[fdo] Announcing Inkscape 0.40 Release . www.inkscape.org

[Jon Phillips]

Inkscape 0.40
=============

Draw Freely.

http://www.inkscape.org/

The Inkscape community is proud to announce release 0.40 of Inkscape, "A
Cross-Platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool." This
release includes three highly requested new capabilities: Layers,
Text-on-Path, and Bitmap tracing. In addition, several minor features
have made the cut along with a number of usability enhancements, three
new tutorials, and hundreds of bug fixes; this is by far the most
feature-packed release to date!

The implementation of layers provides another means for organization of
compositions. Layers can be locked to not allow changes and their
visibility may be toggled on and off. This is great for sketching over a
bitmap image by using it as a template. However, one might skip this
technique altogether by using the new "Bitmap Tracing" which uses
Potrace to convert pixels/bitmaps into vector graphics. Normally this
function is not found in illustration programs, but now it is front and
center right on the canvas within Inkscape.

Since our last release four months ago, we have added several new
dependencies such as the Boehm garbage collector and the stable Gtk 2.4
libraries. Hence, installing Inkscape on some platforms might raise more
issues than as with previous releases, and we ask you to please post to
the bugtracker (http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php) any issues
discovered. To help those who run into undocumented problems we're also
providing 'Static Binary' packages that include these new libraries.

We celebrate this release from our community and hope to encourage
others to join our project by the simple act of contributing graphics,
tutorials, code, and translations. Inkscape recently became a one-year
old project. We are looking forward to another dynamic year of
development as we move Inkscape further from C to C++, approach SVG Tiny
compliance, and eventually full SVG 1.2 validation. Thank you for using
Inkscape. Draw Freely.

Download your packages (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX):

     http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

For many more details, see the Release Notes for 0.40:

     http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes040

Community submitted screenshots:

     http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/