 Good morning everyone and welcome to this talk about the release of Inkscape 1.0 about its history, about how Inkscape 1.0 came to be and more generally this talked about what's up in the Inkscape project for now and a bit about the future of the project. So let's start with a bit of Inkscape history first. So Inkscape was forked from the Sotypodi project which was also a vector graphics editor, pre-existing, in 2003 roughly and published its first version in 2004 which was version 0.37. At that time the versioning scheme for Inkscape was a bit simple. Basically the goal, the stated goal of Inkscape was to create a vector graphic editor for SVG format. The versioning was basically how much of the SVG format do we support. So version 0.37 basically means that we supported around 37% of the SVG specification which means that the goal, the end goal was to eventually publish 1.0 release with 100% of the SVG specification. So this was the goal and this versioning continued basically through 38, 39 etc. until 0.48 version which was in 2010. So version 0.48. Then after 0.48 was out we published several point releases which means no big new features but mainly bug fixes and stability until we hit our I think most stable version 0.48.5 and at that time we had decided to change the versioning to have a more a faster approach to 1.0 because a lot of people thought that being below 1.0 means that the Sotypodi was not stable and that was not at all how we felt about Inkscape because Inkscape was already very stable. So we decided that we would jump basically to 91 so we published the version 0.91 in 2015 which means that we felt that we were very close to version 1.0. At that point we already had in mind the idea that version 1.0 would have to have basically DTK3 to support because DTK2 was already old and not really well supported everywhere and not taking into account a lot of stuff that people already used like high DPI screens. So after that we published another version which was 0.92 in 2017 and a few bug fix versions after that until 0.92.5 recently. The start of DTK3 in Inkscape code was basically around 2012 by Alex Valavanis and it was a bit dormant as an compilation option in the Inkscape code until 2016, a bit before the release of 0.92. When we created the branch for 0.92 after that we made the master branch using mandatory DTK3. Basically we removed the code of DTK2. So this forced the developers to look at all the issues that the DTK3 branch had which was basically unusable for the first month after the switch because nothing worked in the DTK3 branch and after fixing a lot and lots and lots and lots of those in this DTK3 branch we finally released a version using DTK3 in 2020 which is the version 1.0. We haven't yet finished to update to DTK3 because we still have a few deprecation warnings about DTK stuff that is already deprecated. Related to that we had the pleasure of welcoming more recent macOS contributors in the Inkscape developer community. We had a lot of versions without any real macOS developers so none of the Linux or Windows developers knew how to basically package things for macOS or make things work on macOS so we could not really have macOS versions and apparently the DTK3 framework makes it easier to provide a DTK3 to provide a macOS version so we welcomed René who made basically a macOS sort of native version from April 2019 which was a very good thing for the project I think and in parallel to that we had the Python 3 migration on the extensor type which was mainly initiated by Martin so Martin started in March 2018 to port all extensions from Python 2 to Python 3 and even some Python 2 compatible and he finished that migration 18 months later just in time for the release of 1.0. Another thing that prompted us to change our versioning scheme was the arrival of the SVG2 specification. We already had implemented for some time things like paint order to put fill in front of stroke for instance and now we implemented SVG2 text to have text behave more like text in browsers and we also started to implement meshes to have paint meshes but that didn't make it into the SVG2 spec eventually. Hello LGM I'm here to talk about the Inkscape community. One of the things that is really great about Inkscape is that we take our community of contributors very seriously and part of what we've done in the last few years has been to really ramp up how we invite different kinds of users who may not have been able to contribute previously because they're not program programmers and finding ways for them to help the project. Part of this has been facilitated by moving the project from large pad to GitLab. GitLab now contains many of the new teams that we have and I'm here to talk about a couple of those things. So previously we had the developers team, we had a translators team, a docs team and then the Inkscape board which is a specialist function but in the past few years we have been growing our vectors team. Our vectors team is just a funny name for our marketing and outreach team. These are people who are very keen and interested to use a product but they also want to contribute back and one of the things that they can contribute is being able to like write news articles and post things on Twitter and you know basically make it so that Inkscape has people paying attention to what's going on outside of the developer community. We also noticed that we needed to pay attention to our user community itself. Inkscape had a situation where there were a lot of forums online and a lot of places where people were going for help but none of those were inside the Inkscape community which means there was a massive divide between