Monday, February 16, 2015

Inkscape, New and Improved

This post is either a little late or a little early, depending on your perspective. The piece of news I wanted to point out is that Inkscape, the free and open-source vector image editing program, has recently had an updated version released. If you read this blog you'll have seen images made using Inkscape, as I use it frequently (the image in the previous post, for instance, was made with the previous version of Inkscape).

Why is this big enough news for me to want to post it, you ask? This particular update is both large, and a long time in coming. Like, almost four-and-a-half years in coming. The version number jumped from 0.48.5 all the way to 0.91! This long period of development apparently resulted in over 700 bugs being fixed, and the addition of a new internal rendering engine which should bring some performance enhancements. There are a whole host of other little improvements and additions, which are better explained in the official release notification.

I mentioned this post could be considered both early and late; it's late, because the new version was actually released at the end of January, but I only learned of it at the end of last week. It's also somewhat early because I haven't actually had a chance to use the new Inkscape version yet; I'm waiting for the packages to be made available for Debian (which Linux Mint Debian Edition uses). It's currently available for Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE, though, and I'm sure I'll get to play around with it soon enough. If you're looking for a good vector graphics program, I encourage you to give it a try! And if you aren't, take a look at it anyway; you just might find it to be the solution to problems you didn't know you had. A hui hou!

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