As Inkscape is constantly being developed and improved, there is always new features and improvements being implemented. Three of the cooler improvements are: On canvas gradient editing, selection by touch, and the new flood fill tool. Each of these new features can be read about in the Inkscape Wiki or you can install a development version of inkscape, or you can view the following screencasts that briefly demonstrate the new improvements.

Recently, the open clip art library's biggest contributor of artwork,JohnnyAutomatic reached his 500th clipart upload on the new site. At the time of writing, JohnnyAutomatic had uploaded 519 pieces of clipart. (view the stats page). An example of JohnnyAutomatic's work (the Toy Robot) can be seen to the left.

The majority of JohnnyAutomatic's Uploads are taken from external archives of public domain clipart (like the US Patents Image Archive). He manually searches through these vast online archives, converts them to SVG and tweaks them sometimes to make them more usable.

If you are interested in helping the open clip art library by uploading images from external sources, there is a page on the wiki that lists some places to start, and some places where we have already started this process.

Even though Inkscape 0.45 has only been out for a couple of months there are already many new features that have been implemented that will be available in the next full release. Below is a quote from the inkscape news that talks about the new features, and if you want to give them a go download a development version of Inkscape.

A new Paint Bucket tool allows you to click in any area bounded on all sides and fill it with color. So now you can scan in a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill its cells with vector paint, letting you completely skip the bitmap tracing step.

The calligraphic tool has a new mechanism called Engraving for creating old fashion style black and white line art, like was commonly used by printers a hundred years ago with the Wood Engraving technique. This was a very labor-intensive process back in the day, but we've given you some shortcuts for tracing a guide path, tracing backgrounds, and thinnning/thickening with the calligraphic pen that will let you make short work of it.

Touch Selection is a new feature for selecting objects by simply drawing freehand over the items to select. Our testers are already finding this handy for selecting objects intermingled with a bunch of others. To use this, hold the 'Alt' key while drawing a rubberband rectangle with the select tool. (Note, you might have to change your windowmanager keyboard shortcuts to not steal the Alt key).

Snapping has been seriously reworked, resolving a number of bugs; hopefully it will work more cleanly now. The Grids code has been reimplemented, abstracting the base capability so it should be easier for developers to create new kinds of grids.

And plenty of other little featurettes and bug fixes are in. Please see our Release Notes for a complete list.

The Google Summer of Code projects have been announced and like always there are tons of great open source projects that will get a boost from this great program. Even though openclipart.org does not have a directly linked participant, there are a few projects that will benefit users and contributors of openclipart.org.

1. Importing from, and Exporting to, a remote ccHost instance
   

   The project is a implementation of a new feature in Inkscape, integrating this software with the Open Clip Art Library. It will allow Inkscape's users to publish their work to OCAL in an automated fashion and also import pictures from it, by merely pressing a key sequence.
   - From the google summer of code website (link)

   Im sure that the implementation of this feature will make a lot of people's lives a lot easier.

2. Openoffice.org SVG import
   

   SVG is a language that describes 2D graphics in an XML style language. Onle of the major implementations of this is an external SVG import filter. Unfortunately, this filter has strong dependencies on both Java and the Apache batik SVG Engine, making it very difficult to incorporate within OpenOffice.org directly.
   
   The goal of this project is to incorporate an SVG import filter into OpenOffice.org that does not require any additional dependencies. This parser will be able to read SVG files and parse out its information.
   - From the google summer of code website (link)

   The ability to be able to import SVG straight into your documents is another feature that i know a lot of openclipart users have wanted for a long time.

The Open Clip Art Library is proud to announce its first ever contest - the Xiph.Org - Spread Open Media Logo/Mascot Contest. The main goal of this contest is to finish up with a highly identifiable logo and or mascot for the Spread Open Media project.

Spread Open Media (acronymn SOM) is a project that will spread the word about Open Media Formats in the same manner as Spread Firefox did for the open source web browser. SOM will promote Open Media formats like Xiph's ( Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, Theora and XSPF) and others like SVG and ODF.

The contest commenced on the 10th of April 2007 and will run until the 5th of May 2007. For all the rules and guidelines, view the contest page

Monday, 9 Apr 2007 23:41 am GMT

Inkscape (the free, open source SVG editor) has announced the release of version 0.45 of their great vector drawing program.

Links & Downloads:
- inkscape.org
- Download Inkscape 0.45 - Linux & Mac OS X packages (Windows should be there within 24hrs)
- Inkscape 0.45 Community submitted screenshots
- Inkscape Press Contact Jon Phillips' Blog on 0.45 Release

The following excerpt is from the Inkscape Press Release:

February 5, 2007 - The Inkscape community today announced the newest version of its cross-platform open source vector graphic drawing software, Inkscape. Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter.
Sponsored by Google's Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes, text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc.

Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug fixes have been included. A history dialog allows you to browse your change history. Many new extension effects are added including Pattern along Path and Color Effects.
There are performance improvements to rendering speed, on the order of 2-3% in general, and up to 5-10% for drawings using heavy transparency and/or radial gradients. Compositing quality is also improved through the removal of banding seen in gradients.

For more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.45

Tom Whiteley has developed an extremely cool little web application aptly titled "Search with Pictures" which allows a user to draw a image in a javascript canvas, then it searches Open Clip Art library images for similar images based on the drawing.

