Project updates from Libre Graphics Meeting 2014

Last week we took a brief look at the many new projects that were represented on the initial day of Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) 2014 in Leipzig. Although there were a few other newcomer projects presented in the remaining three days, the schedule for the latter part of the event was slanted more toward updates from existing projects, user presentations, and slots for team meetings, workshops, and hackfests. All of these are valuable, of course—in particular, LGM routinely does an exceptional job soliciting talks from real-world software users. But the updates from established projects, particularly those that set out short- and medium-term roadmaps, are likely of interest to many of those who could not attend in person.

The opening day's overview talk (mentioned last week) included slides provided by many project teams, among them GIMP and Inkscape, which are two of the most widely used open source graphics programs. GIMP's current development branch is 2.9, which is now feature-frozen. The plan is for that branch to be released as GIMP 2.99, which will debut a number of significant new features, such as a rotatable canvas window, integration of the former plugins IWarp and Seamless Clone as built-in tools, many more operations ported to the new GEGL processing core, greatly improved metadata support (courtesy of Yorba's metadata wrappers), and the ability to search for actions by name rather than hunting for them in the menu hierarchy. After the 2.99 release, the project will then work on its 3.0 branch, the main focus of which will be porting to GTK+ 3.

Bumping the version number of GIMP will no doubt attract quite a bit of attention (perhaps mostly from people less familiar with free software's "release early, release often" approach to versioning). The same issue came up during the Inkscape update. Inkscape has been a reliable cross-platform vector editor for years, but its version number still hovers at 0.48, several years after talk of version 0.49 began. But that number will change in the second half of 2014, the project announced, when it will bump the next stable release up to version number 0.91. That release (which would otherwise have been 0.49) will incorporate changes like the new Cairo-based rendering engine, a new tracing engine, substantially reduced memory usage, a library for incorporating symbols and other reusable drawing elements, and the new on-canvas measuring tool.

0.91 will also solve two longstanding complaints, said Krzysztof Kosinski: the fact that Inkscape's native coordinate system places the origin in the bottom-left corner as opposed to SVG's in the upper left, and Inkscape's broken support for flowed text. The program's flowed text implementation is based on the abandoned SVG 1.2 specification, making it incompatible with most other SVG tools; the new solution will support files using the old implementation and the modern fix. Subsequent to 0.91, though, the project will work on a 1.0 release. That number is largely a public-relations target, the team admitted, but one that will ease the minds of many would-be users. The 1.0 release will also denote full support of the SVG specification, which was the original target of the project. Or, at least, Kosinski said, it will support all of SVG that makes sense for a vector editor to implement.

Also from the GIMP camp, interaction designer Peter Sikking spoke about the project's future, in particular the user interface (UI) challenges being addressed for the application's move to using entirely non-destructive editing tools based on GEGL. Historically, other non-destructive editing applications like video compositors have taken a "node graph"-based approach, with users hooking up boxes and tubes on a canvas to represent operations. That is almost always an awkward approach, he said, particularly given the considerably larger set of operations involved in painting as compared to video compositing. Consequently, he has been working on techniques to simplify the UI for GEGL-based GIMP, such as automatically hiding portions of the node graph and compressing or de-emphasizing subtrees of the graph. It is ongoing work, without an announced release date as of yet.

Christoph Schäfer and Jason Harder spoke about the desktop publishing (DTP) application Scribus, focusing primarily on real-world Scribus deployments, but addressing the project's upcoming roadmap as well. The next stable release will be version 1.6, which will introduce a significant number of long-requested features, including vertical text alignment, footnotes and endnotes, the ability to clone document objects, "real" table objects (as opposed to workarounds like constructing large grids of small text objects), orphan/widow control, and support for layered SVGs.

Artist and developer Tom Lechner also provided an update about his DTP application Laidout, which was originally created to do prepress impositioning, but has since expanded to tackle several other page-layout, formatting, and prepress tasks. The latest updates in Laidout include a tool for creating engraving-style images (as transformable vectors), new tools for using meshes to transform shapes and gradients, and a tessellation tiling tool that can produce a wide array of M.C. Escher-like tilings from any source images.

The 3D modeling and animation tool Blender was the subject of several talks. The most significant news for Blender's future is the recent launch of Project Gooseberry, the latest in the Blender Foundation's "open movie" projects, which provide what speaker Francesco Siddi called "production-driven development." Each project sets out a target set of features needed to complete the chosen film project. Gooseberry differs significantly from its predecessors, however, in that it will produce a feature-length title rather than a short. Consequently, it will require a significantly larger team of modelers, animators, and effects experts; the project's answer to this challenge is to partner with a dozen or so independent animation studios around the world.

