move flow-text into Inkscape name space. Add support for hyphenation, paragraph indentation, underlining, etc.
• Units (inch, cm, px): the codebase has 4 different pieces of code for handling units! Refactoring into *one*.

Better SVG standard coverage

• Full SVG viewbox support
• Multiple Page support
• Improve SVG compliance. Current status of W3C test suite compliance.
• Implement SVG 2.0 (and related) items such as:
  • Vector Effects (non-destructive boolean-ops would be a good start)
  • Marker color matching stroke
  • Solid-color support (Named colors, would deprecate the single-stop gradient approach we currently use)
  • CSS3 color support
  • CSS3 2d transforms (duplicates current attributes)
  • Stroke position
  • Stroke dash adjustment

Note: Some of the above items are somwhat low hanging fruit and would need a few of them to make a good proposal, others alone are worthy of a full GSoC project.

Improve Inkscape SVG for use on Web

A proposal should fix most if not all of these problems:

• Fix "plain" SVG to not remove <script> section, etc.
• Fix saving SVG to not modify CDATA (e.g. don't change & to &amp; inside CDATA).
• Add option to set viewbox attribute to Document Properties.
• Font fallbacks.
• Easily add/edit hyperlinks.
• Better CSS support.
• Option to add title to SVG (searchability and accessibility).
• Remove XML prolog/DOCTYPE.
• Move sodipodi namespace items to Inkscape namespace.

Live Path Effects related

• More Live Path Effects - There is a lengthy list of ideas to choose from here.

Tools and shapes related

• Multi shape editing - ability to edit more than 1 shape (like ellipse or star) at once, with extra features like resizing rectangles by dragging their edges.
• Transformation Anchors
• Further development of Shape Opera, a simple Javascript framework for morphing Inkscape PATH shapes.
• Add a palette of objects to Inkscape. Such a palette would contain often used objects and would allow categorizing such objects. Examples of categories: UML, electric, network.
• Connector tool improvements - Expose new libavoid functionality: orthogonal routing, connector ports, curved connectors. (Mentor: Michael Wybrow)
• Arrowhead/marker improvements
• Fillet/Chamfer tool
• Add Mesh gradients in Inkscape name space with appropriate editing interface. (Note that Cairo now supports meshes and here is a WORK IN PROGRESS of a proposed mesh syntax for svg.) It would be advised to base work on the existing cairo rendering branch for Inkscape.

Please do not feel limited to the above ideas - some of our best contributions have been unique ideas that students had in mind from other sources!

For more ideas, please see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/

Successful SOC Projects from Previous Years

• 2005
  • Connectors
  • Inkboard
  • Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) Interface
  • DXF Import / Export
• 2006
  • Support for SVG Filters
  • Filter Effects
  • PDF export
  • Inkboard Protocol Spec / Lib Conversion
• 2007
  • Text Style Improvements
  • PDF import
  • Live Path Effects
  • 3D Box Tool
  • UI for SVG Filter Effects
  • Raster Functionality
  • Importing from, and Exporting to, a remote ccHost instance
• 2008
  • SVG Fonts support
  • 2Geom refactoring project - port most geometry code to 2Geom
  • lib2geom: interactive applications showing off the power of lib2geom
  • Tech drawing abilities
  • A test suite
• 2009
  • Node tool rewrite
  • D-Bus scripting API
  • Connector tool improvements
  • ICC/CMYK workflow
• 2010
  • Cairo-based rendering
  • C++ification of SP Layer
• 2011
  • Rendering caching
  • Javascript support improvements
  • CSS support improvements