This little app is still being developed by Tom, however after playing with it for a bit, it is clear that is has awesome potential as a search tool for the Open Clip Art Library. Hopefully, once it has been developed further, it can be integrated into our ccHost engine to allow users to search the Open Clip Art Library visually, as well as using tags.

The URL of the application is: http://www.lococitato.com/search_with_pic/search_with_pic.html

Below is a screenshot of this tool in action:

Good news for all you Inkscape-using Open Clip Art artists out there; the newest installment of the open source vector graphics editor should be released very soon.

If you want to give it a test-run, inkscape.org have released a preview source release that is available for download and use. If, during your testing of the preview release, you encounter any major crashes, you can log them on the inkscape bug tracker

Recently, inkscape has also just hit over 2 Million downloads of their software, and with the upcoming release, this total is sure to rise a lot more. Inkscape has a large team of developers, testers, documentation-ists and translators which all work to make a great opensource product for us to use, so if you see any of them around, make sure you give them a friendly thanks!

Congratulations are in order for one of the Open Clip Art Library's resident librarians, Molumen; as his design was chosen as the winner of the the Inkscape 0.45 About Screen competition.

Molumen's Design, which samples an Open Clip Art Library image also utilises the blur filter which makes it's debut as a feature in the upcoming 0.45 release of inkscape.

If you see Molumen around, make sure you congratulate him on his great work!

You may or may not know of the existence of the Open Clip Art Library's sister project the Open Font Library. The name pretty much explains itself, however the overall goal of the project is to collate a collection of open fonts for anyone to use for any purpose.

Discussions on the mailing list have been vibrant over the past month; since the implementation of ccHost for the Open Font Library. (you can view the archives here)The project is still in the very early stages of progression and many decisions still need to be made, so if you have a background in type design, or like the idea of having a vast library of open fonts, have a look at the open font library website and the wiki

For all the artists out there that use inkscape to create and edit your SVG images, you might like to know that there are some nifty new features that will be included in the upcoming 0.45 release of inkscape.

Probably the most exciting new feature is the support for SVG filters. This functionality was developed by the Google Summer of Code 2006 participants. The only filter that is enabled to date is the Gaussian Blur.

"With it, you can softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects: paths, shapes, groups, text], images. Clones inherit blurring from their original, but they can also be blurred independently from the original (you can create blurred clones with Tile Clones, too). Both the fill and stroke of an object are blurred together, creating semitransparent margins that smoothly blend into the background." - Inkscape Wiki, 0.45 Release Notes

valessiobrito has uploaded a clipart and a screenshot that demonstrate the use of the blur filter -

         

Other than the filters that have been implemented there has been other features and improvements that have been added and will be available with the release of 0.45. Below is a basic list of some of these features (These features are discussed in more detail in the inkscape wiki)

• PDF Export
• Undo History
• Improvements to the Dropper tool
• Improved outline mode
• Calligraphy tool improved
• + loads more

If you wish to have a look and use some of the new features, download a development version of inkscape and have a go!

We now have 46 registered users on the ccHost version of the Open Clip Art Library

We now have 683 public domain cliparts uploaded into the cchost version of the Open Clip Art Library.

Of the 56 images that were gifted to us by worldlabel.com, there are only 10 images remaining to be converted.

There are only a few remaining tasks to be completed before we can go fully live with cchost as out main engine for clipart uploading and browsing. These include the tasks like the integration of thumbnails into the browsing process and the importing of all the images that are in the old archives over into the ccHost engine.

If you would like to help with the finalisation of the ccHost / Open Clip Art Library implementation, please contact the mailing list and/or contact anyone on the IRC channel.

Today, the Uploading of clipart on the old site was disabled, and everyone that wishes to upload to the Open Clip Art Library will be redirected to the ccHost site.

This is a great step forward for the implementation of cchost as the primary engine for uploading, downloading and organising the library's image collection.

If this is the first time that you have uploaded to ccHost, you HAVE to register before you can upload. This simple process allows you to upload, rate and review all the clip art in the library.If you have any questions or problems, use the normal communication channels that are outlined in the wiki.

The tutorial is in the "Examples" section, or you can find it here

All the worldlabel.com images are now uploaded into the requests section, so if you have some time, keep converting them and uploading.

This means that we need these images converted from jpeg to svg, before they can be included in the Open Clip Art Library collection.

Jon has uploaded some of the worldlabel bitmaps as "requests" (these are found by clicking the Requests tab above) redo them as vector (while possibly improving them) and then re-uploading them as a remix of the original image.

So far, the "borders" images of the worldlabel collection are the only images that have been uploaded to ccHost. (And a fair few have been converted already) When the majority of the images have been converted, the next batch of images will be uploaded, ready to be converted.

So, please help us best by uploading test SVG files to this installation. We hope to move to it very shortly (hopefully within the week).

There are still a few tasks in the migration we need help with such as:

1. export of our content from the old system to the new one
2. SVG thumbnails
3. writing metadata to SVG files in getid3
4. migration of old web content from old site to the new one

The tasks are listed on the ccHost Migration page on the wiki. Please e-mail the mailing list or hop onto our chat channel, #openclipart on irc.freenode.net if you want to help out. We are very close now to switching to this new infrastructure.

If you are having any problems uploading to the present site, please try the new one at http://www.openclipart.org/cchost. Thanks!]]> http://www.openclipart.org/OCALNEWSBLOG-1 The Open Clip Art Library News