Weekly recap — 11 May 2025

system · May 13, 2025, 2:27pm

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.

Inkscape

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.

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.

Artworks

Atmosphere practice (氛围练习) by HFH, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Ark of Covenant by Tomasz Badalski, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Quixel Bridge:

The Sewers by Nils Drechsel, made with Blender:

Dark Fantasy Concepts Part Two by Max Steksov, made with Blender and Photoshop:

Why Do I Feel Like an Ant by Ahmed Shakib, made with Blender:

Sunflower Field by AstheriArt, made with Krita:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://librearts.org/2025/05/week-recap-11-may-2025/

Silvio_Grosso · May 13, 2025, 8:30pm

Hello @Aleksandr

Thanks a lot for this update.
As regards Inkscape, I have always watched the reports of Martin, on his channel on YouTube, related to his work on CapyPDF. It has been extremely hard. Inkscape is the first software to use it and there were many “basic” features missing.

Do you think this work (PDF - CYMK) might be “easily” re-implemented on GIMP as well?

If I am not mistaken, KRITA does not have an option to export as PDF and, maybe, its developers might take advantage of this work as well…
But again, I supose it would be not so straightforward given all the problems Martin has faced so far…

MrQ · May 14, 2025, 7:36am

My Opinion on Two Projects GSoC2025 for GIMP

Gabriele Barbero will design and implement a GEGL filter browser for GIMP.
Ondřej Míchal will enhance the plug-in/filter development experience by developing a new browser for discovering which GEGL filters are available and how they can be used from a plug-in/filter.

These could be interesting projects if it weren’t for the fact that there is already a solution that combines both tasks.
I’m thinking here about Batcher by Kamil Burda.

The program has a browser for Gegl filters and other Gimp procedures and allows you to easily create your own plug-ins from existing procedures.

Batcher also has other interesting options, but you can learn about this from the excellent description of the program.
Choosing such projects is a waste of time and opportunities to solve other problems.

Tobias · May 14, 2025, 2:23pm

I think it is possible and I know it is somewhere on the very long todo list from @cmyk.student.

First of all, Martin has encountered and resolved numerous issues, so I believe the process should be more straightforward now. On the other hand, converting SVG to PDF is much harder than converting pixels to PDF. To convert an SVG to PDF, you need to convert from one vector description format to another. For pixels to PDF, you “just” need to embed the image in a document.

cmyk.student · May 14, 2025, 11:16pm

@MrQ Hi! GSoC students work on what they’re interested in - we can’t (and don’t want to) force them to work on arbitrarily “more valuable” projects. I was lucky the GIMP developers let me work on initial CMYK support even though there were other projects more necessary for GIMP 3.

Batcher is a great plug-in! But since not everyone has it (or knows about it), I think it’s great that we could get those improvements in GIMP by default as well.

As a note, Gabriele Barbero is actually working on improving the text tool for GSoC. This was a late change, which I think is why the article doesn’t have that update.

@Tobias Yep, it’s on my TODO list. Martin did a lot of the hard work, so I’d likely follow his lead. We’d just need to add CapyPDF as a dependency to our PDF plug-ins and then conditionally use it if CMYK export is selected.