Introduction To Inkscape And Its Future

WarriorC writes "Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading (see: Illustrator-killer). Some screenshots of the latest CVS version are included." It's also a nice glimpse into an "unorganized" but nonetheless successful open source process.

Comments

Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[JoeShmoe950]

Another interesting Vector Graphics program is Flash 4 Linux; http://f4l.sourceforge.net/ Although in Alpha, it is quite usefull. Its a flashlike program (very similar interface to flash studio), and it is quite far along. It does animations and everything (I believe it doesn't have full flash script abilities yet). It can create flash files.

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[Anonymous Coward]

Although a very good looking and interesting project that F4L one, looking at its CVS commits, it seems abandoned. Last changes were made 8 months ago! :(

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[jaaron]

Yes, and speaking of other open source vector graphics programs someone should also point out that Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi. And if I understand the story correctly, Sodipodi was based on earlier efforts called "Gill" for GNOME Illustrator. I'm not sure why the Inkscape team forked Sodipodi.

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[ZaMoose]

I believe politics (both development and global) played a roll in this. The primary developer on SodiPodi was being a bit authoritarian and capricious in the ways he incorporated changes, etc. and some people didn't care for that.

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[__aagctu1952]

Not to mention the different GUI - Inkscape uses MDI, which is a must under MS Windows (all those windows and no "always on top" feature makes Sodipodi completely unusable under Windows). Mmmm, MDI...

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[__aagctu1952]

Eh, correction. It doesn't completely use MDI, but at least it keeps the main toolbar and menus in the same window as the actual graphics...

Too much caffeine and too little sleep...

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[NamShubCMX]

I know the kdewebdev maintainers wanted to start sponsoring the F4L guys... Donation could probably help.

If they can integrate this project within Quanta, we're talking about something killer :)

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[Anonymous Coward]

Another interesting Vector Graphics is Sketsa SVG Graphics Editor http://www.kiyut.com/products/sketsa/index.html

It is similar like Illustrator and Inkscape. Since it is written in Java, it is run on Linux as well.

Although not as feature full as Illustrator, It provides many features that are also lack in Illustrator like native SVG File format which allow design and code in the same time (something like Macromedia Dreamweaver)

Cool

[Mind Booster Noori]

This is really good... But wouldn't it be better if there was a Gimp plug-in to add vectorial drawing support?

Re:Cool

[BenjyD]

Better vector support in GIMP would be nice, but I think that the Vector vs Raster is too radical a difference to incorporate nicely in one package with a good UI. I think the workflow for most web artists is draw in vector (Illustrator etc) and then finish the image in raster (Photoshop etc).
A vector drawing package on a par with commercial offerings would be a huge addition to the free software world, and UI is very important in that area. Sodipodi is pretty good, IIRC.

Re:Cool

[Syzar]

Well, Inkscape forked from Sodipodi. And IMO Inkscape has evolved lot in UI-area. I don't know if it was just me, but Sodipodi's UI is awful.

Re:Cool

[Slack3r78]

Please god no. The thing about that article that got me interested in Inkscape is the fact that the developers, and more importantly, UI designers are artists themselves, so clearly they want to build a UI that's focused around getting work done, and it sounds like they're doing a good job of that.

While I keep reading that the Gimp's interface was greatly improved with 2.0, when I've tried it, it felt as kludgy as ever. The Gimp does a lot of cool things, but create a smooth workflow it does not. For that reason alone, I feel it's better that this be a stand alone project. It allows them to build a much lighter system aimed at doing one thing and one thing well.

In general, if you're working with vector graphics, you're not really going to care about immediately working with raster. That said, I do think it'd be cool if someone could take the Gimp and strip it down to a very focused UI like Inkscape seems to be doing, creating a set of interlocking common programs like Adobe currently does with their Creative Suite. However, for this type of work, the plug-in-replacing-an-app mentallity is exactly what needs to be avoided because while it may work, an artist will usually be much happier with a lighter program aimed at doing what they want it to do, not ten thousand features they'll never need creating a cluttered and confusing menu system and obscure keyboard shortcuts.

Re:Cool

[Omnifarious]

No, vector graphics are a different enough beast, that you need a completely different set of tools for dealing with them. What you really want is for gimp to be able to import external SVG things and convert them to an arbitrarily scaled bitmap representation in a layer. From what I've seen, gimp 2.0 can already do that.

