The incoming version of Inkscape is a brilliantly engineered masterpiece designed to punch Adobe Illustrator in the face.
The scale of Inkscape 1.5 is hard to put into words.
- A full port from GTK 3 to GTK 4
- A new rendering engine
- The Unified Font Browser becoming default,
- Document Tabs being introduced,
- Many long-standing issues finally being addressed,
- New and changed dependencies across multiple target platforms.
- UI/UX improvements
GTK 4 unlocks several possibilities, but it also exacts its own costs. This transition is definitely being felt in the amount and complexity of the work the developers have had to undertake.
Inkscape developers have been pouring their nights and weekends into 1.5 but they are currently feeling overwhelmed.
If you’re a C++ developer, particularly with graphics experience, Inkscape could use your help in pushing 1.5 forward.
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items
Adobe has unlimited ressources. Inkscape relies on us
🙏🙏🙏
I think Inkscape’s UI could def also gain some good improvements even just with little technical know-how! I’ve been trying to make a UI style for it from scratch purely through GTK’s CSS layer (no touching internal code or recompiling at all) and I’m pretty impressed of what’s possible. (see here)
If anyone is even just familiar with CSS, you could certainly make good contributions to the UI layer. Or help out in my repo i posted above, I need to port the style to Inkscape 1.5 / GTK4 (aswell as cover some missing stuff e.g. right-to-left) but I don’t find a lot of time to do it.