Just when users expected any news about PrintDesign (any!), its predecessor, the seemingly obsolete sK1 vector graphics app, got a maintenance update.

Probably the most important change in v0.9.2 is the use of Pango text layout engine which makes it finally possible to type text in pretty much any language—something the project had been missing for nearly a decade.

The other important change is support for LittleCMS v2 which means faster and better colorspace conversions, as well as support for newer ICC profiles.

Among arguably less significant things:

decreased use of memory at startup (down to 40Mb from 70 Mb);

refactored and improved Cairo-based rendering of the canvas;

the use of GTK+ printing system;

direct use of GTK+ dialogs (without Zenity);

exporting to PNG possible now..

Source code and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS packages are available at SourceForge.

Development of PrintDesign is still not exactly transparent, new code is being pushed to the project's SVN repository in big chunks, although recently developers started making commit comments that actually describe what's changed.

According to the team's manager, with departure of two programmers, they are finding it difficult to maintain crossplatform development. One possible solution they've already been working on is creating a widgetset abstraction layer, so that native interfaces could be plugged in one by one. A GTK+2-based interface is currently in the works.