CourtBouillon

About Code

WeasyPrint v70.0 and CairoSVG 2.9.1 have been released this month 🎉.

This new version of WeasyPrint adds support for CSS Notes, the specification we worked on with Julie and Julien from paged.js, COLR fonts, and many other things. The release also contains security information related to untrusted images and URL fetcher to filter elements passed as Python parameters.

We wrote an article about this new release, where you can find more details about it.

If you’re curious about our work on the CSS Notes specification and how to use it, there is also a dedicated article 🤓.

The new version of CairoSVG contains a fix for Windows paths and adds support of path-like objects for URLs.

Among these releases, we started to rewrite the repagination process of WeasyPrint. It’s quite an old part that has become longer and longer along the years, and also less and less clear. So, by rewriting it, we’ll make it simpler to understand and to maintain!

We also fixed several issues related to gradients. The number of tests related to gradients in WeasyPrint is quite impressive, and it’s a bit frustrating to see all the issues we still find 🙃.

And to finish this code part, we’re continuing to work on the new website. Here is a preview of the future homepage!

Not About Code

As said in the code part, we wrote two articles this month: the release article of WeasyPrint v70 and the article about CSS Notes.

We also organised, and went to, the monthly local Python meetup 🐍. After the summer, we’re back with talks! This month was about self-hosting. We learnt a lot about hardware and tools used to deploy / monitor services.

Related to Python events, from October 29 to November 1, we’ll be in Biarritz (south-west of France) for PyConFR. Lucie will give a talk about the impact of AI in our lives of open source maintainers. If you’re around there, don’t hesitate to come and say hi 👋!

Interesting Reading and Watching

The interesting reading and watching of this month, we got two items:

• Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever? — Scott Jenson at the KDE conference,
• The state of the Devs survey results.

In his talk, Scott Jenson talk about the evolution of desktop interfaces, and how there is no real new evolution these days. It’s a very interesting talk, and beyond desktop UX/UI, we feel that the tech field in general isn’t about new evolution, and more about keeping things as they are without real new features or ideas (and AI isn’t a new idea 😊).

The state of the Devs survey is an annual survey related to the physical/mental health of developers. It’s the second edition of this survey. We think it’s important to have data on this topic and also interesting to know the general mood in the development field, outside our usual circles.

See you next month for another Journey Book entry 💜