ReleaseAnnounce041

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

Announcing Inkscape 0.41 Release . www.inkscape.org

February 10, 2005 UTC — The Inkscape community announced the release 0.41 of Inkscape, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool" today. Inkscape continues to develop at a rapid pace by focusing on bug fixes, stability, color bitmap-to-vector tracing capabilities, Internationalization, pattern tiling, and translation refinements.

Inkscape developers fixed many bugs and worked on overall stability for the 0.41 release. This significantly strengthened Inkscape on Windows and overall improved Internationalization in the program. Inkscape developer Bryce Harrington stated that "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 are now corrected and certain areas are noticeably snappier thanks to user submitted bug reports.

In addition to stability improvements, developers added several new features. First, Inkscape 0.41 builds on the black and white tracing functionality introduced in release 0.40. This functionality converts a bitmap (raster) image into an editable vector graphic. Now, Inkscape converts color and grayscale images with ease and the results are quite astounding. Second, is the addition of a new clone tiler facility which creates patterns, tesselations, and other sorts of geometric tiling arrangements with an easy-to-use dialog.

User requests and comments also stimulated a number of improvements to units handling, extensions, the Invert Selection command, layers selector, icon theming, and several new translations.

A number of large scale changes are planned for the 0.42 release, including converting the interface to use Gtkmm and the incorporation of a new Document Object Model (DOM), which will provide the core to build scripting onto.

As always, Inkscape is open to contributors and developers of all levels of experience. The Inkscape development community encourages people to join the development team by submitting bug reports, making feature requests and by contributing code. For more information, visit www.inkscape.org.

Inkscape. Draw Freely.

Download Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX packages:

    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/