Though, It would be nice if gimp could regenerate the layer automatically when the source SVG file changes. I don't think it can do that yet.

Re:Cool

[Deusy]

Sodipodi is pretty good, IIRC.

Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi, with a more open approach and an emphasis on using C++. The result is a program that builds upon Sodipodi's good points by adding a better user interface, handsome new features (like boolean operations), as well as being a lot more stable.

My impression is that Lauris Kaplinski (the Sodipodi maintainer) was doing a David Dawes impression and holding Sodipodi development back in one way or another, and Inkscape is the result of all the frustration that built up. Now the momentum is with Inkscape which has a bright future with a lot of active developers.

Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair. Inkscape is a very well organised project and Bryce in particular is very diligent about keeping the future well mapped out. The "unorganised" jibe is really because Bryce and Co let people hack on features they want to hack on, and readily accept them if they meet a decent standard. But isn't that what open source is all about? And isn't the reason for many forks and/or project stagnation due to this being prevented? I'd say "open minded" is a more appropriate term.

Re:Cool

[breon.halling]

... one package with a good UI ...

Good UI? I thought you were talking about GIMP! =P

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Vector is a higher level of abstraction than raster. It's a vector graphic tool that needs to incorporate more raster capabilities, not the other way round. And in fact, Inkscape plans to start adding various raster effects for the bitmap objects embedded into SVG. It's not going to replace Gimp, but if you really want both vector and raster combined, this combination can only work within a vector-based framework.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's a great discussion on how, when you've got the right players and attitude, Open Source can really work.

that is not offtopic
if you read the article you would know it is right on the money

Inkscape has made a lot of progress because they welcome new developers, the welcome chagnes and they want to share code with other projects

Re:Cool

[BiggyP]

The Gimp does a lot of cool things, but create a smooth workflow it does not.

that's a matter of opinion, i find that it provides me with an excellent workflow personally.

one important point to bear in mind is that Inkscape, while fairly usable, has a heck of a long way to go before it can compete with the commercial alternatives, the GIMP, on the other hand, is already at that stage.

from what i hear, Jimmac, head GNOME artist, has no need for Photo$hop, but can't replace Illu$strator with any of the free offerings.

Re:Cool

[bcrowell]

My impression is that Lauris Kaplinski (the Sodipodi maintainer) was doing a David Dawes impression and holding Sodipodi development back in one way or another, and Inkscape is the result of all the frustration that built up.
It's a little sad to see David Dawes' name used as an epithet. This is a guy who's probably spent a couple of orders of magnitude more hours on open source than I ever have. The most I've heard him accused of is that he may not have had the political skills to manage a very large, complex, high-profile open-source software project.

I'm very impressed with the careful attention to quality that Lauris Kaplinski has put into Sodipodi. I sent him a small amount of money and an "attaboy" e-mail. Bryce is also a good guy who has made well known contributions to free information.

A fork doesn't have to be like a spiteful divorce, and there are no bad guys here. I'm just thrilled that I'm getting very close to being able to dump Illustrator, which is basically the last thing forcing me to maintain a machine with non-free OS!

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Actualy, Macromedia Fireworks has both vector and raster capabilities and integrates them almost seamlessly. As a [beginning] web artist, my workflow goes: Draw in Fireworks->publish. Heck, it can even make HTML code and JavaScript to instantly publish whatever you make. Adobe also has a product called Streamline, which I think does the same thing.

ooooh

[millahtime]

this could definitly be a nice new toy to have. I like using photoshop and gimp for my projects but to have them retain their charactistics like in their example of a triange would be a great help for some of the projects I am working on.

Trivial?

[th1ckasabr1ck]

"...one of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format"

Isn't that a fairly easy change to make to current open-source vector-drawing utilities? Serializing the output to XML instead of a binary format doesn't seem like the first feature you should mention when describing the advantages your program has over others... Then again, it is open source.

Re:Trivial?

[Bishop923]

It isn't serializing the data, it is actually creating a Scalable Vector Graphics file which is an XML based language that you could then use on a web page or in any app that can read it. Think png vs psd.

(Yes I know that PSD is a published format...)

Re:Trivial?

