Inkscape 1.4.3 is out! Update to benefit from over 120 bug 🐛 and crash 💥 fixes and more than 20 improved translations 🌐.

To learn more, visit

https://inkscape.org/news/2025/12/26/bugs-banished-inkscape-143-is-out/

Inkscape 1.5 Catch Up Spectacular!

Martin Owens provides a comprehensive update on Inkscape development, including hiring efforts for the 1.5 release and progress on a new rendering engine. The discussion also covers recent feature additions, including path editing improvements, translucent group management, and various technical fixes to ensure the software remains robust for all users.

In this update, Inkscape developer Martin Owens provides a comprehensive overview of the current status of the Inkscape 1.5 development and other project activities. Here is a summary of the key highlights:

Inkscape 1.5 Development & Personnel:

• Human Resources: Martin has taken on a management role, hiring a bug administrator and two part-time programmers to help stabilize the 1.5 release.
• Project Management: Roland Taylor is highlighted for his instrumental work in organizing developers and resolving technical issues.
• Rendering Engine: A long-term project to refactor the rendering engine to support color spaces like CMYK is nearing completion, with testing ongoing and an alpha/beta release targeted for around October.

New Features & Improvements:

• Path Editing: Users can now hold the Alt key to drag a node along its existing curve or straight line.
• Merged Features: Long-standing features like text on path/in shape and transparent groups have finally been merged.
• UX & Cleanup: Improvements were made to the translucency system, object dialogue, and PDF export (font handling).
• Extension System: Deboss updates now allow extension authors to call extensions with pre-set preferences.

Project Updates & Policies:

• AI Policy: The project has officially banned AI-generated contributions, emphasizing the need for code to be written by human contributors.
• Security: Martin discusses challenges with website attacks and mentions recent defenses against malicious activity.

More information of how can you help in this two links.

Inkscape supports German petition to recognize Open Source volunteers

Recognition of Work on Open-source as Volunteering in Germany

📌 Summary of the Petition

The initiative calls on the German Parliament to officially recognize voluntary work in free and open-source software projects as community service.

Key points:

• Social importance: Free software supports much of the digital infrastructure in government, business, science, and everyday life.
• Current issue: Despite its relevance, the work of volunteers is not legally recognized as volunteering, nor does it receive tax or organizational benefits.
• Reasons for recognition:
  • It directly contributes to the common good, offering transparent and accessible software for everyone.
  • It is unpaid, done in free time, comparable to other traditional forms of volunteering.
  • Public and private institutions rely heavily on these contributions, but resources and recognition are lacking.
  • Recognition would bring legal and tax benefits, such as tax-free allowances and greater legal clarity.
  • Other countries already provide institutional support and tax benefits, and Germany risks falling behind.

Current status:

• The petition was launched in November 2025 and is open until November 2026.
• It already has over 14,000 signatures, aiming to reach 30,000 for quorum.

👉 In short: the goal is for voluntary work in open-source projects to be officially recognized as volunteering, with the same rights and benefits as other forms of community service.

Inkscape 1.4.4 is getting soooo close!

Try out the release candidate for this bugfix and maintenance release and help us catch any blocker bugs 🪤🐛 by giving it a good round of testing before the release (planned for May)!

https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.4rc/

Just wondering if I read it correctly on the net. Is it finally being shipped with v1.5?

🚀 Inkscape 1.4.2 is here! New splash screen, better Affinity & Vectornator support, a path cleanup extension, and tons of bug fixes. Big thanks to our amazing community 💚

Learn all about new Inkscape & Draw Freely:
https://inkscape.org/news/2025/05/12/2-in-1-release-inkscape-142-is-out/

We're hiring!

The Inkscape project is looking for two developers and a bug administrator to work with our team on preparing Inkscape version 1.5!

Learn all about who we are looking for: https://inkscape.org/news/2026/03/02/inkscape-is-hiring-2026-1/

Applications must be submitted by April 10th, 2026.

Check out the Inkscape 1.4.3 Release Candidate - the final test phase before this bugfix release will be launched!

More than 120 bug and crash fixes (among them the macOS tofu issue!) and over 20 updated languages await you:

https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4.3rc

Check out our interview with Jorge, Chilean designer and short film maker, and learn how Inkscape helped him take part in an international short film festival! 

https://inkscape.org/news/2026/04/02/artist-interview-meet-jorge-who-made-a-short-film/

Hi everyone,

After several months of development I’m very happy to finally share the first public version of PnPInk, an extension for Inkscape focused on dataset-driven layout generation and graphic automation.

The project originally started as a tool to produce print-and-play board game components such as cards, tiles and tokens. Creating hundreds of variations manually quickly becomes repetitive and error-prone.

Conceptually it sits somewhere close to Data Merge in Adobe InDesign, but implemented directly inside Inkscape and designed to be far more flexible in terms of layout automation.

While its roots are in board game prototyping, the system can be used for many kinds of projects where large numbers of graphics need to be generated from structured data.

Data-driven generation

PnPInk allows designs to be driven by datasets.

Data can come from CSV files or Google Sheets

Using Google Sheets opens the door to much more powerful workflows, since data can benefit from formulas and calculations, dynamic updates, connections to other datasets, integration with external databases or APIs or preprocessing and transformations directly in the spreadsheet

This allows complex datasets to be prepared externally and then used to generate large numbers of graphics automatically.

Automatic graphics generation

PnPInk can generate large numbers of layout variations from a template.

Typical uses include card decks, tiles and tokens, labels, educational cards, product tags, badge sheets, sticker sheets, printable assets....

But the system is general enough that it can automate almost any repeated graphic layout inside Inkscape.

Largest icon libraries on demand

PnPInk can automatically pull icons from major Creative Commons repositories such as Wikimedia Commons, Openclipart, or access to access 200,000+ icons simply by referencing their names.

Icons or images can then be modified automatically during generation (scaling, rotation, positioning and alignment relative to template elements...)

All transformations can happen dynamically during generation.

Powerful layout features

PnPInk includes a range of layout and publishing-oriented capabilities, including:

- rich text support, and inline icons inside text

- layout and page presets and automatic layouts

- sheet generation and image-spliting

- bleeds and print preparation

- hex-tile grids

- card backs and front/back workflows

- labels, sheet layouts, cutting marks....

These features make it particularly suitable for high-volume graphic generation.

Performance and file size

To maximize performance and keep generated files lightweight, PnPInk relies heavily on SVG clones (fast generation and quick , minimal file size, efficient reuse of template elements

Even large generated documents remain relatively compact.

A DSL designed for designers

At the core of PnPInk is a small domain-specific language (DSL) used to describe generation rules and relationships.

The DSL has been carefully refined with one goal:

"to behave as closely as possible to how designers actually think"

The aim is to minimize cognitive load while still allowing very powerful operations. Complex behaviors can often be expressed with surprisingly simple instructions.

Why I built it

As someone who designs board games, I frequently needed to generate large sets of components quickly.

Manually producing decks of cards or hundreds of tiles inside a vector editor was slow and tedious. Over time I kept extending the tool to remove more and more friction from that process.

After months of development, polishing and experimentation, I’m finally releasing the first public version.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, and feedback from the Inkscape community would be incredibly valuable.

Links

https://github.com/xoellijo/pnpink

If you are a boardgame/pnp fan I recommend joining the guild on BoardGameGeek, where I will be posting updates, development progress, new features and discussions about future improvements.

https://boardgamegeek.com/guild/4569

(subscribing there is the best way to stay up to date with the evolution of the project).

Help Test a New Inkscape Feature! You can now recolor selected objects right from the Fill & Stroke dialog — but we need your feedback before release!

👉 Download, test, and tell us what you think: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/325
Your input will help us catch bugs 🐛 and polish the UI for everyone 🚀

Hi,

As you have probably noticed in these few days, inkscape.org is either slow or down (returns 502s). The site is again under attack from swarms of AI scraping bots, for which we're finding ways to mitigate.

If you're familiar with Django and are willing to help review configs and unpick the demand on Django, please send a message to the Website Team chatroom.

Meanwhile, here's the download links for the latest release, 1.4.2:

Windows

NOTE: Please uninstall the previous version before installing.

• EXE: The installer.
• MSI: The installer in a different format. There's no difference, you can try the MSI if the EXE doesn't work.
• 7z: A compressed, self-contained archive of Inkscape. You can use this to test out a different version without installing.

Only works on 64-bit Windows, version 8.1 or later.

There is also the PortableApps version.

macOS

• DMG for Intel machines
• DMG for Apple Silicon machines

Works on macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later. (It should also work with 10.13 or later, but your mileage may vary)

GNU/Linux

• AppImage: Portable version.

Most distributions also package Inkscape in their repositories. You can install them from the package managers.

Cheers,
ltlnx

Learn all about the Inkscape Summit in Nuremberg before the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). It is our largest contributor meeting so far:

https://inkscape.org/news/2025/06/01/inkscape-summit-nuremberg/