Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.

A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Here are some key features of "Skencil":

· Bézier Curves
· Transformed text and images
· Bézier curves, rectangles and ellipses can be used as guides
· Gradient fills
· Blend groups
· Writes EPS files
· Rectangles, optionally with rounded corners
· Ellipses (full ellipses, pie slices, arcs and chords)
· Bézier curves (single and multi path)
· External images:
o Raster images: JPEG, PNG,...
(all types the Python Imaging Library can read)
o Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)
· Text (very simple at the moment)
· Rectangles, ellipses and bézier curves can be used as guides. Skencil has ordinary horizontal and vertical guide lines as well, of course.
· Blend Groups: Automatically updated interpolations of arbitrary objects
· Text can be converted to bézier curves. (This works only if Skencil has access to the PostScript Type 1 font files (pfa or pfb)).
· Text along a path:
· User scripts
· Exports Encapsulated PostScript
· Unlimited undo history

What's New in This Release:

· Prepare for Python 2.4:
· Update paxtkinter to deal with python's Tkinter changes
· The .sk file format is now the default file format in the File/Open dialog. Patch by Frank Koormann
· The setup.py script works on HP-UX now. Shared libraries have a .sl extension there. Patch by Olivier Mehani (Savannah patch #3709).
· Mouse-wheel support for the canvas. The mouse wheel scrolls up/down. Savannah patch #3836 by cafeine
· Updated the FAQ a bit to better match the one on the web-page.
· Kinyarwanda translations by Steve Murphy. The translation seems quote incomplete.

Bug Fixes:

· On some systems math.atan2 raises an exception when called with two zeros. Fix one occurrence in the arrow module. Reported by Joel Biddier
· Cancelling the drawing of a poly line or poly bezier with ESC resulted in tracebacks until the next mouse click. Reported by Antoon Pardon (Savannah bug #9378). Patch by Valentin Ungureanu (Savannah patch #3141).
· The "Export Raster" script gives a better error message if ghostscript can't be called. Bug reported by Eric Devost
· When importing EPS files, skencil didn't parse %%BeginData comments correctly. Fixed by Savannah patch #3134 by Bernhard Reiter
· The svg export filter now sets the winding rule for all objects to even-odd. Savannah patch #3103 by Philippe Blayo, fixes Savannah bug #5756 by Simon Budig.
· The SVG filter handles ill-formed transform specifications a bit better. The old version would hang in a regular expression match if the triling closing parenthesis of e.g. a matrix specification was missing. Bug report by Joel Biddier
· The svg import filter also accepts capital Z as closepath command of a path specification as required by the SVG specification. Savannah Patch #3587 by Bernhard Reiter.
· In the print dialog, when the user clicked on the file selection button and cancelled the dialog, Skencil would give an exception. This is now fixed.
· The usage messge printed when the --help option is given on the command line now correctly refers to "skencil" not "sketch" anymore.
· The source URL in the spec file now refers to skencil as well. It still points to sourceforge, though. Patch by Paul Dickson
· The setup.py script now finds the tcl/tk libraries on OpenBSD as well (savannag bug #12046)
· Already in 0.6.16, but not mentioned before: Skencil's type1 font parsing code could not cope with some type1 files -- files with no subrs or with flexes. Now it can. Bug report by André Pascual