Start TMIL February 2024

Author: DJMcNab

content/blog/2025-03-06-tmil-14/index.md

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+title = "Linebender in February 2025"
+authors = ["Daniel McNab"]
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+
+Linebender is an informal open-source organization working on various projects to advance the state of the art in GUI for [the Rust programming language](https://rust-lang.org).
+
+## Xilem
+
+Xilem is our flagship GUI project, inspired by SwiftUI.
+It lets you build user interfaces declaratively by composing lightweight views together, and will diff them to provide minimal updates to a retained layer.
+February was a slow month for Xilem specific changes, although many changes further down the stack will be relevant to Xilem users.
+
+- [xilem#861][]: makes a method on `Pod` public to make creating widgets easier, by Evgeny.
+
+## Masonry
+
+Masonry is the widget system used by Xilem.
+It provides a non-opinionated retained widget tree, designed as a base layer for high-level GUI frameworks.
+
+- [xilem#872][]: Exported the scale factor for limited use cases (such as single-pixel lines).
+
+There is some important work upcoming:
+
+- [xilem#873][]: Olivier started to develop their "arbitrary properties" feature, which is intended for styling.
+- [xilem#875][]: Adds an image widget containing arbitrary vector graphics content, by Richard Dodd.
+
+As Parley has now been released to crates.io (discussed later in this update), we're hoping to release a new alpha of Xilem and Masonry to crates.io in March.
+
+## Vello
+
+Vello is our GPU vector renderer.
+It can draw large 2D scenes with high performance, using GPU compute shaders for most of the work.
+
+<!-- TODO: ... -->
+
+## Parley
+
+Parley is a text layout library.
+It handles text layout, mostly at the level of line breaking and resolving glyph positions.
+
+We released [Parley 0.3][] and [Fontique 0.3][] to crates.io.
+These contain many of the features we have discussed over the previous months, including <!-- TODO -->.
+
+## Resvg
+
+<!-- TODO: Talk about resvg 0.45 release -->
+
+## Kurbo
+
+Kurbo provides data structures and algorithms for curves and vector paths.
+
+- [kurbo#412][], [kurbo#413][]: Added utility methods to `Size`, by [@nils-mathieu][].
+
+## Color
+
+[Color][] provides functionality for representing, converting, parsing, serializing, and manipulating colors in a variety of color spaces.
+It closely follows the [CSS Color Module Level 4][] draft spec.
+
+The biggest update to Color in February was the addition of absolute color conversions, in [color#139][].
+This won't be visible for most users, but will be useful for those who need to convert between color spaces without changing the white point.
+This will also be used in [color#137][], which allows creating a theoretical black-body color from a temperature in Kelvin.
+
+## Velato
+
+We released [Velato 0.5.0][], bringing compatibility with Vello 0.4.0.
+
+## Kompari
+
+[Kompari][] is a tool for visual inspection of snapshot tests.
+
+<!-- TODO -->
+
+## Research and Future Directions
+
+Linebender has an origin story in being a very research oriented group, looking to break new ground.
+While we are focused on shipping code today, we still have an eye on the future and how to be prepared for the new opportunities and technologies that are coming.
+
+<!-- TODO -->
+
+## Get Involved
+
+We welcome collaboration on any of our crates.
+This can include improving the documentation, implementing new features, improving our test coverage, or using them within your own code.
+
+We host an hour long office hours meeting each week where we discuss what's going on in our projects.
+See [#office hours in Zulip](https://xi.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/359642-office-hours) for details.
+<!-- TODO: Mention renderer office hours? -->
+
+* Daniel and Olivier's "office hours" appointments can still be booked by anyone for open-ended discussion of the ecosystem.
+  * [See Daniel's schedule here](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ32eQYJ9DtZ_wJaYNtT36YioETiloZDIdImFpBFRo5-XsqGzpikgkg47LPsiHhpiwiQ1orOwwW2).
+  * [See Olivier's schedule here](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ2t767ZRETD_TkRI_VxK2ZTG0VrO9OZ4l7HvTxefhtJcg85iK0ZN7zWNnAEZtH0Dn7C1GKxrmYM).
+
+[Color]: https://docs.rs/color/
+[CSS Color Module Level 4]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/