where developers were talking about things and where users needed to go in order to ask questions. We developed a forum on our website. We implemented a rocket chat system which we have encouraged not only for our developer team and all of our teams to use but also we've made sure that users can ask questions there as well so that there isn't so much of a divide between people who need help and developers who are communicating what they're trying to do technically. The future for the community, we are trying to grow our user experience and design teams. We're trying to figure out the best ways of making sure that the designs that they come up with in GitLab, the processes that they go to to refine are then respected and then brought into code which is always the hard step to go from like a perfected design on paper and then actually bring that into code especially since Inkscape is almost entirely volunteer driven. We have some successes already, some designers were able to learn how to use Glade and therefore they were able to create designs that were able to bring into Inkscape pretty directly. But we'd also like to grow our user community further, do more competitions, do more artist based things. We'd also like to grow different types of communities so user communities that do like CNC work or they do specific kinds of artwork or design or planning things like that. Those communities usually have specialist knowledge which they you know they can create things like tutorials for each other, having space for them so that they can learn each other's names and know who to ask for help for specific issues. I think it's going to be important going forward. And each of those communities of different types of users I think are important to Inkscape and we should definitely be paying attention. Our Vectors team, I have to say it, big shout out to Chris, big shout out to Ryan, big shout out for all of the Vectors, Mahayla, Marron, because they've really shown what a marketing and outreach team can do for a project. Not only were they able to improve Inkscape by showing us the bugs that were going to be important to our users in the 1.0 release, things that they would definitely notice that we managed to fix because they considered them blockers. But they were also able to promote the 1.0 in a way that has really increased the profile of the project. So if your graphics project is thinking about doing a marketing and outreach team, I can highly recommend it. That's it for the community section. Thank you for listening. Considering the amount of changes in 1.0, this made the release process for it very, very long and much longer than anticipated. We released the first alpha version in January 2019. So the goal of the alpha versions was to have people signal the biggest problems with it and what was to be fixed with highest priority. Then a second alpha version in June 2019. Then we published Beta in September 2019, where the goal of the beta was to basically collect all the problems, however minor, that could be encountered with 1.0. We then released a second beta in December. Then we tried to fix as much as possible of what was found problematic during the beta and identify a lot of blockers basically. And then we published a released candidate in April, which where the goal was to have already fixed what was to be fixed before the release. And then one month later on May the first release. This release was a big success. We had a great video by Chris and why we knew there are many bugs present in the release. And we even let a debug dialog in the release. Apparently a lot of people did not realize it was buggy. I don't know how they missed it, but we received a lot of praise and congratulations for that release. And both in social media, in articles about the release and even the discussions on hacker news were mostly elogious, which is quite something. So yeah, it was a release, I guess. And so we turn to what is in the future for Inkscape. And here I'm to give you some taste of the kind of things that might be coming in the next few releases. First of all, the question is always who is next? We have, of course, always the situation that the people that show up, the people that contribute, these are the ones that set the direction of Inkscape. The project as a whole has guides, but mostly it's people who want to actually develop things further. Those are the ones who are most likely to get their features in. That's why in the next couple of months, we're going to have a hack fest, which is going to be online. And everybody's invited if they're interested in developing Inkscape for the next releases, and encourage everybody who has plans to come along. And we're going to have some presentations of all of the dreams of the future that we can actually lay down in detail and have discussions about them. So what kinds of things can we look forward to? Well, there's the idea of the collaborative edition, that is, Inkscape where two different individuals using Inkscape can collaborate on the same document. We used to have this kind of functionality, but we need to bring it back. There are plans afoot to do that. We're going to continue the rollout of the customization that is making Inkscape more themeable, more configurable. And a lot of this has to do with plans such as making an Inkscape for kids, which would be a much more fun and bright version of Inkscape that's simplified. But also for many other reasons, lots of users have particular kinds of needs that we'd like to be able to offer them an interface that matches. There's obviously GTK4, which we hope will be a much easier transition. We need, we really need to get GPU rendering