It’s time to celebrate the success of GSOC 2023 and recruit for 2024 with Inkscape
23 Feb. 2024, 21.09
Inkscape’s involvement in Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC) program is one of the ways the project helps to advance both learning and new and improved features in the program. We’re excited to be taking part in GSoC once more in 2024!
For more information on the timeline and details for applying to collaborate with Inkscape this year, head to our project page on Google's Summer of Code website.
If you’re curious to know more about what some of Inkscape’s GSoC students accomplished in 2023, keep reading!
Customize the appearance of your Canvas Controls
GSoC 2023 Inkscape student Sanidhya Singh was a sophomore undergraduate student in Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), India.
Sanidhya spent the summer working on developing a customizable appearance for canvas controls under the mentorship of Inkscape core developer Marc Jeanmougin.
What are these canvas controls, you ask? If you’ve drawn a shape using the Pen tool and tried to later edit it using the Node Tool, you might have noticed the circular (or square) handles Inkscape provides to manipulate and transform the shape. These are called "canvas controls" or more commonly "node handles". The style of these controls has been the same since at least Inkscape 0.48, and was in need of a refresh – one that would enable the user to have more flexibility in changing the style. Sanidhya stripped out the old handle styling part and replaced it with an easily editable CSS file, so that users can now change styles by just editing the file. This also enabled better default colors for the controls which will hopefully land in Inkscape 1.4.
You can read more about Sanidhya's work.
Preparing behind the scenes for GTK4 Migration
GSoC 2023 student Vaibhav Malik is from New Delhi, India. Once again, he joined Inkscape devs who have been putting a lot of work into the GTK4 migration. GTK is the user interface toolkit Inkscape uses to draw things like text boxes, buttons, etc. on the screen. Inkscape currently uses GTK3 which is version 3 of the toolkit. The migration to the latest version of the toolkit - GTK4, is what Vaibhav worked on under the mentorship of Inkscape core developer Tavmjong Bah (Tav).
Vaibhav's changes are mostly under-the-hood changes so that Inkscape works as expected with GTK4. One noticeable user-facing change is the addition of popovers for smaller screens. Below a particular window size, Inkscape will automatically adjust the items in the toolbar so that they're still usable on a smaller screen!
You can read more about Vaibhav’s work.
Collaborating with Inkscape developers is a learning experience and helps our free and open source program to advance for all Inkscape users.
Reach out, ask questions and get involved with our global team of volunteer contributors!
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