Weekly recap — 7 August 2023

Mon Aug 7, 2023 by Alexandre Prokoudine

FreeCAD 0.21 released, Inkscape to get CMYK PDF exporting in v1.4

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Highlights of the last few weeks: new releases of Inkscape, FreeCAD, LSP plugins, MuseScore, first beta of Krita 5.2, CMYK PDFs are coming in Inkscape v1.4, and more.

GIMP

The patch by mr.fantastic adding support for on-canvas alignment and even distribution has finally been merged to the main development branch.

I just reviewed and merged new snapping features in GIMP by mr.fantastic:
1. snapping by layer's bounding box ◰ (side and center);
2. snapping by equidistance 📏 between 3 layers.

To be discovered in the next dev version of @GIMP_Official (2.99.18… or who knows 3.0.0-RC1? 😜) pic.twitter.com/c48NDEbudS
— @ZeMarmot@fosstodon.org (@zemarmot) July 25, 2023

The team keeps adding support for bizarre new file formats. The most recent addition is Farbfeld. Not sure what to make of this, but if GIMP now supports Amiga IFF/ILBM, I guess, why not?

CMYK PDFs in Inkscape 1.4

Closely following the recent release of v1.3, Martin Owens posted a video with results of a poll about things users want him to focus on for Inkscape v1.4 (expected next year).

Long story short, most votes went to rewriting the PDF exporter to allow for CMYK PDFs support (PDF X/n, really), with ICC profiles, bleeds, margins, layers, etc.

The other main target for v1.4 is the Connectors tool, which is interesting. I mean, sure, I used that tool in several paid projects ever since it was first released, but we have specialized libre and open-source tools for that sort of thing now (diagrams.net comes to mind). So I do find that peculiar, but also very much welcome.

By the way, if you missed the v1.3 release for some inexplicable reason (holiday season?), it’s great, and here’s a video from Nick Saporito:

Krita 5.2 beta

The team released the first beta of upcoming v5.2. The final version is going to be a more technical, under-the-hood release, with internal rewrites of animation features, an entirely new text shape engine (more text-related changes are coming), and some other things.

FreeCAD 0.21 and onwards

The team finally released v0.21 with quite significant improvements in the FEM department, some UX/UI changes (rather subtle so far), CAMotics support in the Path workbench, various improvements in the Sketcher and TechDraw workbenches, but most importantly — with two phases of the toponaming fixes done. The latter isn’t going to be noticeable in this release, it’s essentially the foundation — new classes and routines for storing data on topology features. There’s a recent post at Ondsel’s blog that details TNP fix phases and suchlike, you can check it out.

(MangoJelly has several videos highlighting various changes in 0.21, see the channel for more.)

The FreeCAD team is having a hackathon in Vancouver later this week (Friday through Sunday). One of the discussions is going to be about v1.0 roadmap and what major changes it should have. Brad Collette (FreeCAD Project Association board member) proposed the following four items on the Discord channel:

Toponaming fix completion (WIP),
Default Assembly (WIP at Ondsel, needs discussion),
Materials overhaul (WIP by Dave Carter of Rocket WB fame),
First-run wizard (not started yet, needs discussion).

Meanwhile, Yorik van Havre has his own agenda for 1.0 that he shared in a post on Patreon:

Unify Arch, BIM, and NativeIFC workbenches for better user experience,
BIM tools should not require having a deep knowledge of IFC,
Rewrite the Window tool,
Move IFC exporting code to IfcOpenShell.

That seems really helpful. Personally, I love what seems to be an emerging focus on UX.

Ardour

There’s some preliminary work done for what is usually called elastic audio, that is, automatically stretching audio clips on the timeline to follow tempo changes.

There have been smaller neat changes too, like the editing of multiple automation control points:

New in development: multiple selected automation points can now be given the same value. Patch by Robin Gareus. Coming to the next release of Ardour pic.twitter.com/k7njyBmsKl
— Ardour DAW (@ardourdaw) July 12, 2023

And then it’s now possible to select multiple tracks and tweak their fader positions by the same amount, you don’t have to create a group just for that anymore.

New behavior option: multiple selected tracks can now be temporarily treated as a group, so you can adjust e.g. faders by the same amount. This is an opt-in feature, coming in the next release. Patch by @PaulDavisThe1st pic.twitter.com/OMBRYugH2R
— Ardour DAW (@ardourdaw) July 27, 2023

That tweet didn’t age well, by the way. This is now default behavior, no opt-ins.

Finally, Robin Gareus will be participating at Ubuntu Summit in November with a talk titled “50 things you didn’t know you could do with Ardour”.

MuseScore 4.1 and UX Design Awards

Around the time the team delivered version 4.1 with engraving and playback imptrovements, performance improvements, aux send etc., they were also nominated for design award & a ‘public choice’ award. You can still vote for them.

LSP plugins 1.2.8

Vladimir Sadovnikov releases an update of his plugin pack, the most important changes are the new Grand Over-The-Top Compressor, Filter, Flanger, and Multiband Limiter plugin series. He also added high-precision oversampling algorithms for the Oscilloscope plugin series.

The plugins are available in LADSPA, LV2, CLAP, and VST2 for various architectures, built for Linux and *BSD.

Here’s the GOTT demo, there’s more demos in the YT channel of the project: