Weekly recap — 5 March 2023

Sun Mar 5, 2023 by Alexandre Prokoudine

New releases of GIMP and Godot, new features in Krita and Inkscape

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Still settling in, shorter recap again. Week highlights: new releases of GIMP and Godot, new features in Krita and Inkscape.

GIMP 2.10.34

The GIMP team released another update in the stable series, mostly with bugfixes and some minor new features backported from the 2.99 series.

Notable changes:

TIFF support improvements
Exporting of paths to PSD now possible
Exporting to JPEG XL now possible, metadata now imported
Transparency now handled on importing and exporting to PDF
The Set Image Canvas Size dialog now has a template selector
Fixes in the desktop color picker

Meanwhile CmykStudent merged their code to list unsupported PSD features in a file that is about to be imported:

Since I'll be using FITS files for a project soon, I've begun work on updating GIMP's support for it. Step one is switching to @NASA's cfitsio.c library, which will allow you to import modern compressed FITs images.
As you can see below, it now works... just not well yet. :) pic.twitter.com/dtnPOJ3BEK
— CMYK Student (@CmykStudent) March 4, 2023

Apart from the usual bugfixing, there’s a few new features in the works, this time — by Wolthera van Hövell. Essentially, this is the last part of the recent text layout rewrite. The two major improvements are CSS-Text white space handling and SVG 2 style text-in-shape.

While working on this, Wolthera fixes various bugs. The merge request is likely to land to the main development branch once the testing is complete (which in case of Krita also means writing unit tests).

Inkscape

Font Collections have finally landed to the main development branch of Inkscape. Essentially, you are getting a little bit of fonts management right inside Inkscape. You can organize existing fonts into collections and make only fonts that belong to selected collections show up in the fonts drop-down list when working on your design.

There are all sorts of interesting ideas how to make this feature even more powerful. But for now, this should take care of the popular request to make it possible not showing all the fonts available in the system.

The patch had been at least 6 months in the making and was contributed by Vaibhav Malik. Mike Kowalski, PBS, Adam Belis, and several users got involved with testing and reviewing, so great team effort!

Indigo UI for Scribus

I’ve just noticed that last year, Tom restarted his earlier effort bringing new better UI for Scribus:

This is not a patch but rather a test application that mimics Scribus. The code is on GitHub. Fingers crossed that this time changes will land to upstream Scribus.

Blender

Two developers joined Blender Foundation this week.

Lukas Tönne is not a new contributor, he’s been active in Blender since at least 2010, mostly in the (everything) nodes department. He is now part of the Nodes & Physics team.

Harley Acheson also joined the project in 2010. He is now working in the triaging team and helps with the UI module.

Godot 4.0

Considerably outside my area of expertise, but too tempting to mention: Godot 4.0 game engine is finally out after years of active development. I cannot possibly compete against either official release notes or this great video by GDQuest:

Last year, Godot team graduated from Software Freedom Conservancy who had been managing their funds since 2014, and started Godot Foundation. Much like other similar organizations, they are building their own pool of corporate sponsors in addition to community funding.