[Alan Shutko]

The feature is that it stores its drawings in SVG, not any random XML format. That's a bit harder, and far more useful, than just using an XML format instead of a binary one.

Come on, you only needed to read just a sentence or two more of the article to get the explanation.

Re:Trivial?

[rdewalt]

I'm surprised that one of the first features isn't "Fully Skinnable Interface"

Unlike a certain OS video editor that the name of escapes me, which had -THAT- as its very first Feature element. Yeah, that makes me leap into inspirational fury.

Re:Trivial?

[Anonymous Coward]

> "...one of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format"

You did not read the sentence fully.

It is:

"...one of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format -- SVG"

And that is huge. Inkscape is an SVG editor.

Re:Trivial?

[Hatta]

Besides, Sodipodi already edits SVG, and I believe amaya has some svg capabilities as well. I'd like to see openoffice pick up svg too for draw and impress(powerpoint clone). They already use an XML format for everything, why not be standards compliant too? That way I wouldn't have to convert to powerpoint or pdf whenever I give a talk.

One feature I'd really like to see in these tools is some kind of networked blackboard. I'll often be explaining something to a friend online and damn it if I couldn't explain it better with a picture. Collaborative sketching could be extremely useful.

Re:Trivial?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent (-1) Retarded

Re:Trivial?

[eggplantpasta]

Not really trivial. It's not just any old XML but SVG (scaleable vector graphics) a W3C recommendation. This means it is a recognised standard and is implimented by Adobe, the Mozilla project, and others. The raw format of inkscape is directly usable in other tools.

Re:Trivial?

[WWWWolf]

Well, it's a GTK+ app, so "Fully Skinnable Interface" is most yawn-inducingly Already There. The OSS world got over the "oo, this is Fully Skinnable" phase years and years ago, and is now focusing on producing high quality software. Or that's the theory. =)

What makes this a killer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or to state more appropriately, what is Inkscape going to do to get marketshare from Illustrator that the GIMP hasn't already tried and failed to do when attempting to grab Photoshop marketshare?

Re:What makes this a killer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least they got the multiple document interface right.

Re:What makes this a killer?

[beatleadam]

Two seperate questions and issues here.

What makes this a killer?

This looks like a very good, well-featured Open-Source project that is providing users everywhere with a Choice in what they install on their computers.

Or to state more appropriately, what is Inkscape going to do to get marketshare from Illustrator that the GIMP hasn't already tried and failed to do when attempting to grab Photoshop marketshare?

No this is the real question and one that begs an answer. One possible answer to this is that as it takes money to make money...Marketing is therefore the answer.

Re:What makes this a killer?

[quinto2000]

Gimp actually has a fairly closed development structure, and I don't think it would be accurate to say that they're trying to steal Photoshop's userbase. They seem to have their own goals and interests, and seem to be pretty stubborn about them (especially interface decisions).

Re:What makes this a killer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should maintain a GIMP fork that has a useable interface, just to see everyone switch over from the original. Hell, maybe I should.

Re:What makes this a killer?

[metamatic]

What's Photoshop's market share on Linux? I've not seen any figures.

Re:What makes this a killer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or to state more appropriately, what is Inkscape going to do to get marketshare from Illustrator that the GIMP hasn't already tried and failed to do when attempting to grab Photoshop marketshare?

Make an interface that doesn't suck.

The GIMP and Inkscape should copy Adobe's interface as closely as possible...and then back off just enough to avoid legal troubles.

Re:What makes this a killer?

[Sweetshark]

what is Inkscape going to do to get marketshare from Illustrator that the GIMP hasn't already tried and failed to do when attempting to grab Photoshop marketshare?
1) There is no GIMP marketshare because GIMP is free. This might change with the buyable version at WinGimp.com.
2) This is one tool less missing on a linux desktop. The list of "missing apps" got rather short recently ....

integrating

[millahtime]

This is really good... But wouldn't it be better if there was a Gimp plug-in to add vectorial drawing support?

An integrated enviornment would be nice but with all of the other features to be added to gimp is it practical to add this to the list.

Re:integrating

[Short Circuit]

Does the To Do list appear to be getting shorter? If not, then you probably ought to hold off. If so, then add it.

Personally, I think vector support in Gimp should be secondary to raster support. Let Inkscape be the other way around.

