History

2003: Beginnings

Inkscape came into life in 2003 as a fork of Sodipodi, which in turn is a fork of Gill, the GNOME Illustration application. It was initially led by four active Sodipodi developers: Bryce Harrington, MenTaLguY, Nathan Hurst, and Ted Gould. They wanted to take a different direction with the codebase in terms of focus on SVG compliance, interface look-and-feel, and a desire to open development opportunities to more participants. The name is a combination of “Ink” and “landscape”.

Following the fork, the project switched from C to C++ as the programming language. The last pure-C Inkscape is version 0.36, released on 2003-12-11.

2004-?: Aiming for SVG Compliance

Todo

How and why SVG compliance?

The developers implemented layers, markers, clones and other SVG features, and added a bunch of fixes to the usability and feature set of Inkscape. One of the developers, Tavmjong Bah, had also participated in the SVG working group before it went dormant. In 2019 Inkscape achieved full SVG 1.1 compliance with version 0.91.

?-?: Building a Community

Todo

  • When are the teams established?

  • Quick history of community building (forums, mailing lists, chatroom)

The Inkscape community held the first hackfest in 2015. Hackfests are in-person meetings of developers to work on features and fixes. We have been holding such an event roughly yearly ever since. In 2024 the name was changed to the Inkscape Summit to encourage participation from documentation authors, designers, and other non-developers.

The development platform of Inkscape was on Sourceforge until November 2007, when it switched to Launchpad. In June 2017 it was moved to Gitlab.

?-?: Version 1.0 and Shifting Focus

Todo

  • become a more general illustration/graphic design application

  • shift to GTK3

  • quality-of-life additions

? onwards: Improving Performance and UX

Todo

  • shift to GTK4

  • performance regression fixes

  • UX studies and improvements

Looking into the Future

Todo

  • big ideas such as animation, node graph support, paragraph tools and vector brushes