Inkscape 0.45: overview This release brings the exciting new features developed by the Google Summer of Code 2006 participants, as well as tons of other improvements across the board. SVG filters: Gaussian blur Thanks to Google's Summer of Code program, Inkscape now has basic support for [44]SVG filters. The only filter enabled so far is Gaussian blur. With it, you can softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects: paths, shapes, groups, text], images. Clones inherit blurring from their original, but they can also be blurred independently from the original (you can create blurred clones with Tile Clones, too). Both the fill and stroke of an object are blurred together, creating semitransparent margins that smoothly blend into the background. Gaussian blur enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects to achieve the "feathered mask" effect. * To blur selected objects, open the Fill and Stroke dialog (Ctrl+Shift+F) and use the Blur slider. The blur value is a percentage, with 100% corresponding to a blurring radius of 1/8 of the object's bounding box' perimeter (that is, for a square, a blur of 100% will have the radius equal to half a side). * The Tile Clones dialog also supports blurring. On the Blur & opacity tab, you can set the blur percentage per row or per column of your tiling, as well as randomize blurring and make it alternate (all the same options as for Opacity). * The quality of on-screen blur display is controlled by the Blur quality option on the new Filters tab of Inkscape Preferences (Ctrl+Shift+P). The available options range from best quality/slowest display to worst quality/fastest display, the default being in the middle of the range. Any setting except the "best quality" may introduce some rendering artifacts, especially when blurring thin strokes; on the other hand, the "best quality" setting may make Inkscape extremely slow at high zooms. These settings only affect the screen display of blurred objects; bitmap export always uses the best quality. Here are a few tips on using blur: * Masks and clipping are applied after blur. That is, if you clip an object and then blur it (or blur it first and then clip - it makes no difference), the clipped edges will remain crisp. Often, this is what you want. If, however, you want to blur the clipped/masked edges too (possibly with a different radius), you can use grouping: group the clipped object with some other object (which you can then delete from the group) and blur the group. * A simple drop shadow is now very easy to do: just copy the object, paint the copy black, blur it, shift away a bit and lower it to the bottom. However, such a shadow does not update when you edit the foreground object. If your object is already black (or, more generally, if you want the shadow to be the same color as the object), you can clone instead of copy to make the shadow auto-updating. But what if your foreground object is not black but you need a black shadow? Here's a recipe: unset the object's fill (it becomes black); create two clones of it; put one clone on top and paint any color you want; put the other clone at bottom, blur it and shift sideways. Now you can edit the unset-fill original (use Alt+click to select it) and everything will update. * If an object has a fill that you don't want to blur (e.g. pattern, or if it's a bitmap), but you just want to feather its edges, use a blurred transparency mask. For this, copy the object; paint it white; blur it as needed; scale the blurred copy down so its blur margins are entirely within the original object; select both the original and the blurred mask; do Object > Mask > Set. * Transforming a blurred object transforms its blur, too. This applies to a non-uniform scaling as well, so by squeezing a blurred object you make its blur squeezed as well. So, the easiest way to blur a path horizontally more than vertically is this: stretch it upwards without blur, then apply blur and squeeze it back into the original shape. * You can combine blurring with gradients. For example, an ellipse with elliptic opacity gradient will look much softer and more natural when blurred. An object with a horizontal linear opacity gradient, when blurred, will look like it is more blurred on its transparent side than on its opaque side. * A clone of a blurred object inherits the blur of the original. Therefore, such a clone can be blurred more, but you can't "unblur" it to make the clone sharper than its original (unless, of course, you unlink it). The Fill and Stroke dialog shows you the amount of the blur applied to this particular object; however, if the object is a clone of an already blurred original, the dialog does not reflect that. * Note that Firefox 2.0 does not support SVG filters, so your files will be displayed in Firefox 2.0 without blur. However, support has been added in the current development version ("trunk") and will be included in Firefox 3.0. The Opera web browser, as well as librsvg (used by Wikipedia) and Batik, support filters correctly. Undo history * Inkscape now features a History Dialog accessible through Ctrl+Shift+H or Edit->Undo History. All changes to the document since it was opened are recorded here. + In the dialog, changes are listed from the oldest (top) to the newest (bottom). + The type of each change is indicated by an icon and a short description. + For readability, consecutive changes of the same type are placed in a collapsable branch showing a triangle marker and the number of the hidden actions in the branch. + By clicking on an event event in the list, you can easily move through the undo history, i.e. undo or redo any number of actions with one click. * The Undo and Redo commands in the Edit menu display the descriptions of the commands to be undone and redone, correspondingly. (These are the same descriptions that you see