Weekly recap — 11 May 2025

Sun May 11, 2025 by Aleksandr Prokudin

New version of Shotcut; CMYK PDF in Inkscape; GSoC2025 announces students/projects

On This Page

Week highlights: new version of Shotcut, CMYK PDF exporting has landed in Inkscape, GSoC2025 has announced students/projects, LGM2025 program is up.

GIMP

Ondřej Míchal started submitting his first patches that introduce a GEGL filter browser, which is his GSoC project this year. Very early work, a lot more to follow.

Gabriele Barbe is adding a live preview of selected text color.

Martin Owens merged his megapatch that implements a new PDF exporter using CapyPDF. This is what’s bringing initial CMYK PDF exporting support to Inkscape. There’s not much user interface to look at, and it will probably stay that way. Would you like me to do a deeper dive into the topic, though?

Also, dopelover contributed a keyboard shortcuts file that mimics Illustrator CC 2024.

Shotcut 25.05.11

Dan Dennedy released a new version of his video editor with new features:

New video filter: Alpha Strobe.
New Freeze Frame command inserts a 10-seconds video clip that copies the frame your playhead is currently at.
You can now make a track header wider by dragging its right border.
The timeline toolbar now has a New Generator button.
The File menu now has a New submenu where you can create a new project or a generator.

Shoctut 25.05.11 with a freeze frame selected

Download options are here.

GSoC2025

Google finalized the list of participants in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. A lot of good projects got students: GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, FreeCAD, Kdenlive, Krita, Synfig, and others. I already covered this earlier in a dedicated post.

LGM2025

The Libre Graphics Meeting program is up on the website. The event will take place at the end of May in Nuremberg, Germany.

Here are some of the talks I’d be interested in attending if I were there:

The Curious Case of Splines in FreeCAD. Ajinkya Dahale is the splines guy in FreeCAD. He recently got another FPA grant to work on that, too.
A View on the Open-Source Video Editing Landscape. Simran Spiller has been very active in the Olive project (which is my personal NLE choice on Linux) for years.
The Elephant in the Room: Who Owns the Image? I’ve been bitten by AI artwork in the artworks section in my weeklies to the point where I won’t even post anything without going through AI detection services now. So I’m curious what Eylul Dogruel has to say about the larger picture with AI, images, and copyrights.
Inkscape UI Vision Going Forward. Henrique Perticarati submitted a UX/UI overhaul proposal last year, and parts of it are being implemented. You can see some of the proposed changes in this video.
Printing Maps with Spot Colors. For no other reason than to verify that Pierre Marchand, former developer of Fontmatrix, has really resurfaced after falling off the face of the Earth over a decade ago.

Oh, and one last thing. The event had been mostly (if not completely) controversy-free since 2006 until this week, when the organizer decided to hand over the keynote mic to Richard Stallman.

I have no foggiest idea why Lasse needed to put himself in a position where he had to pick a side and defend his choice of a guy with this much antics. It’s not like there are no other prominent figures in the FOSS community to deliver the keynote (I could cough up a list of maybe half a dozen off the top of my head). To his credit, Lasse reversed the decision promptly.

I’ve seen at least one call for a complete flush of LGM management over this controversy. The thing is, there is no LGM management per se. People just agree where the next event will take place, and an entirely new team takes over. Right now, the LGM is looking for people to host the 2026 and 2027 events.