support. Inkscape currently renders everything on the CPU and it's quite slow. We need to somehow get the CMYK workflow completed. It's one of the largest gaps in Inkscape's functionality. It's been on our roadmap for a very long time. Whether this means developing features in Zekairo or whether it means using a new back end in order to do the color management, that's for the planning. We also have some really good designs for multi-page support. So hopefully we'll be able to do canvases and multiple pages. They won't be based in SVG because SVG2 rejected the idea of multiple page pages. But we still need the functionality because there's lots of people who use Inkscape in order to do production work. And I would also say that there are lots of user experience improvements that are being designed right now in the in the new UX team. Lots of small tweaks, small things where Inkscape can be designed a little better. And I think that's it for functionality. At least in the grand scheme of things. I will pass you back to Mark. Thank you. Okay so it seems we have many exciting things to come in the future of Inkscape. So I cannot wait for some of them and I hope you're excited by them too. So what to say now? Join us if you can using Inkscape and if you have any questions feel free to ask them. Thank you for coming to LGM. Hello. Hello. Okay so there's a question here about how many users are using Inkscape? Let's start in order probably. So when is the next hackfest and how to join and participate? Oh yeah of course. Okay so the next hackfest hasn't been confirmed with a specific date but I'm aiming at August. Online right? I hope that that gives you a more specific answer but if you want to if you're interested in the details come to the rocket chat and we'll make sure that you get the information. So Z mark what's the next question? There was a question about some diffusion curve but I don't know about it. I don't sorry myself I don't know about the diffusion curves. So there are two issues potential issues with implementing that. The first one is that we try to have the SVG conformant output as much as possible. So we need to make sure that this kind of gradients can be handled in SVG maybe with gradient meshes if if need be. So if it can be implemented with the gradient meshes we can do it and we will just need people to basically do the UI for it and if it cannot then we need to see how we can specify some kind of implementation of it in XML and SVG in general and basically suggest it to the SVG specification if it's if it could be useful to all SVG basically. Okay so I'm going to take the next question which is about how many users does Inkscape have. This is obviously a very hard question to answer but I'm going to answer in my my role as the the website administrator. We know that Inkscape is downloaded from the website hundreds of thousands of times every month and of course this is not the total list of Inkscape users since there will be duplicates but there'll also be lots of Linux users which aren't counted. For example statistically our user base is 95% Windows 5% Mac and 0% Linux but that's obviously not the the truth of the matter so obviously the stats are really hard we don't record and we don't track users and we never will but suffice to say that Inkscape is well regarded and has millions of users. Yeah when I last looked at the popularity contest on which is tracking how many users of some distributions use some package basically we are on one Ubuntu install out of four that records their package installs and one DBN out of five some around around this order of magnitude and in one month of downloads on the website we have I think people have downloaded the 1.0 installers approximately 600,000 times and yeah that's about it and for the version that stayed longer the new website which was 0.92.4 the Windows installers were downloaded 7 million times in total so that gives you us an order of magnitude but we don't know the exact numbers. Yeah that's very interesting I haven't actually heard about the the other numbers. Do you want to take the questions about prototyping the prototyping GUI? Yeah I can't actually see the question but can you read it out for me? Yeah someone wanted to know if there have been some discussions about tools for prototyping GUIs such as those that like Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD so I think Akira is trying to fill that gap. So the idea here is that Inkscape being used as a tool to create user interfaces not development of user interfaces for Inkscape. I mean people have no specific development plans so far as I've seen for creating tools specifically for doing kind of UI design workflows but if you're interested we're always interested to hear what kind of tools Inkscape could provide for different kinds of segments like user interface design. I know that's not really a very good answer but so far as we know the UX team which is collating a lot of the design the future designs doesn't have any plans. Yeah there is another tool that is currently developed to try to fill that gap which is called Akira I think Akira UX that you can look up. I will put the link in the chat. So another question for you Martin. Someone would love to hear more about the community building and especially how do you make sure that people who are less tech techy or less already involved in other open source project and how to be keep those people engaged? Yeah so it's actually it's a hard process because the first thing that you have to be aware of is that as developers we are naturally inclined to listen to and give a greater time and respect to all the developers. It's just sort