Inkscape 1.4 coming soon

The open-source vector-graphics editor, Inkscape, is expected to release version 1.4 in October. The release represents an evolutionary step for the program, which brings new features, user-interface improvements, new and improved file-format support, and important changes to the code base. The changes in this release should improve the user experience for both casual and professional designers, and make Inkscape more compatible with proprietary vector-graphics software, including Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer.

New and improved dialogs

Dialogs (also referred to as panels) are a core component of the Inkscape user interface. Implemented as GTK+ tabs and housed in a custom panel widget (typically on the left side of the application window), dialogs organize commonly used tools and settings into groups. For example, the "Fill and Stroke" dialog contains settings for object colors, gradients, patterns, and swatches, as well as settings for strokes (whether by themselves or as outlines for objects).

Thanks to this approach of grouping features and their settings, the developers can introduce incremental improvements, or add new features altogether, without seriously compromising the overall layout and familiarity of the application. In this release, emphasis has been placed on polishing existing dialogs, while also introducing new ones, such as the galleries for extensions and filters, which highlight a number of the standard tools and extensions Inkscape provides.

Inkscape is shipped with lots of extensions, written in Python, that provide features developed separately from the core project. In previous releases, extensions were only available through the "Extensions" menu, which does not have features such as searching or previews. However, with Inkscape 1.4, comes a new "Extensions Gallery" — a more modern and familiar interface for browsing Inkscape's extensions. Benefits of this new dialog include a dedicated search box for extensions, flexibility through customization of the dialog, and thumbnails associated with each extension. Some extensions do not have thumbnails and will use shared placeholders for now. The Inkscape team has extended an invitation to the community for contributions to this effort.

Debuting in this release, the "Filter Gallery" dialog presents all of the SVG filters included with Inkscape in a searchable format. SVG filters are W3C-standard, image effects that can be applied to any object, including raster graphics. In previous releases, filters were only available from the "Filters" submenu, which organizes them into categories but offers no means of searching or previewing the effect. Happily, the new dialog provides a way to find, preview, and select filters. The previews approximate the action of the filter, but do not present a live view of the filters' effects.

The search feature in the "Filter Gallery" allows for finding individual filters by name. This serves as a more intuitive solution compared to using Inkscape's command palette (accessed through "?" on the keyboard). The command palette is akin to Ubuntu Unity's HUD, in that it provides a means of typing any action Inkscape supports, pulling actions from menus, toolbars, or even extensions. In the "Filters" menu, filters are listed by their common names, but there is no search functionality. In contrast, the command palette accesses filters by their more complex internal names such as "doc.org.Inkscape.effect.filter.f088", making them harder to find. The new dialog simplifies this by allowing users to search for filters using their common names.

The "Swatches" dialog, which manages color palettes and recently used colors, has been completely overhauled. Users can now select palettes, search for colors by name, and load palette files in various formats, including GIMP Color Palette (.gpl), Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase), and Adobe Color Book (.acb). It is also possible to load palettes using CEILAB colors, and, to a limited degree, CMYK colors. When loading palettes with CYMK, the colors are converted to RGB more effectively than before, even without an ICC profile installed. This brings Inkscape closer to full CMYK support. The gradient editor has also been improved, and gradients can now be rotated from the "Fill And Stroke" dialog, with the benefit of a full 360° slider.

Working with layers has long been a bit cumbersome in Inkscape, but, with successive releases, the layer workflow has been improved. The trend continues in this release, bringing two user-experience improvements to the layer workflow. When adding a new layer from the "Add Layer" dialog, users now choose where to place the layer using radio buttons instead of a drop-down list. This reduces the number of clicks needed and is more discoverable for new users. In the combined "Layers and Objects" dialog, adding a new layer no longer brings up the "Add Layer" dialog. Instead, new layers are added on top of the currently selected layer.

Inkscape's "Text and Font" panel combines basic text editing, font selection, and advanced font settings in one interface. However, the existing panel has problems with spacing and cutting off certain fonts from being displayed correctly. In Inkscape 1.4, a new, experimental "Unified Font Browser" has been introduced, which fixes those problems, allowing users to preview and choose fonts more intuitively. This feature must be activated through the preferences, at "Edit > Preferences > Interface > Windows", and requires a restart of Inkscape to take effect.

Once activated, the unified browser replaces the old font browser in the "Text and Font" panel. The new browser brings live previews, search functionality, and extensive customization options that are not present in its predecessor. On the first run, the new interface may take some time to initialize, especially with many fonts installed on the system. However, subsequent uses of the tool only experience a minimal delay to allow for previews to be rendered. As this feature is still experimental, it is likely to be further optimized in future releases.

