Week highlights: new Verge3D release, major improvements coming to Inkscape, FreeCAD has zero v1.0 release blockers.
Inkscape
There are a lot of exciting things happening here.
The one that probably brings me the most joy is the newly proposed switch to using CapyPDF for color-managed PDF output. This is a major milestone on the way to getting CMYK PDFs out of Inkscape.
CapyPDF is a new-ish project started around early 2023 by Jussi Pakkanen. Martin Owens is using the bleeding edge of that library to create a new default Inkscape extension for PDF output. CapyPDF uses LittleCMSv2 for all color transforms and doesn’t have a document model, it exposes PDF primitives directly.
The latter is a kind of a big deal. The main reason Inkscape couldn’t use the PDF exporter from Scribus is because it is highly dependent on Scribus’s document model (at least, that’s my recollection). So Martin would have to decouple the exporter from the document model first, which would be quite a challenge. Instead, he chose to use CapyPDF (he’s a minor contributor now, too).
There’s not much to show in terms of UI, and CI pipelines are failing on that merge request for now anyway. But even though everyone knows Martin has been hacking on CMYK support probably for a couple of years now, it’s still very exciting to see actual patches landing as merge requests.
Rivaling this exciting news, Mike Kowalski is turning the Object Properties dialog into something that is beginning to resemble Figma and PenPot’s sidebars. The latest patch is bringing fill and stroke selectors.
Meanwhile, PBS continues hacking on his older patch that implements tabs for documents. It works pretty much like in any other application with tabs, such as a browser. You can rearrange tabs, you can drag a tab out to make it a separate window, and you can drag a tab between two Inkscape windows.
That’s not the only thing PBS does. He recently picked up Martin’s older patch that rewrites the Connector tool as a live path effect. Not a lot to look at right now, but a great improvement nonetheless.
Verge3D 4.8
This new version of Verge3D brings spatial audio support, shader optimizations, better click detection for points, lines, and grids, and support for Blender 4.3 and 4.4 including new Metallic BSDF and Gabor Texture nodes.
See here for release notes.
FreeCAD
There are exactly zero release blockers for v1.0 right now. When you are reading this, the release has probably been already tagged, and an official announcement is coming soon. After over 20 years in the making, about time, right?
One interesting conversation recently has been about Paul Ebbers’s work on the program’s 3rd-party Ribbon-style UI. The addon is currently unpolished and will need a lot of tweaking (for me, the UI is twice the size of the usual one for some reason, including fonts). But it’s worth watching, and Paul has a public roadmap.
Meanwhile, Ondsel is shutting down the Lens server on November 22. Oh, and earlier this week, I posted a tutorial on customizing default FreeCAD to look and work like Ondsel ES. Check it out if you prefer OES to FreeCAD.
Artworks
“Classical architecture” by Carlos Cardona, made with Blender:
“Hole in the wall” by Laurent Palmier, made with Blender and GIMP:
Just another practice chart by 土豆LCZ, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Patreon subscribers get early access to my posts. If you are feeling generous, you can also make a one-time donation on BuyMeACoffee.