of how we are built in how we program. So being able to make sure your community has things like a code of conduct and that also has places where non-developers will find comfortable to contribute. This is something for instance that the Rocket Chat gives us. It's no disrespect to IOC but Rocket Chat is a more comfortable place but that's just like the basis. To go on further from that you have to give non-developers control over decision making itself. Whether this means bringing them into the board or whether this just means for certain decisions. Not having input into things which can be sometimes very hard right because we want to be in control but oftentimes it's just better to say okay so there's this new person here that wants to make something new. I don't have time to actually do this particular task myself. This person is going to make decisions that are not going to make me happy and there's a limit to how much that I should be stopping them from doing the task and so like being able to stop yourself is perhaps one of the most important lessons. So a question about the SVG specification. So is the SVG specification board easy to work with as a stubborn or open people? Do you feel that SVG could target more desktop publishing artwork instead of just web and what is the vision of the SVG standard? So I think the person most able to answer that question precisely is Tava who is not here right now but from what I heard basically SVG specification people is very web-centric with a lot of people coming from browsers like Firefox and Chrome. They used to be more involved from Adobe who is more art-centric than web-centric but I think right now it's mostly Chrome and Firefox and it makes sense since it's from the W3C which is like the worldwide web consortium so SVG is primarily targeted at web. I don't think they would be close to suggestions to improve SVG but they are very conservative about it and they basically want to have as low a burden for browsers as possible so basically they need for something to be added to SVG you need to make sure that there are several already implementations ready to be published instead before they will basically consider adding it so it could target more desktop artwork but it's primarily a web specification which is not incompatible we can have desktop targeted stuff in it but not it's not easy to make it evil so another question about specification I noticed that you mentioned near the end that you were looking for a five format with multiple pages so both multiple pages oh it's not a question and SVG were on the table for open raster format discussions tomorrow so yeah might be interesting to look at open raster discussions to see how we want to implement stuff in SVG. Martin maybe for you do you feel a moment a new momentum of users and companies interested in Inkscape 1.0 as Blender was when it released 2.80? Yeah I think I think every release that we do we definitely see an uptick in interest the 1.0 has been special for us and we have definitely received a lot of media attention a good example of that is we had ASF support so they gave us some money and you can see them on our support page on our website and you know I don't think that that would have come to us if we hadn't have made the release you know it's difficult to know about industry because we have very industrial ties to all of the companies that use Inkscape some great examples of that actually is things like companies that produce cutting machines and other kinds of devices a lot of them actually use or recommend Inkscape in a really heavy way but very few of them actually contribute or are in contact with us so it's difficult to know like what the we were talking about how difficult it is to know how many like ordinary users that we have but it's also difficult to know how many industrial users we have too but yes we definitely have a a vigor and a Vim going on with with 1.0 so Mark do you think that conforming to SVG is hindering Inkscape feature development? Not really as most things can be done in SVG like almost all vector things can be done in SVG and it's just a matter of providing an easy UI to access what could be done basically except for vector meshes like gradient meshes but we try down I think we will make it add it in some later version of SVG yeah I think if we have a couple things if Krita could have an independent implementation then then we definitely make it so I know we have a couple of things that are on the slab for the next release or the next few releases things like multi-page support that we are definitely going to have to do ourselves because we have a strong signal from the SVG working group that they are not interested in supporting those things but we'll just have to see how we can develop it so that if in the future with SVG 3.5 or whatever they they introduce these features that are Inkscape SVG variants are not too far away from what we would expect so will there be a vector brush for the power pencil tool like for the grease pencil tool in Blender I don't know I haven't really used the grease pencil tool in Blender maybe Martin do you know about it or I've only seen a couple of videos on the Blender grease pencil Blender videos always look amazing so it's hard to it's hard to dig out from the from the fog event and envy but I've seen that the LPEs are probably the closest thing that we have but I don't think it's comparable oh yeah maybe there could be improvements to the power pencil tool with more brushes but it's it's not impossible but we haven't tried to implement it did we miss any questions I think we're okay there is a question about the shapebuilder tool which exists in Illustrator I think and it's not on the roadmap because it's a lot of work and basically no one has time for that but if we have anyone willing to implement it and with some knowledge about how to potentially implement it then sure it's like why not it is that like all all features that exist in other software we are not against it it's just that we did not have time in the past to do it and it's a lot of work yeah so there's a there's a couple of actually adobe like features that specific users have asked for things like color color management improvements to swatches and so forth a lot of those discussions are actually happening in the UX team the UX team knows that there isn't a promise that all of the features that they design will be implemented but it is at least the start of the discussion that happens from the designer perspective so there's a question here about what is the simplest way to help inkscape and this so inkscape like all open source projects primarily needs contributors right people who get active but it's okay to do simple things like help with retweeting or answering questions on the forums or donating some money all of these things are the simplest perhaps ways of contributing but we also need documentation writers translators people who do graphics like all of the amazing artists that do the about screen contest amazing contributors i have to say who really help sort of raise the level of inkscape from just merely developers to like more more than that how was the transition from launchpad to githlab in particular the bug reports migration so island serves a part that's not about bugs and i will let martin about the story so one of the one of the technical parts was to that we migrated from a bazaar which is used in large pad to gith in githlab and that was quite an easy part that we transferred all the bazaar commits into gith and that was really painless and coming into githlab and starting to use the githlab with more git-esque workflow was really easy i think for many of the contributors of protect it took some time from some other some contributors to get used to it but mostly it going into githlab was painless for most things and for bugs i will let martin sure so the the the bugs migration is still happening and in in fact this is one way that people can contribute there's a bugs migration game in fact it's a game where you can earn little animated badges of little dancing bugs that chris has done we'll post a link so that everybody can have a look but so we've moved a lot of the 70 000 bugs that we had on launchpad or close them as as needed but it's it's a lot of work and it's taken more than a year to sort of go through even the ones that we have so far but it's definitely a worthwhile project because we've recovered some of the issues or patches that we've had in the past we know that when we transitioned to githlab we lost a couple of the people who were looking after our launchpad issues tracker because they didn't want to move which is always sad but this is of course we had to have a balance between the the project's needs in terms of development and also what you did different contributors were comfortable with using so would you hope for mega grants as the ones that blender got from intel nvidia etc i mean inkscape is not a company so it's not quite the same thing yeah basically blender when they got these mega grants they already had big structures with full-time employees and lots of organizations around around it so i think i would not refuse any mega grants and i think it would basically make the project advance a lot but we don't even have money for one full-time developer right now so it's it would be a lot of work on the project current contributors to handle such a big grant basically because it would the first thing we would do with some of this money would be with such an amount of money would be to try to reorganize the project to be able to handle it and to have full-time contributors etc and it would take it it would take a much longer time than for blender to use it basically so it would not solve everything i think one of the the biggest sort of mega contributions that a company could make is actually to to hire a developer right so if if ren had turned around and hired a developer who was a full-time inkscape developer that would be way more of a contribution and immediate because of the way in which inkscape is structured currently than just a large part of money inkscape has its own forum implementation do you find it easier than using something like discourse and what are the teams experience in communicating with users i should probably handle the inkscape implemented its own forum so i i wrote the forum in jango python mostly because most of the implementations of forums that were out there were php and i really don't like php so this is a this is a very biased account but after many discussions with a couple of forum people who who were looking after different forums online we got a sense of what the requirements were and it took about six months of backwards and forwards and programming and fixing and trialing and stuff so in the end i think we've we've got a forum which is actually pretty solid so far it's been it's been fairly active but not but not very active but it's also nice to see users being able to post their their pictures and talk amongst themselves about things and being able to answer questions whether the answers don't disappear like they do in the chat also if anybody's interested in looking at the python code for our forums the the inkscape web project is on git lab so are there interoperability discussions between open source graphics software