Linux for Designers

The 4th and hopefully last prerelease of Inkscape 0.47 is out. This prerelease is focused on stable live path effects.
So test it and send the developers your feedback. The bad news is that there is no prerelease4 package for Ubuntu yet:
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+ppa-packages
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.testers/+archive/ppa

And the winner is...

Not bad at all but the typography could be improved, it is to thin for my taste.

Other participations can be found at deviantART.

Here is a short summery of what is going on at the Inkscape project:
* GSoC student Jasper van der Gronde started working on support for OpenMP which brings multi processor support to Inkscape
* A spray tool is planed to be integrated based on some GSOC work from 2008
* students are wanted for GSOC 2009 working on new Inkscape features

John Cruz posted some interesting news about CMYK profiles in Inkscape. It seems the upcoming Inkscape 0.47 would be very interesting for prepress cases too:
* Add a basic UI for linking to ICC profiles
* Integrate ICC profile support into the existing color selectors, incl. gamut warning.
* Improved style and/or CSS support to manage paint types, palettes, etc.
* Basic support for "registration" color/style.
* Coordinate with Cairo team on extending API beyond RGB
* CMYK PDF export

That sounds great so after that it isn't longer necessary exporting Bitmaps and using Gimp to create CMYK PDF documents.

Update
Some more information and mockups at the Inkscape Brazil Wiki (in portuguese).

If the Inkscape project published a status of the Google Summer of Code interim results. All work of the GSoC projects are now in the main development branch of Inkscape or lib2geom. So most of the new features are likely to be seen in the upcoming 0.47 version .

UniConvertor 1.1.3, a universal vector graphics translator for various formats, is published by the SK1 project:
* Added PDF exporter
* Added PostScript exporter
* Fixes for sk1 import/exort filters
* Fixes in model layers representation
UniConvertor could be used with Inkscape 0.46 for importing CorelDraw files *.cdr (and may in future in Scribus too). At the moment just the sources and an RPM package is available.

Andy Fitzsimon demonstrates the improved Path Effects of Inkscape 0.47. This is another good step go ahead to the goals of 0.47: improvements, cleanups and code refractoring.

At the Inkscape Tutorial Blog i found this nice tutorial of Martin Sourada, member of the Fedora Art Team, about painting icons with Inkscape. If this is not enough check out this too. Here and here is another icon tutorial too.
Inkscape is my favorite for icon design too.


UPDATE: Another goody is here.

Inkscape 0.46 shipped with a lot of new features, the roadmap declares that 0.47 is a refactoring/ code cleanup. Of course there will be some new features too.
John Cruz give us some screenies about the upcoming eraser tool (and eraser toggle), the enhanced tablet support and new toolbar options - awesome!

Inkscape 0.46 reaches the final state and is now available for download.

If you using Ubuntu Linux you can use these reposotories:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main

Read my older posts about the new features and the release notes of Inkscape 0.46. A bunch of screenhsots is available too.