Roadmap

This is a working document showing specific near-term tasks needed for achieving the numbered milestones. It is not a wishlist of features to be included in future releases. Because people often work on whatever they feel like, only the current and current+1 releases should be taken seriously. Beyond that is mainly conjectural.

See OldRoadmap for milestones that have already been achieved.

Inkscape 0.91 ~ Refactoring

0.91 will be a longer cycle focused on refactoring and new features.

• (DONE) Merge GSoC 2010 work
• (DONE) Evaluate changing the numbering scheme to a date-based one, or setting more realistic goals for major (1.0, 2.0) releases
• (DONE) Port renderer to Cairo (Krzysztof - GSoC 2010)
• (DONE) Completely remove libnr

Inkscape 0.92 ~ Infrastructure Focus

• (DONE) Set up autogeneration of Inkscape source code documentation (Doxygen not available online according to old wiki page but available here (fossies.org)) (http://jenkins.inkscape.org/job/Inkscape_trunk_doxygen/doxygen/)
  • (DONE) Put it publicly somewhere on the inkscape domain for "official" access. (http://jenkins.inkscape.org/job/Inkscape_trunk_doxygen/doxygen/)
• Build system: migrate away from Autotools (See Build system improvements)
  • (DONE) Decide between CMake and Waf
    • (DONE) Alex will be doing a "neutral party" review of the two Decision to go with cmake for now.
  • (DONE) Get decided system working
    • See CMake_Tasks
  • (DONE) Switch release tools to use new build system Documented for now; will wait on mechanizing it until after switch to git.
  • Switch packaging tools to use new build system
  • Retain Autotools support one final release (legacy support), then drop next release.
• Decide which Unit testing framework to use (Discussion July 2013 didn't get much traction)
  • Hackfest consensus is Google test. Bryce will make RFC to devel list for any other opinions.
• Improved mailing list archive
  • Move existing archive to inkscape.org or add an archive mirror at inkscape.org ("official" inkscape information is spread out wide between different domains), this would be an improvement.
  • Consider also bringing lib2geom mailing lists?
  • inkscape: We need postmaster@inkscape.org and abuse@inkscape.org set up. Maybe as part of a mailing list refresh?
• Make the Windows uninstaller work (reevaluate this, we now have msi installer for win32 and Win64)
• New Swatch dialog [Tomasz' GSoc project]

Inkscape 0.93 ~ Maintenance and Optimization Focus

• Migration to Git
• Migration to GitHub
• Set up continuous builds using Travis CI / Appveyor
• Make C++11 compiler a hard requirement
• Drop Autotools support (See Build system improvements)
• Improved performance
  • with an empty start
  • when starting up with an existing file
• Flip y-coordinate to match SVG.
  • Introduce a backwards compatibility mechanism that will allow us to modify the XML representation of editing info. This is needed to bring the desktop coordinate system in line with SVG due to guideline and 3D box problems (they save desktop coordinates in the XML). This can be done either at the SP tree level or by moving to a SAX-based parser which updates the editing information as the document is parsed.
• 2geom maintenance
  • Clean up and move generally useful geometry code to 2Geom
  • Stop embedding 2Geom in Inkscape's codebase; handle it as a regular dependency
  • Possibly start doing lib2geom releases in conjunction with Inkscape's releases?
• Split tutorials and other content from the main executable, to enable them to be updated independently of our main release process
• Split out less well maintained extensions to an 'extras' package
  • Add a test suite that runs each extension against a collection of test documents
  • Possibly start doing inkscape-extras releases in conjunction with Inkscape's releases?
• Refactor out "Sodipodi" history
  • SPItem, SPObject and other variables have names from the early versions of Sodipodi, these names no longer makes sense (especially for new developers).
• Migrate potrace to be an external dependency Done for 0.92
• Prepatory work for expanded testing
  • Implement example unit tests for: SP objects, verbs, cmdline options, live effects, UI dialogs, UI widgets/tools, UI view, etc.

Inkscape 0.94 ~ New Features Focus

• Multi-page documents and parent/child document references
• SVG Flowed Text
  • Fix flowtext
  • Implement SVG 2 flowed text which has a natural SVG 1.1 fallback.
• Improve support for CMYK/spot colors
  • Minor UI streamlining
  • Eliminate the CMS tab
  • Change the CMYK tab to allow selecting the CMYK colors directly
  • Allow setting the document to CMYK, which sets a global CMYK profile
  • Stores RGB colors as RGB, CMYK colors as CMYK
• Solicit community-contributed tutorial contributions
• (Optionally) Start allowing use of C++-11 features that we find to be sufficiently widely supported

Inkscape 0.95 ~ Stabilization Focus

• Update all core plugins to handle multi-page documents
• Special focus on bugs relating to multi-page, flowed text, 2geom, and coordinate system flip
• Write unit test cases
  • Core functions
• Introduce new tutorials

