[artinfo] Inkscape Announces 0.42 Release

[Jon Phillips]

July 26, 2005 ’ The Inkscape community today 
announced the release of Inkscape 0.42, a 
cross-platform Open Source Scalable Vector 
Graphics (SVG) drawing tool.

About Inkscape: Inkscape is an open source 
drawing tool that uses the World Wide Web 
Consortium's (W3C) scalable vector graphics 
format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include 
basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha 
blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In 
addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons' 
metadata, node-editing, layers, complex path 
operations, text-on-path, text-in-shape, and SVG 
XML editing. It also imports several formats like 
EPS, PostScript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF

Inkscape 0.42 is the most feature-filled release 
to date, with an exceptional number of major and 
minor new features, usability mimprovements, and 
bug fixes. While some of the new features simply 
fill long-standing functionality gaps, others are 
truly revolutionary. Inkscape 0.42 is one step 
closer to full SVG compliance. This release adds:

       * Flowed Text: Text objects that 
automatically re-flow to any shape (and not just 
a rectangle).
       * Text Selection: One can now select part 
of a text and apply any style to the selection, 
just like in a word processing application.
       * Gradient Tool: A completely redesigned 
and much easier to use on-canvas gradient 
interface with handles displayed directly in the 
drawing.
       * Effects: These are now usable from within 
Inkscape on all platforms. This version ships 
with a collection of effects including path 
interpolation, randomization, and various fractal 
algorithms.
       * Color Swatches: This standard facility of 
most graphics software is now a part of Inkscape.
       * Colored Clones: Clones may now be painted 
differently from their original.
       * Tile Tracing: The Tile Clones dialog can 
trace an existing image with tiling, producing a 
multitude of exciting effects.
       * Grid Arrange, Baseline Align, Unclumping: 
There are new, powerful ways to arrange objects.
       * Better PS/EPS Export: PostScript level 3 
gradient support, better text handling, and a 
command line option for batch export are in this 
release.
       * Command Line SVG Analysis: Inkscape may 
now be used from the command line to query 
coordinates and dimensions of objects in an SVG 
file.
       * Better SVG/CSS Compliance: Notably, 
internal CSS stylesheets are now supported 
(read-only).
       * Mac OS X Support: In addition to Linux 
and Windows, Inkscape 0.42 is now available as a 
fully self-contained dmg package for Mac OS X.

Thanks to Google's Summer of Code, there are four new student developers
adding new functionality to Inkscape this summer. Michael Wybrow is
adding connectors for automatic diagramming. David Yip is picking up the
development of Inkboard (http://inkboard.sf.net/) to integrate networked
collaborative editing of documents to Inkscape. Matthew Squires is
adding DXF Import and Export. Greg Steffensen is working with the Open
Clip Art Library to make a common graphical interface from the Library
to Inkscape. Thanks to the $20,000 worth of funding for these
developments from Google, the Inkscape developers are aiming to
accelerate the development cycle for the next few releases in order to
promote these projects.

Download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

For many more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.42:
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes042

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