Re:integrating

[Mind Booster Noori]

Don't forget that you can do plug-ins to Gimp without being part of the Gimp project. If it turns out stable and they like it, they add it. The idea isn't to have the Gimp team to add this functionality, is that someone creates this plug-in. At least if it was up to me, I wouldn't start a project like Inkscope if I could just do a plug-in to The Gimp that would do the same thing...

Re:integrating

[Anonymous Coward]

The GIMP has SVG import by using RSVG to Rasterize the SVG.
The GIMP also imports SVG Paths.

If you want to improve the GIMP support for SVG then the Path Tool is where you should look.

the Gfig plugin might be worth looking at too.

Cool

[Short Circuit]

It's a great discussion on how, when you've got the right players and attitude, Open Source can really work.

This bothers me

[stratjakt]

Following our policy to "Patch first, ask questions later", we integrated the new feature as soon as practical, without wasting time arguing about it on a mailing list

The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.

At least Linus wants folks signing patches now. But how much damage has been done to the various Free projects we all rely on? How can anyone guarantee the pedigree of any of the code on my linux box with a "go ahead and paste it in!!" attitude?

Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape since I use KDE. You may know it as Ginkscape.

Re:This bothers me

[grasshoppa]

So...which is worse? Not reading the article and commenting, or reading the article and only reading what you are looking for?

Right before your quote, "We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised; it passed on all counts.".

Did ya miss that on your way to bash these folks?

Re:This bothers me

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape

And that sir, would be incorrect as Inkscape uses Gtk+ (a la GNOME, etc.).

Re:This bothers me

[_Sprocket_]

The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.

Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:

We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised...

Re:This bothers me

[surreal-maitland]

but this isn't the only major problem with "paste first, ask later." i mean, a quick check is unlikely to find (a) any of the bugs that the original author missed (b) anything malicious that the original author didn't want you to know about.

call me paranoid, but i think these are valid issues.

Re:This bothers me

[stratjakt]

I wasnt bashing these folks, I was bashing this cavalier attitude that 99% of the project maintainers on sourceforge have. If one subroutine is suspect, the whole project is suspect.

Ie; if the SAMBA team wasnt prepared to prove (and no doubt they are, this is for the sake of argument) that the code was indeed their own original work, and none of it was copy/pasted from the leaked Win2k source, then it's a timebomb ticking on all those servers.

The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".

And, I mentioned that they checked the code was indeed PD. It was beside my point.

Did ya miss that on your way to bash me for karma?

Re:This bothers me

[flossie]

Following our policy to "Patch first, ask questions later", we integrated the new feature as soon as practical, without wasting time arguing about it on a mailing list

The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.

You have completely misunderstood what the author of the article was saying. The questions he was referring to are the developer questions - "should we include this feature?", "is this the best way to implement this feature?", etc.

He explicitly emphasised that licence issues can be a problem and that was the first thing he checked when the patch was submitted.

Re:This bothers me

[EMH_Mark3]

It's not like they pasted it in, compiled it and released it right away.. Code was pasted, fixed, tested, tweaked, expanded, tested again, debugged and finally released

Re:This bothers me

[stratjakt]

No I didn't miss anything, I mentioned that they checked it was indeed PD.

Which raises another question. Legally speaking, would an email from an anonymous guy on the internet hold up in court as proof that that person wrote it?

Say, for instance, SCO managed to produce a significant amount of code that existed in the linux kernel - an obvious copy. Would linux be able to pull out an old archived email from "BigDaddy23@hotmail.com" that says "I wrote all this, honest injun!"? And if he doesn't even have that, could every kernel hacker in the world wind up in front of a judge trying to prove a negative (I didn't write that!)?

I bring this up because the SCO thing is merely the tip of the iceberg. More of this shit is coming. I have no doubt there is stolen code in various OSS projects. But who pays the piper when it's found and the project is called out?

I'd sure like to see the author of the code in question be accountable, not everyone who's ever contributed to or even used the project.

Re:This bothers me

[schemanista]

The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".

Linus did say that.

"It's not our side that isn't identifying the code. We'll work damn hard to identify everything they care to name," Torvalds said. "In fact, the source control system is out there in the public, and it identifies the source and the reason for patches," mentioning the BitKeeper repository he's used for the past two years to keep track of code in the heart, or kernel, of Linux

...

