The Inkscape community is proud to announce the release of Inkscape 0.41, "A Cross-platform Open Source Vector Graphics (SVG) Drawing Tool" today.

The primary focus of 0.41 has been bug fixing. With over 100 bugs fixed since the 0.40 release, this significantly strengthened Inkscape on Windows and for international users. We owe deep thanks to the many users who have worked patiently with us to report the problems and validate these fixes. Several serious crashes, memory leaks and mis-features are now corrected and certain areas are noticeably snappier thanks to user submitted bug reports.

A couple new features also found their way in. First, the black and white tracing functionality introduced in 0.40 has been improved to also allow conversion of color and grayscale images. Second, is the addition of a new clone tiler facility which creates patterns, tesselations, and other sorts of geometric tiling arrangements.

User requests and comments also stimulated a number of improvements to units handling, extensions, the Invert Selection command, layers selector, icon theming, and several new translations.

A number of large scale changes are planned for the 0.42 release, including converting the interface to use Gtkmm and the incorporation of a new Document Object Model (DOM), which will provide the core to build scripting onto. This should keep us busy for a while! If you'd like to join in the work, please drop by.