or are the open formats already okay so there are definitely discussions between open graphics software and well other people in other software could probably tell more about discussions like the discussions happening on or a tomorrow for instance are an example of that for the svg format in particular we have some discussions sometimes with the critter like i hang out on the critter ioc channel and sometimes i mean in some discussions but there are not a lot of open source projects implementing svg and certainly not trying to implement the full svg specification like scribus is implementing some of the svg so that you can import svg files in scribus fontforge is interesting basically in path so you can they are interested in people having path implemented implemented in fontforge but they don't really care about gradients or any fancy features because it's not in their interest to create fonts basically so we like specifications make it easy to handle those matters because we try to implement what's specified other try to implement what's specified etc and we don't have a lot of discussions about trying to further modify the svg specification with other projects but we could have some such discussions so mark what's your favorite new feature in 1.0 centerline tracing probably that is a very good feature it's hard to pick out because we've been using it for so long but i think mesh great gradients they're definitely the coolest they were already there before i think ah they're still cool i thought we disabled them i thought we disabled them for a nine two but maybe they were there how much budget do we have and how do we spend the donation money or is this information available somewhere it is it is information that's available i unfortunately don't have it on hand but i know that we have we have more money coming in currently than we are able to spend on things like hackfests especially since we're not spending any money this year on airplanes and hotels which is different from previous years but so this is where we're in this tricky situation where we are getting more donations than we can spend on biscuits but we are not we're not getting enough donations to to hire somebody or to do large contracting projects especially since some of our sponsors are technical sponsors that just give us free access to cdn free access to servers etc so we don't have a lot of spending on technical stuff most of our spendings are for uh meetings between developers which we try to do once or twice a year but not this year obviously i think it's does inkscape use svg to store layer effects like blur shadow outline strobe in our lights yes in svg 1.1 it was in the svg specification that filters are well specified in svg the svg 2 specification outsourced that to a filter specification which is i think a subsection of css something specification which has a whole section it's about svg tags for filters and what exist and exactly what they do and it was one of the most difficult to read specifications that i've ever seen in w3c that's the last question that we have so far i will put a link so it says do inkscape developers plan to form a foundation like critter and blender have i mean we're an organization as a part of the software freedom conservancy so we have a structure but we don't have a foundation which could conceivably operate independently do we have a master don fediverse account yet so that this actually is a quick question for the vectors team the the vectors team has accounts with all kinds of social media including master don not only do they have accounts they also do tracking and various other interesting ways of making sure that all the news that we produce ends up on all of the platforms forum versus chat what is the future what's my opinion between forums and chat it's uh do you use the forums at all mark uh no no i don't use the forums i i try to react uh quite often on the chat but yeah so so i think uh chat is good because it's more it's a higher bandwidth and more more immediate so if there's a lot of backwards and forwards then chat can be very valuable um but when it comes to um being able to lay out your thoughts and um take time uh post examples that's the sort of thing uh the forums are much better we actually find this in interestingly between git lab and rocket chat or i i rc in that developers can chat in in i rc um but often they will document things in get in git lab and i think git lab is operating like a like a developer forum for us um is the ai format open no definitely not see ai format well sort of the ai format is actually uh pdf uh since uh 10 or 15 years ago before it was eps so it's basically a valid pdf file that you can rename ai to dot pdf but it contains all the ai specific elements like ai filters and some ai editing data as a binary blob inside the pdf and as far as i know it has never been reverse engineered by anyone and never been specified anywhere so contrary to for instance the photoshop format which was published by which is binary but was published by adobe the ai specification was as far as i know never released and never reverse engineered yeah artificial ignorance indeed yeah i think the the overall roadmap from question was in the video um if you've got a specific question about future developments though please please qa that team says we are almost out of time excellent these were some really good question questions so thank you everyone for your questions and thank you lgm for letting us present uh inkscape that many people already knew anyway but yeah the questions were really interesting and i hope you enjoyed the presentation and the video so thank you lgm and thanks chaps