Krita Monthly Update - Edition 24
Welcome to the February 2024 development and community update.
Development Report
Text Tool Rework Update
Wolthera has written a new post about recent Text Tool updates which will be coming in Krita 5.3.
A Glyph Palette has been added to Text Tool Options, which allows selecting glyph alternates as well as showing a font character map (MR!2080). The Text Properties Docker now shows CSS Font Variants glyph properties (MR!2325) and OpenType features property (MR!2343).
Qt6 Port Progress
Krita now has Qt6 CI builds for Linux, Windows (MR!2328), and macOS (MR!2334). Android has yet to be built, as the platform has more complications and fewer developers working on it.
Most of Krita's custom Qt patches have now been ported by Dmitry, and ANGLE and HDR support are revived on Windows (deps commit).
Community Report
February 2024 Monthly Art Challenge Results
For the "Fabulous Flora" theme, 27 forum members submitted 34 original artworks. And the winner is… Hollyhocks by @Elixiah
The March Art Challenge is Open Now
For the March Art Challenge, @Elixiah has chosen "Virtual Plein Air Painting" using MapCrunch or Google Maps street view, as the theme. The optional challenge is doing paired entries; one urban, one rural. See the full brief for more details, and see the sights without stepping outside your door.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - January/February 2025
Nine images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from January 14th to February 11th. When the poll closed on February 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Luca - To the Sea by @deerblue
Recent illustration I did for a card game by @JoaoGGarin
Ways to Help Krita
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.
Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.
Other Notable Changes
Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from Feb. 12 - Mar. 17, 2025, that were not covered by the Development Report.
Stable branch (5.2.10-prealpha):
- Resources: Correctly load UTF-8 .pat pattern names. (bug report) (Change, by Nicholas LaPointe)
Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Bug fixes:
- Animation: Fix crash on closing secondary animated document during playback. (bug report) (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
- General: Fix menubar disappearing after toggling system global menubar feature. (Change, by Carl Schwan)
Features:
- Freehand Brush Tool: Add Brush Smoothing options to adjust the smoothing based on brushstroke speed. (Change, by killy |0veufOrever)
- Preferences: Add a global pen tilt direction offset in Tablet settings. This can be used to make tilt brushes work similarly for left- and right-handed users, or behave better without tilt support. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
- Scripting: Add Canvas.setPreferredCenter() and Canvas.pan() for panning the canvas. (Change, by Dov Grobgeld)
- Python Plugins: Add Mutator plugin. This consists of an action to randomly modify brush preset settings such as color and size, and a docker to customize these mutations. (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
- G'MIC: Update to 3.5.3. (Change, by Ivan Yossi)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.10-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64
Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64