Release notes/0.92.3

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Release highlights

Not yet released

Inkscape 0.92.3 is mainly a stability and bugfix release, but it also brings some small new features, like being able to set an ellipses' radii numerically in the tool controls, or switching the writing direction from left-to-right to right-to-left. Windows users will be happy to learn that the long startup times many of them were seeing could greatly be reduced. A new rendering option with an adjusted default value can vastly improve performance when working with filters.

Many of the bug fixes address important functionality, like printing issues, crashes with the node tool or problems with keyboard shortcuts.

Improvements

Command line usage

Three new command line options controlling page size are supported when exporting in SVG format:

• --export-area-drawing (feature requests in bug #1597921 and bug #1722844)
• --export-area-page while using --export-id
• --export-margin

Text tool

Support for switching between RTL and LTR writing directions has been added.

(On narrow screens, find it by unfolding the overhang menu for the text tool's tool controls by clicking on the triangle at the far right.)

Circle/ellipse/arc tool

New fields for setting vertical/horizontal radius (Rx/Ry) were added to the tool controls bar.
(Bug #1181127, Ellipse control bar should include Rx, Ry, or width and height)

PDF+LaTeX export

Support for multi-line text with basic support for line-spacing attribute was added. (Bug #771959)

Please note:

• Currently only the line-spacing of the top level text element is considered, i.e. all lines in one text element share the same line spacing.
• LaTeX is much more clever with respect to line spacing, so layout might not always be exactly the same as in Inkscape.
• Make sure to use a continuously scalable font in LaTeX, otherwise results might be unexpected.

Performance: New preferences option

A new option called "Rendering tile multiplier" was added under Rendering preferences. It can adjust the size of rendering tiles (tiles are portions of canvas area that are calculated in one go). Rendering larger areas with complex content at once requires more computational time, but modern computers come with powerful hardware and many should be up to the task.

Making this value larger can speed up drawing, if you have large areas with complex filters in your drawing or work a lot with high zoom levels on filtered objects. Making the value smaller can make zooming and panning in relevant areas faster on low-end hardware (if there are no large filtered areas on the visible part of the canvas).

The new default value makes your screen consist of about four tiles that are rendered independently if you're not using a hidpi screen (which requires more tiles). A more detailed explanation is available here.

Startup Performance

The first start of Inkscape on Windows is much faster now.

This is the result of improvements in fontconfig 2.13.0, a third party library which handles font related tasks for Inkscape. One of the tasks is creating an index of all fonts available on the system which is much faster now. If the new indexing causes any issues (i.e. fonts or glyphs not available that could be used before) make sure to let us know or report the issue directly to the fontconfig project.

Extensions

Extensions on Windows can now make use of Tkinter, without requiring users to install it themselves. Tkinter provides functionality for creating interactive graphical user interfaces. This is used, for example, by the TexText extension that renders mathematical LaTeX formulas to SVG (feature request at bug #1735451).

Regression fixes

• Potentially missing command line output in Inkscape 0.92.2 on Windows 7. (Bug #1714278)
• Extensions in the 'Raster' submenu relying on ImageMagick were broken and caused crashes in Inkscape 0.92.2 on Windows. (Bug #1720330)
• gcodetools were creating wrong orientation points since the dpi change had been made for Inkscape 0.92 (Bug #1680760)
• The 'Clone original' path effect that was partially broken in Inkscape 0.92.2 works again to fill a path with a PowerStroke applied to it (useful for drawing cartoons) (Bug #1715433)
• The preferences dialog was tiny by default (Bug #1360213)
• Node handles no longer get too large when selected, and they also revert back to standard size when deselected (Bug #1568644)
• Export to .odg (Open Document Drawing) works again on Windows (Bug #1654034)
• Inkscape no longer freezes when trying to import clipart from OpenClipart when the openclipart.org server takes too long to respond to requests (Bug #1745521)
• Texts that are written in vertical direction now have their marks (e.g. accents) on the correct side again (gitlab commit)

Important bugfixes

• Fix shortcuts not working as expected on systems with non-latin primary keyboard layout. (Bugs #1226962, #1730246, #1734308)
• Fix crash when attempting to drag path at cap or line join. (Bug #1691406)
• Inkscape process did not exit cleanly on Windows. (Bugs #1412365 and #1715339, also causing #1714278)
• Fix "Open recent" not including files with special characters on Windows. (Bug #629608)
• File extension was sometimes omitted when adding saved files to Windows' list of "recently used documents" resulting in unusable links ([1])
• Do not crash on systems with illegal fontconfig configurations. (Bug #1716516)
• Resolve issues when attempting to save files to non-existing directories. Could happen for shortcuts.xml (Bug #1719629) and when setting the autosave location manually.
• Allow cancellation of bitmap export. (Bug #1195929)
• Fix issues with PDF+LaTeX export: wrong stacking of text/graphics, missing pages in PDF output (Bugs #771957, #1417470)
• Printing multiple copies of the document resulted in one copy and many blank pages (Bug #490866, #1733424)
• Fix export area when exporting single objects to SVG using the --export-id command line switch (Bug #1306662, #1707368)
• Fix DXF output and Windows vector print scaling for documents with a custom view box (Bug #1672066)
• Invalid output generated from extensions no longer makes Inkscape crash (gitlab commit)
• The Ruler Live Path Effect now shows correct measurements in the default template (and other non-px-based templates), too (Bug #1460858)
• The Document Properties dialog now has a more compact layout, so all items should be accessible on smaller screens (Bug #1510831)

More bug fixes

There were even more issues fixed than those listed above, but these probably only affect a small portion of users, or are relevant for development and packaging only.

For a complete list, visit our launchpad bug tracker and see the commit history on gitlab (all changes from August, 6th 2017 until release date).

Translations

The following UI translations received updates:

• French
• German
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Korean
• Spanish
• Ukrainian

The following installer translations received updates:

• Korean

Contributing to interface translations

Want to help with translations? Learn how to help!

Documentation

Documentation Relaunch

The Inkscape documentation repository, containing the man page, the keyboard shortcut list as well as the tutorials and their respective translation files, has been almost completely refactored (Java has been dropped in favor of Python), and was updated to work with git and gitlab.

Documentation Updates

The man page and the keyboard shortcut list have been updated.

Where to find recent documentation

Continuously updated man page (for command line usage), keyboard and mouse shortcut list, tutorials and translation statistics for the various parts of the Inkscape project are available on the inkscape.org website:

• Man page
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Tutorials
• Translation statistics for Inkscape 0.92 series / development branch

Tutorials, as always, are also included with your Inkscape installation.

Contributing to documentation and documentation translation

Contributions to the documentation translations, as well as improvements to its contents, are welcome at the inkscape-docs repository.

Known issues

• DPI Change: known issues with 'Scale elements' option (1653230,1653236,1654342,1654796,1654880,1654903,1655005,1655053,1660228)
• DPI Change: Default grids in documents created with Inkscape 0.91 don't scale correctly (Bug #1653893)
• Line height: Changing "baseline spacing" stops working (#1707808)
• Renderer: Artifacts in Gaussian blur effects with default quality settings (Bug #1656383)
• Node editor: Deselecting selected nodes of complex paths takes a long time (Bug #1652100)
• Performance: Using the objects dialog at least once in your Inkscape session slows down actions such as duplicate and delete for files with many objects. (Bug #1431274)

Previous releases

• Release notes/0.92
• Release notes/0.92.1
• Release notes/0.92.2