ReleaseAnnounce041

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


Announcing Inkscape 0.41 Release . www.inkscape.org

February 8, 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. Please see Inkscape's Known Issues section for noted problems that have work arounds and were not fixed for this release.

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.

In addition, user requests and comments stimulated a number of improvements to units handling, extensions, the Invert Selection command, layers selector, and icon theming. Translations have also received an amazing amount of attention this release, including several new translations of the ever-growing tutorials. All this and more is available in explicit detail in the 0.41 Release Notes, accessible at www.inkscape.org.

Inkscape 0.41 avoided the addition of new dependencies and developers pushed back implementing ambitious new features originally 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 increased to version 6.4 due to freezes that occurred in some circumstances on Windows and Linux.

However, for the upcoming Inkscape 0.42 release, the developers are going to make aggressive changes that have been worked on experimentally behind the scenes for several months. These changes are going to destabilize the codebase considerably during this development cycle; it may be a while before the next release. The first of these changes is a complete re-implementation of the graphical user interface using Gtkmm. The second is the incorporation of a new Document Object Model (DOM) which will provide a core that the developers can finally build a scripting system on. Both of these features are major requests and have been commented on heavily by reviewers.

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/