No. I allege that SCO is full of it, and that the Linux process is already the most transparent process in the whole industry. Let's face it, nobody else even comes close to being as good at showing the evolution and source of every single line of code out there. The only party that has had serious problems clarifying what they are talking about is SCO, and now when details start emerging like with RCU, it's clearly about IP that they had nothing to do with, and don't even own. I'm sure that they are confident that they own the collective work of Unix, but that's a separate thing entirely legally from being the actual copyright owner of any specific section of code.

How much more of an audit trail do you want? The SCO-job was gonna happen. One way or another.

Re: This bothers me

[Black Parrot]

> Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape since I use KDE. You may know it as Ginkscape.

Lucas fans call it "Binkscape"

Hog farmers call it "Oinkscape"

Teletubbie fans call it "Tinkie-Winkscape"

etc.

Re:This bothers me

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention all the f/oss software in proprietry software we are not allowed to review!

Re:This bothers me

[LMCBoy]

The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".

Linus does not need to do this, because the authorship of every piece of Linux is trivially easy for anyone to look up for themselves.

Every file in the Linux kernel has a copyright notice. This provides both an identification of the author(s), and a legal claim that the author(s) own the code.

In addition, the version control system of Linux records who submitted each revision ever made to the kernel, does it not? What more could one possibly want?

Re:This bothers me

[grasshoppa]

And, I mentioned that they checked the code was indeed PD. It was beside my point.

So...your point was something completely unrelated to the article you posted to?

Okay

( And for future reference, not all of us understand PHB-ese. You might not want to use acronyms unless they are more well known than the words you are replacing. ie: dns, www... )

Re:This bothers me

[Bryce]

The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.

Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:

We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised...

And also note that before this there had been another patch that implemented booleans that we had to reject on licensing problems with a General Polygon Clipping library it used. We'd contacted the GPC author to see if he would let us use it under the GPL, but his license was firm (it allowed for educational, non-commercial use only IIRC), so we ended up not being able to use it.

"Check licensing, then patch, and ask other questions later" doesn't quite have the same ring though. ;-)

Re:This bothers me

[juhaz]

The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".

No it couldn't have.

As others have stated, there IS a trail, but that's not even important. SCO was not looking for facts - heck, they knew damn well from the beginning that there was no violation - they would've ran away from any such documents, no point starting a good FUD-show just to spoil it with truth.

Not that easy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that easy to kill off Adobe Illustrator. For example just take a look at Illustrator's type options - it has probably more of them than other good layouting programs!
Good luck and success nevertheless, Bryce!!

Re:Not that easy

[NamShubCMX]

Why should it *kill* Illustrator?

A usable alternative is okay. Both project can coexist you know...

Offtopic rant: Why is every software company deemed NOT successfull if it doesn't kill its competitor? You don't have to be Microsoft to be successful...

Re:Not that easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I find Illustrator's type options to be severely lacking. You can't even underline your text. You can adjust all sorts of crazy font parameters, but you can't fucking underline.

Re:Not that easy

[black mariah]

Draw a line under it. Problem solved.

Re:Not that easy

[circusboy]

actually, if you really want to kill Illustrator, the first thing that you would want to implement would be the ability to create multiple pages in a single document...

I grant you that is not a feature that is of grave importance in the web world, but in print, of all the people who I know who use Illustrator, this is definitely one of the biggest gripes. (never quite THE biggest, but always in the top 3-4.)

the most irritating thing about adobe products is that they have very firm lines of demarcation. while photoshop has gained some vector tools and illustrator now comes with all the photoshop filters for rasterized objects, neither can do a multiple page document like say, freehand. In adobe's world you need to have pagemaker, framemaker or indesign to do even a simple multiple page layout.

personally I feel that this is really annoying.

btw, i heard a rumor sometime back that the gimp would gain CMYK tools at some point, is that true? also, one of the biggest failings of the gimp, ( from a usability point of view, especially for someone new to it,) would appear to be the neccessity of double clicking for every tool. since it acts like every window, (toolbox etc.) is a separate application, you need to click once, and then click again to select the tool. this may be an osX eccentricity, if so please correct me.

anyway Inkscape looks delightful so far, I hope they keep it up and remember to put all the good stuff in first. (any chance of a cocoa version?)

cheers all.

