Draw Freely.

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.