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).

Those that followed my hints about the Tango icon theme for Inkscape may recognized that not all icons are included in that theme. Today i downloaded the a new version from the Inkscape SVN that seems to add the missing icons.

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 .

Jimmac presented in his blog an interesting screencast about a good worklfow for designing theme icons with Inkscape. The SVG-PNG slicing script he is talking about is available here (Ruby) and here (Python).
About creating icons with Inkscape in general read my older post "Painting icons with Inkscape".

After the first features additions to 0.47 and optimizing the GUI space of Inkscape the developers switches partly the code using the Ciaro 2D graphics library - this is hopefully another speedup of Inkscape

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!

...another nice and sweet piece of Nicole Riske - completly done using Inkscape.