I was looking at my blog and realized that I hadn't talked about Inkscape much lately. This is probably because I don't have alot of finished results right now -- but that doesn't mean there isn't progress.
Currently, the codebase as a whole is getting ready for 0.41. There are some major bugfixes, plus the new tileable clones, which made everyone think that we should do a quick release to get those to users. Recently, Ishmal has extended the tracing to do some color quantizing and multi-pass tracing to make some better pictures. His results are very impressive. I think that Inkscape may become a great app to take photos and turn them into vectored images.
Personally, I've been trying to get extensions and effects in better shape. I had already rewritten the verbs system to allow for dynamic creation (and make it cleaner and more object-oriented) so that was integrated into the effects menu creation. Now, by uncommenting one line, you can configure your interface.cpp file to have an effects menu. This only has a couple of entries on it, but they both work reasonably well, but need some more clean up.
I'm now working to get the dialogs using a plug/socket system from GTKmm to make it so that all extensions can have GUI setting of parameters. This is being a little tricky, but I seem to have it under control.
I expect to, in the near future, get to categorizing extensions. This would make for submenus in the effects menu, but also allow for grouping in the open/import/save dialogs. That would make all of them easier to use. This will have to be done and a pretty base level -- not bad, but just makes the abstraction a little bit tricker. I'm hoping that I can use some of the same constructs to build collections (extensions of clip-art) later.
That's the quick update. Stay tuned for 0.41, and more effects on the way!
posted Jan 5, 2005 | permanent link