Re:Not that easy

[kylemonger]

also, one of the biggest failings of the gimp, ( from a usability point of view, especially for someone new to it,) would appear to be the neccessity of double clicking for every tool. since it acts like every window, (toolbox etc.) is a separate application, you need to click once, and then click again to select the tool. this may be an osX eccentricity, if so please correct me.

Either of these options should solve this problem for you. From the quartz-wm man page:

defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm -bool true

Enables focus-follows-mouse mode. Windows
belonging to the X server may then be focused by
moving the pointer over them, as well as the
default mode of clicking in them.

defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

Disables the default behavior of swallowing
window-activating mouse events.

Inkscape Rocks!!!

[carlback]

I use inkscape all the time as a jump start for any svg based graphics i build.

my job right now is creating svg based graphs and data visualizations and inkscape is by far the best product I've used (illustrator, sodipodi, xmlspy and even vi) for creating the base graphic before i have to build all the data driven elements.

now just let me link in a .css or use a style block for styles and i have a 99.999% solution.

Re:Inkscape Rocks!!!

[Feyr]

maybe you can tell me what a good replacement to visio is? open source?

and no "dia" doesn't qualify

Re:Inkscape Rocks!!!

[Mattintosh]

As a guy who sits here at his desk with about 200 Visio-made drawings in a stack on his desk, I say...

ANYTHING IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR VISIO.

Thank you. That is all.

Re:Inkscape Rocks!!!

[Feyr]

anything, except dia. as it doesn't actually work. visio manage to display what you tell it to. you can't even save and open back a drawing in dia whitout having a completly different design. and don't even think about printing

Re:Inkscape Rocks!!!

[Aaton]

Dealing with Col locations for machine rack space I always seem to get stuck with there Viso files. The only tool I found to be even close to doing what I need (measuring object to scale and maping them out) is Xfig.

Get this support into Inkscape plus the Xfig library of premade objects and more export/import file types I might think about switching.

Re:What makes this a killer? -----AMEN

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

a-fukin-man, I'll believe "Illustrator-killer" when I see 3D objects, texturing, lighting, SWF animations, etc.

The latest version of Illustrator CS will kick Inkscape's dick in the dirt.

Look... I'm sure Inkscape is great n'all, but "Illustrator-killer"???

Anyway to import Illustrator files???

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some .ai files that I would like to convert to svg. Does anyone know if this is possible?
thanks

Re:Anyway to import Illustrator files???

[MrLee]

Illustrator from version 10 on can save in SVG format and Inkscape reads them in perfectly!

I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[elwinc]

according to the roadmap, pdf and eps export will arrive at milestone 9 (inkscape 0.43). The project has currently completed milestone 4 (inkscape 0.39, though .38 is what sourceforge has for download). It'll start to get real interesting for me when I can make .eps and .pdf objects

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[Cthefuture]

You don't need to wait. You can currently "export" (print) to Postscript/EPS. Convert that to PDF, and you're done.

Going the other way is what I'd really like to see. That is, import ps and PDF into Inkscape.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[MenTaLguY]

We (the Inkscape developers, anyway) currently use Scribus for PDF and EPS output when we need it.

Scribus is kind of a sister project, and we've been working closely with them to get perfect import of Inkscape SVGs.

That's not to say that Inkscape shouldn't have PDF etc support in the future, but it's already not too painful if you have Scribus handy.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[Anonymous Coward]

or build Inkscape with gnome-print support enabled and print directly to PDF

needs testing though

- Inkscape Fan.

Posting anonymously so I might actually get modded up for a change

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[Anonymous Coward]

eventually Inkscape will need to be able to import PDF directly because the Adobe Illustrator 10 file format is based on PDF

Sketch has some support for Adobe Illustrator files but I think it is only for versions before Adobe Illustrator 10.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough* gnome-print *cough*

compile Inkscape with gnome-print for PDF export

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[Aaton]

Well I still happen to use Xfig and would find it handy if I could use both tools together without exporting/importing item and losing the ability to scale the object. Not sure if thats on the roadmap but I would love to see it added.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[scribusdocs]

We on the Scribus Team have begun over the past few months working closely with the Inkscape devels on improving SVG import export with with both apps. You can take your Inkscape created SVG, import it into Scribus and create a highly compliant "press-ready" CMYK or PDF/X-3 PDF. Thanks to steady efforts and collaboration, support is improving daily. A few notes and comments:

