Weekly recap — 26 March 2023

Sun Mar 26, 2023 by Alexandre Prokoudine

Kdenlive is getting automatic generation of subtitles from audio

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Week highlights: new releases of topologicpy and LSP plugins, new features and improvements in GIMP, Inkscape, FreeCAD, Olive, automatic generation of subtitles from audio is coming to Kdenlive.

GIMP

There’s some minor porting of various file support plugins to GimpProcedureDialog API going on. Other than that, no major changes.

A very nice first patch proposed by Stephan Lenor improves the performance of matrix calculations. This is a little too technical, but operations with matrices are fairly common in imaging software, so this affects a lot of GIMP features. A very easy example would be transformations like scaling or adjusting perspective.

The GIMP project has been selected for participation at Google Summer of Code 2023 and invites students to get involved. Last year, GIMP got initial CMYK support via late binding thanks to GSoC.

Inkscape

Martin Owens posted a video from the hackfest in Germany that took place last week:

Christian Rohlfs is proposing a patch that will improve performance of the Layers and Objects dock when ungrouping objects or converting them to paths in a document with a lot of objects.

Jabier Arraiza is proposing a redesign of the Corners live path effect that allows rounding selected corners in a rectangle or a polygon.

FreeCAD

Yorik van Havre continued hacking on NativeIFC. There is now proof-of-concept code to create a NativeIFC project instead of an Arch project, and Yorik started translating BIM/FreeCAD objects to NativeIFC objects.

Meanwhile, Ajinkya Dahale added a Sketcher tool to create B-splines by interpolation, and Uwe Stöhr improved support for transient (dynamic) analysis in the FEM workbench.

There’s more FreeCAD-related writing from me elsewhere (and there will be some more).

The interview with Yorik van Havre about the FreeCAD Project Association is now out of the LWN paywall. My intention with this was to provide insight into organizing a FOSS project team into a non-profit organization. I’ve seen much doubt and fear in other teams about a potential falling-out between developers and community, as well as among developers. So the interview deals with that topic specifically.

Then there’s two more posts in the assembly workbenches series: A2plus review and Assembly 3 review. Assembly 4 is next.

topologicpy 0.3.x

From the ‘Computational methods in architecture’ department: professor Wassim Jabi has been making a lot of progress with topologicpy, his Python implementation of Topologic. Recent releases allow creating disjointed graphs from a cluster of heterogenous topologies, using Plotly color scales to create e.g. 3D depthmaps, and — following recent advance in mathematics — the Einstein tile.

Today's progress: Finally! Graph.ByTopology can now create disjointed graphs from a cluster of heterogenous topologies! New release coming soon. pic.twitter.com/yABfyvrZP2
— Topologic (@topologicBIM) March 19, 2023

Kdenlive

Developers will be shipping the next release with automatic generation of subtitles from audio thanks to Whisper, a speech recognition model by OpenAI.

The extra step on behalf of users is downloading srt, openai-whisper, and torch Python modules (and their dependencies), as well as some models from Kenlive’s Preferences dialog. I’ll give this some testing and likely report with more details.

Olive

Matt added a History panel to Olive and made various smaller UI changes. E.g. the audio monitor can finally be made very narrow, in which case it drops all labels.

LSP 1.2.6

Vladimir Sadovnikov released a new version of LSP plugins. Notable changes:

New plugins: Mixer (for 4, 8 and 16 Mono/Stereo channels), A/B Tester with blind test option
Basic SFZ import support in the Multisampler
Various improvements in equalizers

There’s a video to go with the release: