Sodipodi 0.24 is released

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ximian com>]

Dear ladies and gentlemen!

Sodipodi 0.24 is released.

This is experimental, unstable and unpolished release. While many bugs
have been fixed, many-many more are introduced without doubt.

What's new (from NEWS file):
=========================================
Linear gradients work now. OK - to some extent. Only objectBoundingBox
unit system is supported, and there are known artefacts in printing
and bitmap export. Still, if you follow some guidelines, you should
be able to use them:
- If opening non-sodipodi SVG, either leave old gradients intact
  entirely, or create fresh new ones, if you want to edit them.
- Always edit gradient of single object at a time. Do not try to
  modify gradient of group of objects at the same time.
- If you want to export or print gradiented text, better convert
  it to curves before.

There have been lot of work on internals. Not much visible, except
numerous bugs. Still, there is now near-complete asynchronous
notifiaction system, that has been used to build dynamic dialogs
- look at new experimental fill/gradient dialog for example.
Hopefully there will be more these in future.

Mitsuru contributed dynadraw-filtered drawing tool. Although
it does currently only simple lines, it should emerge into
full-featured XInput (read Wacom tablets) calligraphic tool.

Sodipodi now saves emergency backups on segfault. So it would
be good idea, to check $HOME/.sodipodi, $HOME or $TMP time-to-time,
or you will run out of disk space. Also - although it should
save files 99.9% correctly, unless there is grave memory corruption,
it does not mean these files do not cause the same segfault again,
if opened. But it helps a lot for crashes in UI system.

Frank contributed neat enhanced knots. I.e. these small handles,
used for scaling, node editing etc. can now have all kinds
of fancy shapes, and handle X cursor by thmselves as well.

I re-borrowed Raph SVG path code from librsvg (the old one
came from Gill). The new code parses SVG files exported from
Illustrator the right way - so you can now open and edit
most Nautilus SVG icons.

UI-wise there are neat color slider widgets, that should give
a little better user experience than plain Gtk sliders. Among
composite widgets there is CMYK color selector, but it is mainly
placeholder - both display and printing go through RGB anyways.

Frank also did near-complete snappoints implementation, so
guidelines and grid are quite useful now.

Francis contributed several bugfixes and also Base64 inline image
support.

There is global opacity setting implemented. It can currently only
be acessed from context menu. Same stands for object sensitivity.
Hint - to select insensitive objects, use rubberband or Shift-click.

Many other people have contributed to sodipodi. Big thanks to
everybody!

Download location:
===========================
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4054

Screenshot location:
===========================
http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/index.php?section=about&file=screenshots

Best wishes,
Lauris Kaplinski