Difference between revisions of "ReleaseAnnounce041"

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Revision as of 06:16, 9 February 2005

subject line for email: Announcing Inkscape 0.41 Release . www.inkscape.org


Inkscape 0.41

Draw Freely.

http://www.inkscape.org/

The Inkscape community is proud to announce the release 0.41 of
Inkscape, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing
Tool."
The primary focus of the 0.41 release has been on bug fixing.  Inkscape
has already earned a reputation for being robust and hard to crash; but
there were a number of corner cases and rare bugs that we took great
pleasure in squishing for you.  In particular, many fixes have gone in
particular to Windows and Internationalized character sets; even more
so than in past releases we owe deep thanks to the many users who have
worked patiently with us to report the problems and validate these
fixes.  Several serious crashes, memory leaks and mis-features have
been corrected, and certain areas now see noticeable speedups.  We only
wish we could have fixed more!  See our Known Issues section for
problems we know about but didn't have time to fix for this release.
Of course, no Inkscape release would be complete without at least a few
new features.  First, we've built on the black and white tracing
functionality introduced in 0.40 with a surprisingly powerful color and
grayscale tracing capability.  Second, a new clone tiler facility has
been added for creating patterns, tesselations, and other sorts of
pattern tiling arrangements.
In addition, user requests and comments stimulated a number of
improvements to unit handling, extensions, the Invert Selection
command, layers selector, icon theming, and more.  Translations have
also received an amazing amount of attention this release, including
several new translations of tutorials.  All this and more can be seen
in explicit detail in the 0.41 Release Notes.
We were quite strict with ourselves to avoid adding new dependencies
and to hold off on ambitious new features we have planned in order to
make 0.41 especially stable.  The only dependency change is a minor
version update for the Boehm garbage collector libgc, which we
increased to version 6.4 due to freezes that occurred in some
circumstances on Windows and Linux.
However, for 0.42 we intend to go a bit wild with some aggressive
changes that we've been working on experimentally on the side for
several months now.  We expect these changes to destabilize the
codebase considerably, so it may be a while before our next release;
please wish us luck.  The first of these changes is a complete
reimplementation of the graphical user interface using Gtkmm.  The
second is the incorporation of a new DOM that will provide the core
that we can finally build a scripting system on.  Both the interface
design and scripting have been remarked on by reviewers lately so we
know this work takes Inkscape in the right direction.  Wish us well,
and if you'd like to get your hands dirty with us doing this
implementation work, please drop by!


Download your packages (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX):

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

For many more details, see the Release Notes for 0.41:

    http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes041

Community submitted screenshots:

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