Inkscape 1.0 ~ Documentation Focus

• Review, update, and expand existing documentation
  • code documentation
  • tutorials
  • man page
  • kickoff manual effort?
• Better translations - keep track of % translations for all languages. Drive to 95% on all major languages.
• Cleanup website and wiki
  • Move pages of value to users from wiki to the main website
  • Trim down amount of legacy material presented in the wiki

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Following is a WIP draft of the post-1.0 release goals; this is not yet finalized, and should not be taken as official yet

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Inkscape 1.1 ~ Refactoring

• Expand range of C++-11 features allowed; make C++-11 support more of a requirement for Inkscape
  • http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support
• Take a holistic approach to UI design (Original email)
  1. Analyze the existing UI, make a list of UI decisions that are inconsistent between each other.
  2. Look around, see how other project solves these things, figure out what's good/applicable for Inkscape (like designing particular custom widgets that are less pixel-hungry etc.).
  3. Design some sort of HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) for Inkscape
  4. Use it to plan redesigns existing dialogs/docks.
  5. Preserve dialog layouts between sessions
• Externalize some (easy) dependencies
  • Switch to using libcroco as a regular dependency (not embedded in our codebase).
    • Contact maintainer to see if still actively maintaining, and if can roll a new release for us
    • Else, consider adopting maintenance of the library under the Inkscape project umbrella
    • Or consider replacement with libcss or other CSS parser.
    • See http://inkscape.13.x6.nabble.com/Should-inkscape-take-over-libcroco-td2784457.html
  • Switch to using Adaptagrams (libvpsc, libcola & libavoid) as a regular dependency
    • Contact maintainer to see if still actively maintaining, and if can roll a new release for us
    • Else, consider adopting maintenance of the library under the Inkscape project umbrella
    • See https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1353833

Inkscape 1.2 ~ Infrastructure

• Replace VCS
• Greatly expand Unit test framework.
• Consider setting up workflow (passing tests, test coverage, code review) for getting code into trunk.
  • Improve new contributor experience for getting patch reviews
  • Switch patch review software from launchpad to something like mailing list + patchwork, or phabricator
• make msi Windows install multilingual

Inkscape 1.3 ~ Maintenance and Optimization

• Better modularization
  • Break libdepixelize out to its own library
  • Break libnrtype out to its own library
  • Break libuemf out to its own library
• Switch to using Poppler's API rather than using internals (the current situation causes regular breakage with new releases of Poppler)
• GtkMMification
• XML refactoring: Remove direct manipulation of XML from as many places as possible and replace it with SP tree methods.
• Improved performance
  • Working with large files
  • Working with files with lots of filters

Inkscape 1.4 ~ Major Features

• Complete conversion to GTK 3
  • Switch to using libgdl as a regular dependency
  • Be smarter about toolbar layout so we never have invisible (but necessary) buttons off the screen.
  • Rework panels so that they resize consistently and display contents better. Consider moving back to dialogs in some cases or moving more functionality to the canvas.
• Begin development of new plugin / extension system(s)
  • Review the D-Bus scripting API GSoC work from 0.48 timeframe
  • Easy to create
  • Powerful enough to do LPEs, filters, etc.
  • Establish an Extensions Center for community-collaborative sharing/reviewing/maintaining extensions
  • Probably need several different APIs for different levels in the codebase, such as atop the object model, one for canvas stuff, one atop the UI, etc.
    • Core extensions are shipped with Inkscape
    • User review ranking
    • Developer review ranking
    • Auto-QC ranking (mechanical testing, and checking for docs, test cases, etc.)
  • Search the Extensions Center and install from within Inkscape

Milestone [Future]

Maintenance

• Split backend / GUI frontend

New features / Improvements to existing features

• Make flowed text SVG-compliant.
• SVG2 support (with proper SVG 1.1 fallbacks)
• Improve support for SVG switches: the first recognized element in a switch should appear directly in the SP tree, not as a child of the switch element.
• Improve support for changing the name of the XML element node in response to SP tree changes.
• Hardware acceleration: make use of modern GPUs to speed up rendering.
• Live path effects: investigate extending to cover generic vector transformations (vector effects). Provide live versions of several destructive operations: boolean ops, stroke to path, text to path, etc.
• Mesh gradient support
• CSS support
• Javascript support
• Animation support.
  • frame-by-frame interpolations?
  • SMIL?
  • Javascripts?
  • Something else?
• Evaluate pdf exporter to join features from scribus Export
  • Improved export for printing industry (Mailing list thread from October 2014)
• For animation and css, a functionality to remove ALL transformations from an SVG
• PDF cleanup function - ungroup everything, remove all unnecessary clipping and masking
• Better marker support
• Object navigator (like in ponyscape)
• Inkscape for Android
• CAD drawing functionality
• More file format import compatibility
  • TopDraw
• OCR of bitmap traces
• Rewrite / reintroduce 3D box.
  • 3-dimensional grid, perspective deformed, with snapping