Updated core features

Several of Inkscape's core features have seen significant changes in this release as well. The "Shape Builder" tool, introduced in Inkscape 1.3, now supports raster graphics as well as vectors. This tool provides a streamlined interface to the use of boolean operations to create more complex shapes by combining or removing elements from overlapping objects. Since these operations are not limited to SVG's primitives, such as ellipses and rectangles, designers can create complex shapes, for things like puzzles and cutouts. In the past, achieving the same result would have required a lengthy process of duplicating, clipping, and arranging both images and objects — or an extension.

Images sliced with the "Shape Builder" are automatically clipped to whatever shape the designer requires. Even shapes built within the tool itself can be used for this purpose. In addition to the new raster-image support, clones (copies) now preserve their visibility when the original path is being edited in the shape builder. In Inkscape 1.4, modifying a parent shape with the "Shape Builder" tool will turn any clones into independent objects, rather than affecting the clones directly.

It is now possible to add internal document links and preserve them when exporting to the PDF format. Previously, only hyperlinks to external sources were supported. All links are set up in the "Object Properties" dialog, and can be entered manually, or by clicking on the target object. Also improved in this release is the text-editing workflow, featuring a new toolbar layout that places text-alignment buttons directly on the toolbar as opposed to being in a popup menu as before. Text spacing has been moved into a popover component, along with kerning and rotation settings. With these changes, Inkscape is more able to handle desktop-publishing duties.

Interface and internal changes

This update brings several user-interface changes, including some that follow the ongoing work to improve Inkscape's user experience by simplifying and streamlining the interface to improve user workflow. In the world of digital-graphics software, user experience is of paramount interest, and goes beyond the actual interface itself, building upon considerations for users' needs. Inkscape has long charted its own path with how canvas controls are displayed, not following more familiar conventions that are common in the industry, which has negatively impacted some workflows. However, in Inkscape 1.4, new infrastructure is in place to customize the appearance of canvas controls. This work is the culmination of a Google Summer Of Code project by Sanidhya Singh, and allows controls to be customized using CSS.

Inkscape features a few icon themes out of the box, and version 1.4 introduces a new icon theme, called "Dash", designed to cover Inkscape's extensive library of features while simplifying the visual style of the application. Borrowing ideas from other applications in the graphic-design industry, this theme should be more familiar to users transitioning from other applications. On the merge request for this icon theme, there's been some discussion about replacing the legacy Tango icon theme with Dash once it is matured. However, for now, no official decision has been announced, but it has been included among the default themes in Inkscape 1.4.

There are also several new features and changes available via the command line that are worth noting. Inkscape exposes various actions through the command-line interface, including features and functions typically accessed through the GUI. This allows using Inkscape via scripts, and for batch processing, without the GUI. A full list of these command-line options is available by running "inkscape –help-all". Additional features can be accessed via Inkscape actions, which tap into the application's internals and provide more robust control of advanced features. Actions (and their options) can be listed by running "inkscape –action-list".

In version 1.4, Inkscape gains new actions for editing and exporting SVG files, including setting the SVG version, removing both proprietary and Inkscape-specific data, removing transforms from shapes, and various other settings and adjustments. It's also now possible to rotate pages by 90° via a new action. Additionally, Inkscape gains new options ("--export-png-compression" and "--export-png-antialias") for setting the compression level and antialiasing settings of exported PNG images.

Finally, Inkscape can now trace raster images from the command line via a new action, with many of the same options available from the GUI (in the "Trace Bitmap" dialog). Tracing is a process that makes an approximate reproduction of a bitmap image in vector format. This work is based on a project called "Inkscape For Trace", created by "nullmastermind" on GitHub.

What's next?

Features for Inkscape are chosen according to their maturity, after having been agreed upon between developers, and listed in GitLab milestones. This release sets the next stage for a transition to GTK+ 4, something which is made evident in the GUI by the use of popovers for context menus. According to Inkscape developer Martin Owens, the transition to GTK+ 4 was intended to occur with this cycle, but the development team was unable to land it in time for 1.4. Instead, the transition to GTK+ 4 is slated to occur with Inkscape 1.5, which will also bring a new color-management system, though true support for CMYK output is still in the works at this time. Instead, the new system will have support for "DeviceCMYK", which still uses the RGB color space underneath.

Inkscape 1.4 is set to be a significant milestone for the vector-graphics editor. Anyone interested in trying out the beta, or upcoming release candidate for Inkscape 1.4 can visit the download page and grab the Appimage file, which should run on almost any Linux distribution.

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GuestArticles	Taylor, Roland

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