• SVG is a large and somewhat complex spec. However, it has many excellent features. Props to the Inkscape Team for making a goal of real compliance to the W3C spec. Not even Adobe can match all the spec.
• We on the Scribus team really consider Inkscape to be the future of SVG drawing in the open source world. The Inkscape project is very well managed and has approached their development roadmap with enviable discipline and professionalism. We have a lot of respect for the know how of their devels.
• EPS/PS import/export is not trivial by any means. Not every app on the planet exports good EPS and some introduce their own quirks. After 3 years of development, we are finally getting EPS import to where we want it to be.
• Likewise, exporting PDF is not particularly easy. The kinds of effects and transparency Inkscape is capable of creating requires high level PDF 1.4 features, which not all apps can support properly. A simple bitmap dump is not likely to obtain satisfactory results all the time. This is one area where Scribus really shines and the collaboration has allowed end users the ability to reliably export high quality PDF 1.4 with commercial grade reliabilty.
• Most importantly, they are a great bunch of folks who are very attentive to end users and lots of fun to work with.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[chthonicdaemon]

Printing to PS is not all that satisfying when you have 200 SVG graphics that you need to convert to eps to include in your LaTeX document. I have not been successful in finding a svg->eps batch conversion program.

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[elwinc]

Thank you (all repliers) for the pointers to gnome-print and especially for pointing me to scribus. It looks great, and I'm adding it to my toolbox!

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[MenTaLguY]

*palm to forehead*

oh yeah.. ^^;

Open Source Clip Art

[Sinful_Shirts]

There's also a new Open Clip Art Library established to collect and promote SVG clip art for use in any of the open source drawing tools Good idea, but it looks like they still have a lot of work to do.

Free Toys

[The-Dalai-LLama]

I'm all about the "free" as in "speech" idealism, but since I can't read a line of programming it's a little less important to me than "free" as in "beer".

I haven't gotten to play with Sodipodi yet, but I'm glad that there are free alternatives to Illustrator. Now that I'm not in junior high anymore, the coolness of using cracked programs has lost much of its appeal and I'm grateful for the chance to use legitimate apps that, at least pretty well, approximate "the real thing".

The Dalai LLama
... broke-ass-not-wanting-to-pay-seven-hundred-duckets -for-illustrator-mofo...

Re:Free Toys

[Zardus]

Childhood: Oooh! Free toys!

Late elementary school: I'm a big boy and can buy toys with my own allowance instead of fully depending on mommy and daddy.

Middle School: Oooh! Free softwarez!

High School: I can afford to buy a few commercial programs so I no longer need to be like those pirates.

College: Oooh! Free software! Free music! Free movies! Free games! Free beer! Free sex!

Since OS News gets /.'ed all the time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Scalable Vector Graphics and the Open Source Community

Inkscape is a program for viewing, making, and editing two-dimensional vector drawings. This is different from "raster" drawing, as in MS Paint, Photoshop, or The GIMP. In those tools you're essentially just "painting" destructively on a canvas. By "vector" drawing I mean that when you create a shape like a rectangle, it retains its identity. You can easily go back and resize it, change its color, or move it around without disturbing the rest of the drawing. Vector drawing is what you'd be doing in Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, Dia, Visio or even PowerPoint.

There have been a number of popular Open Source vector graphics tools such as tgif, idraw, Sketch, and xfig, but one of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format -- SVG. SVG, an acronym for "Scalable Vector Graphics", is a W3C standard that is gaining support worldwide, in proprietary and public software alike.

The Open Source community is now adopting the SVG format for everything from desktop icons and company logos to web page animation and artistic Illustration. Inkscape (by way of Lauris Kaplinski's popular Sodipodi project) is derived from Gill, one of the first Open Source SVG editors, and so follows a long history of serving the SVG needs of the community.

In the five years since Raph Levien began work on Gill, a huge range of features and capabilities had been added to the codebase. Node editing, alpha blended gradients, object alignment, text handling, localization and more had augmented the basic underlying drawing capabilities to make the tool potentially useful for real drawing work. However, there was one glaring omission for which we and scores of users had been seeking a remedy...
The Contribution of Boolean Operations to Inkscape

I read the email again just to be sure.