While the features added to Blender for the project to support Gooseberry have not yet been set entirely in stone, they will naturally focus on improving Blender's support for large projects. One feature sure to be included, however, is integration with online asset-tracking and project-management tools. Siddi explained that Blender is rolling out such online services as another way for interested users to contribute to Project Gooseberry; by signing up, users can help provide funding to the project over the lengthier production schedule Gooseberry will entail.

High-quality color management in free-software graphics applications is one of LGM's most widely cited legacies. By and large, the available tools just "do the right thing" whether the task at hand is 2D or 3D, vector or raster. But colord developer Richard Hughes and color workflow consultant Chris Murphy appealed to LGM on behalf of the OpenICC project to do even better. OpenICC is a Freedesktop.org-hosted effort to define and implement a full color-management framework for Linux-based desktops. Hughes and Murphy told the LGM audience that the project would like to move beyond working with individual application-level projects and instead push color-management into the toolkit level. The result would be less for application authors—and end users—to worry about, but the project needs more input and feedback from GTK+, Qt, and other toolkits in order to move forward.

Hughes, of course, is also known to the LGM crowd for his ColorHug open hardware colorimeter (which we looked at in 2012). He provided a somewhat sobering update on the project in a separate session. Although ColorHug has been successful, he said, the rapid rise of Organic LED (OLED) screens has posed a serious challenge: they use significantly different light sources with different primaries that the ColorHug cannot measure nearly as accurately as older displays.

The "correct" solution, he said, is a true spectrometer, which entails significantly more engineering: precise illuminants, components guaranteed to have temperature-stable characteristics, even handling ultraviolet. He has explored the idea, but reported that the engineering costs seem to make it prohibitive. In recent polling, he had only 81 people willing to commit to buying such a device, which is not enough to recoup costs. There might be a few more, of course, but he said he would probably need to find a significant new market segment for the device or else he could not move forward with it. Linux users and open hardware buffs are not enough, he concluded; all ideas and prospects are welcome.

Among the other projects that presented progress updates at the event were SuperGlue, GlitterGallery, and GStreamer Editing Services (GES). SuperGlue is a self-hosted web publishing platform that combines ideas found in FreedomBox (like independence from proprietary web services) and longstanding (if rarely implemented) web concepts like making all page content editable in the browser. The latest SuperGlue builds provide a built-in grid system that makes constructing page content simple, and a nice suite of WYSIWYG on-canvas editing tools. The project made its debut at LGM 2013, and has made significant progress over the past year.

GlitterGallery is an initiative that started in Fedora's design team; it aims to build a file collaboration tool that is as useful to graphic designers as Git is to software developers. Sarup Banskota presented an update on its progress, including his own work as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student. The tool runs on the OpenShift platform, and provides version control, issue tracking, and pull-request management for SVG-based image projects. Future work, he said, will tackle related collaboration tasks like user-to-user messaging and file synchronization with SparkleShare.

GES is the GStreamer-based editing library that powers the Pitivi non-linear video editor. Thibault Saunier and Mathieu Duponchelle provided a brief update, emphasizing GES's stable support for timelines, clips, and other video-editing primitives. The goal set out for GES, they said, is to move beyond the basics and implement what the video editing community demands. On that front, Pitivi has had some success recruiting new developers, and is running a crowd-funding campaign to push toward its own 1.0 release.

Last but not least, there were two update talks about progress in open standards. Tavmjong Bah reported on the progress of SVG 2, and Chris Lilley reported on color glyphs in the OpenType font format. SVG 2, most notably, splits a number of features that were in SVG 1.1 out into separate standards—text handling and image filters, for example, will be standardized in the CSS specification, rather than SVG 2. This change simplifies the standards overall (reducing duplication of effort), but developers need to be aware of it.

We have looked at the color OpenType font proposals in previous editions; in addition to explaining them, Lilley's presentation hit on two other key points. First, all of the proposed standards were adopted in January by the MPEG committee that oversees the OpenType standard; that means the marketplace, in effect, will determine which formats take off and which will be relegated to historical footnotes. Second, however, Lilley reported that the "marketplace" for color OpenType font software so far consists entirely of proprietary applications; if the open source community wants to play a role in this new standard, then developers need to get started quickly.

Progress in free-software development, of course, is an ongoing thing. Still, it is especially instructive to look at how far the individual efforts that make up the community have come, all in one place. It is a welcome reminder that the free-software community—where people so often work in relative isolation—is a large and diverse space.

[The author would like to thank Libre Graphics Meeting for assistance to travel to Leipzig for LGM 2014.]