Weekly recap — 9 February 2025

Week highlights: new release of Bonsai and GCodeWorkShop, PDF import/export improvements in Inkscape, GNOME is getting HDR support.

Inkscape

Tavmjong Bah improved PDF importing. Inkscape now supports character and word spacing values in PDF text import and has more capable code for reading emojis in PDF text.

In the latest weekly video, Martin Owens covered the ongoing work on exporting text to PDF as well.

Martin also stated that the team is planning to hire two developers to do bugfixing and another person to do bug triage.

HDR support coming to GNOME

Phoronix reports that the GNOME team added HDR support for the upcoming v48 release of GNOME Mutter, the project’s Wayland display server and X11 window manager/compositor.

Screenshot courtesy of Phoronix

Bonsai 0.8.1

This is perhaps the largest (so far) release of the project previously known as BlenderBIM. The new version comes with slightly over 1,900 new features and fixes.

The release notes are very descriptive as usual, so here is just a quick rundown of new stuff:

• A new item editing mode transforms Blender from a mesh-only editing tool to more of a native solid modeler.
• Improved polyline drawing tool, with wall and slab previews, consistent visual style, input formulas, and metric/imperial-parsing input.
• Various quality-of-life improvements in the parametric roof tool.
• The measure tool now has persistent measures, multi-snap target support, and modes (single / polyline / area).
• IFC elements can now be added directly without creating Blender objects first.
• Basic visualization for structural loads and reactions is now available.
• The web cost UI has been improved and now features adding cost schedules, adding/deleting/duplicating cost items and quantities, updating cost values on the fly, etc..

The project also announced that they have reached their funding target of USD $2,500/month.

GCodeWorkShop 2025-02

I don’t think I’ve ever covered this project before. GCodeWorkShop is an editor for programming CNC.

For this release, the developer fixed several bugs, added support for undo/redo for text replacement operations, and several settings that affect opening and saving files:

• file encoding choice;
• removing characters from the second half of the codepage when opening files;
• removing control characters when opening files;
• deleting additional blank lines.

Builds are available for Debian/Ubuntu and Windows.

Artworks

The Lost Tower, a very cool animated short, Ghibli-style, by Florent Lebrun, made with Blender:

Strange Visions 1 by Echostorm, made with Krita:

Frith by Quentin Pointillart, made with Blender and Krita (do check out the entire series):

Magical Adventure by Mythmaker, made with Krita

The Smoldering Bog by Viacheslav Voloshyn, made with Blender and Krita:

Starvault concept art by Lidia Goryachewa, made with Krita:

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