in the History dialog.) Rendering improvements * Interruptible display: Previously, Inkscape could not do anything until it finishes the current screen redraw. Now the redraw is made interruptible, so that Inkscape responds to mouse and keyboard input and can abort the current redraw and start over if you do some screen-changing operation. As a result, Inkscape now feels much snappier and more interactive. This interruptibility is fine-tuned for some interactive operations (such as node dragging) so that a balance is achieved between responsiveness and completeness of display. * Radial gradients are rendered faster by at least 10%. * Screen render is faster by 2-3%, up to 5% for complex drawings with transparency. * Display is more responsive when working at high zoom levels when using a tablet. * Rendering (compositing) quality has been improved. This is most visible with (partially) transparent gradients, banding is a lot less pronounced now. Speed has also been improved in some cases. Tools Node tool * You can grow or shrink node selection by hovering the mouse pointer over a node and using mousewheel (up = grow, down = shrink) or the keys PageUp (grow) and PageDown (shrink). Growing adds the closest unselected node to the selection; shrinking deselects the farthest selected node. There are two modes that differ by how the closest/farthest nodes are chosen: * + Spatial selection (Mousewheel, PageUp/PageDown): distances to nodes are measured directly, regardless of which subpath a node belongs to. * + Linear selection (Ctrl+Mousewheel, Ctrl+PageUp/Ctrl+PageDown): node distances are measured along the path, and only the nodes belonging to the same subpath as the hovered node are considered (i.e. other subpaths are never selected). This technique is convenient for quickly selecting an area in a complex path starting from a center - for example, for node sculpting. Dropper * Instead of the confusing toggle button, now the Controls bar for the Dropper tool has two checkboxes, "Pick alpha" and "Set alpha", which work as follows. Suppose you have an object selected and, using Dropper, click on an object which has red (#FF0000) fill and 0.5 opacity (half-transparent). + If the "Pick alpha" checkbox is off, the selected object will get the fill color #800000 (i.e. faded-out red) and fill opacity will be at 1.0 (opaque). + If the "Pick alpha" checkbox is on but "Set alpha" is off, the selected object will get the fill color #FF0000 (red) and fill opacity will be at 1.0. + If both "Pick alpha" and "Set alpha" are on, the selected object will get the fill color #FF0000 (red) and fill opacity will be at 0.5 (half-transparent). If you Shift+click instead of click, the same changes will be made to stroke color and stroke opacity, correspondingly. Note that in no situation can Dropper change the master opacity of the selected object(s), although it can pick it just as it does any other kind of opacity. Calligraphy * A new numeric parameter, Caps, controls the amount of protruding at the ends of calligraphic strokes. This parameter can range from 0 (flat caps, default behavior in previous versions) through 1 (approximately half-circle caps) and up to 5 (long elliptic caps). Rounded caps much improve the look of low-fixation strokes, simulating a rounded pen. * The "Drag" parameter has been renamed to Wiggle with a value inversion (i.e. low drag corresponds to high wiggle, and vice versa). Increase this parameter (default is 0) to make the pen waver and wiggle in curly patterns. Outline mode * A new menu command (View > Display Mode > Toggle) and a new keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+) switch the display mode from Normal to Outline and back. * The window title displays "(outline)" next to the file name when that editing window is in Outline mode. * An object with mask and/or clipping path, when viewed in Outline mode, now displays both the object itself and its clipping path and mask as objects, using different outline colors. By default, clippaths use green outlines, and masks use blue. * Images in Outline mode are displayed as red (by default) frames with two diagonals. * An object with no fill and no stroke, invisible and not selectable by mouse clicking in normal mode, can now be picked by a mouse click in the Outline mode using its visible outline. * The bug whereby stroked shapes didn't change stroke width when switching to Outline mode or back is fixed. * All outline colors are changeable by editing the "wireframecolors" group inside "options" in the preferences file (~/.inkscape/preferences.xml). The "onlight" and "ondark" attributes set the colors of the regular object outlines on light and dark backgrounds (default black and white correspondingly); the "images", "clips", and "masks" attributes set the colors of images, clipping paths, and masks (defaults are red, green, and blue correspondingly). Each attribute is a decimal integer corresponding to the hex RRGGBBAA of the color. * To cater for specialized uses, such as preparing input for personal media cutters, Inkscape now has an option to start in the Outline mode upon launch. To enable this, add the following line to your preferences.xml file: placing it after the opening tag. PDF export * A new Cairo-based PDF exporter has been added to Inkscape. Inkscape 0.45 can export shapes, strokes, transparency, gradients, patterns, text, and images correctly to Cairo. While clipping paths and masks are known to be faulty or missing. Cairo will write a PDF with vector graphics when possible and fall back to raster graphics when needed. What can be exported as vectors and how much of the image will be rasterized when the fallback kicks in depends on your version of Cairo. Cairo version 1.2 with the pdf backend compiled in is the minimum requirement for any Cairo-based PDF exports. * [removed? - mental] The native PDF exporter introduced in Inkscape 0.44 is improved along with the new Cairo-based PDF exporter. Changes since Inkscape 0.44 include: New features: bitmap images can be embedded, pdf files can be exported from commandline. Changed behaviour: the pointless text to path question is gone. Fixed bugs: save failure is now detected, miter limits are now >= 1, pdfs with transparent gradient are now embeddable, eccentric elliptic gradients fixed, dash style inheritance fixed, transparency inheritance fixed. PS/EPS export * There's a new option to embed the fonts used in the document in the PS or EPS exported file. As of now, this works for Type 1 fonts only, not TrueType. The option is available when performing the export from the GUI as well as from the command line via the --export-embed-fonts option. EMF export * Inkscape has a limited support for exporting EMF (Enhanced Meta File) format. This works only on Windows, and only exports strokes and fills with constant colours. No text, no images, no gradients, no transparency. Command line * The new --export-pdf command line parameter allows exporting an SVG image to PDF from command line. Keyboard profiles The previous release allowed sets of keybinding to be created for Inkscape in the style of other applications. Two more sets of keybindings have been added. * Adobe Illustrator * Macromedia Freehand Of course not every feature in these other programs has a direct match to features in Inkscape so if you can please do help us out by reporting any problems you may have or improvements you would like to request. Additionally, a keybinding that focuses on tablet-based illustration and drawing work has been added: * right-handed-illustration.xml This keybinding places all commonly-used commands under the left hand, so that the user's hands rarely leave the keyboard or the tablet/stylus. (To enable a profile, copy it into default.xml in the same directory, overwriting the old file. To restore the default Inkscape set, copy inkscape.xml into default.xml.) More of Inkscape's keys are implemented as actions and are therefore available for remapping via keyboard profiles. New actions include EditSelectNext and EditSelectPrev for selecting next/previous object or node (by default, they are bound to Tab/Shift+Tab; as a result of becoming global actions, these keys now work in all tools and not only in Selector and Node tool as before). Extension effects * 3 new parameter types have been added to the extension effect UI: tabs, enumerations and optiongroups (radiobuttons). Examples are available of how to use these parameters in the definition of extensions: the new function plotter uses tabs; enumerations are used by the 'Pattern along path' extension; and a small developer example is given to illustrate the use of optiongroups (identical to enumerations). * A new extension, Render > Lorem ipsum creates the traditional Latin-like random text for design mock-ups. The number of paragraphs, the number of sentences per paragraph and the possible fluctuation of the number of sentences (for uneven paragraphs) can be adjusted. If no flowed text element is selected, a new one in a new layer is created, matching the size of the canvas. * Pattern along path: A new powerful extension (in "Generate from path" submenu) allows you to bend, repeat and/or stretch a pattern object (which can be a path or a group) along a "skeleton" path. This makes it easy to create a variety of patterned and shaped strokes. This obsoletes the old "Kochify" extension which is removed. * Color effects: A new group of extensions in the Color submenu of the Effects menu allows you to adjust all colors of a selection at once. These commands affect both fill and stroke colors, including gradients (but not bitmaps). The commands include a full set of HSL adjustments (increasing/decreasing hue, saturation, or lightness by 5%), Brighter and Darker (adjust brightness by up or down by 10%), Desaturate, Grayscale, Negative, commands for removing or swapping the Red, Green, Blue channels, as well as a Custom command where you can set your own formulas for modifying the color channels. These extensions are a temporary solution; in a future version, similar functionality will be added to Inkscape core. Note: undoing color changes on gradients exposes a bug where an object seems to "disappear"; this is however only a display issue (caused by the order in which gradients and their users are restored on undo) not causing any loss of information. Also, on large documents and large selections with gradients, Python's XPath code may get quite slow. Despite these shortcomings, we decided to add this extension, because it's genuinely useful functionality which was so far missing in Inkscape. * The Function Plotter has been extended, providing greater flexibility in x- and y-range definition. * g2png: The new group-to-PNG Python extension (g2png) is an easy way to export any group or layer to individual PNG files. It was first created for use in the [58]Inkscape User Manual (also available in SVN's user_manual module) but is also interesting for many other uses. If e.g. you have to draw a set of icons, you can draw them in the same document, thus making copying, duplicating, cloning etc. easier. Then just create a group for each icon, and with the extension, each group ends up in its own PNG file. * [color markers to match stroke - acspike] * The "Blur Edge" extension is renamed into Inset/Outset Halo to avoid confusion with the real Gaussian blur that we now support, as well as to better describe what this extension actually does: From the selected path, it creates a group of inset and outset paths that form a stepped "halo" around the object. * The Extract One Image extension automatically appends filename extension to the created bitmap file. * In an extension's INX file, you can specify