OSNews

A not-uncommon way to create a vector graphic is to cheat - trace it! In the past, we've seen the excellent results that artists achieve by importing a bitmap into Inkscape and manually tracing paths on top of it.

(svg here)

Inkscape 0.40 makes it even easier to "cheat", by incorporating an automatic bitmap-to-vector tracing tool called potrace. It's very easy to use: Import a bitmap into Inkscape, select it, then choose Path > Trace Bitmap from the menu. A dialog will pop up with options to control the type of tracing to perform, threshholds, etc.

(svg here). The ability to randomize the shapes of stars was another feature added in this release, not due to request but just because we could. :-) It's pure fun, but it will definitely have its uses in design and illustration. Rounded stars are especially nice to randomize.

To use this, click on the Star tool, set the Randomized value to something other than 0 and draw, or select an existing star and Alt+drag one of its handles.

(svg here). We've had the Calligraphy tool since Sodipodi days, but honestly it never really worked well. With 0.40, we've exposed its internal settings, and with a bit of tweaking it now is quite powerful.

After clicking on the Calligraphy Tool, look at the controls in the Tool Control Bar. Here's what the most important controls do:

Width: This is the width of the stroke to draw. Think of it as the width of your pen's nib.

Thinning: This controls how much the stroke narrows (or widens, if this value is less than 0) when you draw the pen quickly. For a perfect calligraphy style, set it to 0.

Angle: This is the angle (in degrees) of the pen nib, 0 being horizontal. Change this to emulate different ways of holding the pen.

Fixation: This controls whether the nib angle varies with the stroke direction. Essentially, with a value of 1 it makes the nib behave like a carefully held calligraphy pen, and with a value of 0 it works more like a felt pen.

Beyond the major changes listed above are many smaller features, usability tweaks, performance enhancements, and an exhaustive amount of bug fixes. All of them are thoroughly documented in the Release Notes, but of course the most fun is to discover them in use! ;-)

You'll notice some changes in layout of a few dialogs, for instance. Copy and paste, grid, gradients, style of new objects, the statusbar, XML editor, EPS export and so on have all received some attention and show off new ideas that users and developers have had lately.

For example, a most convenient feature was added to the tool buttons - double clicking on them brings up the preferences for that tool. Quite handy!

We've got a lot to look forward to in the future. Over the next several releases we're undertaking a mission to implement full support of the SVG Tiny spec. This involves supporting SVG animation, <switch> element, anchor hyperlinks, and SVG fonts. We'd also love to gain involvement from more people, so if you're interested in joining in, please do!