Wednesday, 18 April 2007 01:31 GMT 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.