It's been 5 years since Skencil's development had been stopped. Most distribution already ditched this free vector graphics editor, because the application simply failed building in modern environments. One might as well decide the project is long dead.

Well, guess who is back after all. Last months were spent on fixing all critical issues in Skencil:

• new distutils based build system
• project structure is refactored as a Python 'skencil' package
• fixes for Tk 8.5/8.6 support
• 64bit platform-related fixes
• mixed indents are eliminated in Python source code
• UI fonts and colors import from Gtk engine is implemented
• ruler widget reimplemented to use Xlib drawing instead of Tk functionality
• palette widget is redesigned
• multiple fixes in Russian translation

After five years the user interface looks more or less up to date:
 

All the changes were introduced by sK1 team. The reasoning behind this co-project is simple: desktop integration in sK1 is long overdue, whereas Skencil's GTK branch could be used as a starting point for updating sK1's interface. Skencil will stay a comparatively lightweight vector graphics editor for users who consider sK1 and Inkscape too heavy.

The sK1 team prepared builds for recent versions of Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandriva (both 32bit and 64bit). You can fetch them here.

More on this topic:

• sK1 0.9.1 pre2 (rev.1383) "Made in Brazil"
• sK1 v0.9.1 rev.905 is out
• Results of Trophees du Libre 2009
• sK1 development restarted