Development

As with many other open source projects, development of Sketch takes place in a separate development series. This approach to development allows substantial changes and experimental features without loss of stability and usability for the end user.

Development versions have an odd minor release number. The current development series is 0.7.x.

The main goals of this development series are:

• Port to GTK
• Multi-document interface
• Multi font, multi line text

If you're new to Sketch, please note that the user-interface in the current development versions is very incomplete as I'm currently porting Sketch from Tk to GTK. To get an idea of what Sketch already can do, please have a look at the stable releases first.

Status

The current development version is 0.7.7. The most important changes since version 0.7.6:

• Added a button in the top-right corners of the editor windows that indicates whether the document in the window is the active document. Clicking on the button makes the document in the window the active document.
• A document can have multiple views and editors now.
• A somewhat incomplete fill pattern dialog. selection and you can use it to select objects.
• Lots of internal changes, among others, the selection is now handled differently.

sketch-0.7.7.tar.gz (423K).

To decrease the file sizes, I've split the font-metrics into a separate file, sketch-fontmetrics-0.7.0.tar.gz (130K). The metrics in this file are the same as in the stable series, so if you already have that, you don't need this file.

CVS

The sources of the development branch of Sketch are now available in GNOME CVS as the module sketch. Even if you don't have an account there, you can still checkout the sources via anonymous CVS:

First you have to set an environment variable that points to the gnome CVS repository

$ export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'

$ cvs login

$ cvs -z3 checkout sketch

Later, you can use

$ cvs -z3 update -Pd sketch

to update your copy of the sources to the latest version in CVS.

Other software

Python, Python Imaging Library, XML (optional)

These are basically the same as for the stable version, but you'll need at least version 1.0 of the Python Imaging Library. You need at least Python 1.5.1 (available from http://www.python.org/ftp/python/src/py152.tgz. The Python Imaging Library is available from http://www.pythonware.com/downloads/Imaging-1.0.tar.gz.

For platform specific notes and binary packages, see the download page for the stable series.

If you want to use the SVG import filter, you also need the Python XML package. This package is optional, you don't need it for anything other than the SVG import filter.

GTK and PyGTK, GNOME

Sketch now uses GTK instead of Tk. You can get GTK from http://www.gtk.org/, you need at least gtk 1.2.4. Versions 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 have some thread-related bugs that affect Sketch if your Python installation is thread-enabled.

You also need PyGTK, the Python bindings for GTK. They are available from the PyG Tools page. I use version 0.6.5 at the moment.

For anti-aliased rendering you also need libart, the rendering library used by the GNOME canvas. libart is part of the gnome-libs package available at http://www.gnome.org/, but it's also available separately.