"I've been sent a new patch that implements boolean operations... The license is public domain. It's been uploaded to the patch tracker." -- Bulia, November 2003

This was very cool. Boolean operations are a way of taking two shapes and combining them together in various ways to create a single resultant shape. Users of Adobe Illustrator might recognize them in the "Pathfinder". The four basic operations are Union, Difference, Intersection, and Exclusion. It's an absolute requirement for creating any artistically sophisticated drawing, and it's lack had held the tool back.

Once before, someone had contributed a patch to add boolean operations, but that patch relied on a polygon clipping library provided under an incompatible license. There's little more frustrating than having a solution in hand, only to be hamstrung by legal problems. Even though it was an important feature for us, we regretfully postponed development of it into the distant future on our roadmap and proceeded with other work.

Here in my inbox, unsolicited and totally unexpected, was the answer. We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised; it passed on all counts. Fred's boolean patch had arrived right as we were releasing Inkscape 0.36, so as soon as that release was out the door we merged his patch and started working with it.

Following our policy to "Patch first, ask questions later", we integrated the new feature as soon as practical, without wasting time arguing about it on a mailing list. We figure that the best way to evaluate an idea is to code it up and see how it works in practice. A working feature now is better than a perfect implementation that still isn't done. Along with that, maintaining a low barrier to entry for new developers is vital; we don't want anyone to give up on contributing out of fear their contributions won't be accepted.

Inkscape, Page 2/2
One of the first areas of focus was to add menu items and keyboard shortcuts for the commands it provides. Mentalguy had just recentl

I need it

[InternationalCow]

Apart from showing nicely how the "hive" model of software development can and *will* work (although I am not sure whether patch first, ask later is always a good idea), this development has me hoping that people who, like our group, use Illustrator and Photoshop for scientific illustrations, can finally escape vendor lock-in. For relatively simple illustrations (we always keep illustrations as simple as possible for reasons of clarity), Adobe's solutions are really overpriced. Licensing issues have us worried anyway since it is almost impossible to keep track of all the licenses we're supposed to have... Anyways: we're on a budget and are always looking to open source alternatives. We have our students on OpenOffice and lots of touching up is already done with the Gimp. If we can now do other illustrations with an open source tool that is equivalent to Illustrator, well... And we would be happy to contribute to the effort financially as long as it is cheaper than buying Adobe :)

Why SVG?

[nagora]

What is the problem with EPS? No one in OS seems to be putting any great efforts into supporting one of the most important file formats in the world. There is not a single decent EPS editing system for Linux (decent: imports and exports EPS and can cope with TrueType fonts). But SVG, there's plenty. Why? What's the advantage? Does nobody use Linux for designing logos for use in the real world?

TWW

Re:Why SVG?

[KrispyKringle]

In all fairness, you can export EPS as a number of other formats (such as PostScript). It has, as far as I know, no inherent value as a file format. SVG is widely compatible with browsers and software, however.

Re:Why SVG?

[noewun]

It has, as far as I know, no inherent value as a file format.

Um, dude, it is the standard file format for vector graphics in the print publishing world. Saying it has no inherent value is like saying computers don't need solder.

Re:Why SVG?

[farnerup]

SVG is a lot easier to support than EPS.

The EPS format is just a set of comments around a PostScript program. Now, postscript is a complete programming language. People have implemented things like ray tracers and web servers in postscript, and there is nothing to prevent you from putting things as complex as that in your EPS files

Even if your program had a complete postscript interpreter, how would it translate an arbitrary program to something that makes sense in a gui?

Re:Why SVG?

[stratjakt]

milestone 9 mentions EPS and PDF. Version 0.43 I believe.

Re:Why SVG?

[dmoore]

EPS is an output file format. It is not meant to be an intermediate file to be edited. For example, SVG keeps track of what objects are "grouped" and their relationship to each other. EPS just contains the lines, curves, characters, etc to be displayed.

The correct solution to your dilemma is to write good import and export filters for EPS into the SVG editor. Naturally, there are times when you would want to edit an EPS file, but such cases should be avoided. You almost always want to go back to the original program which created the EPS and edit in its native format. When this is impossible, you want the ability to convert EPS to SVG. That can currently be done with pstoedit, but unfortunately the SVG plugin is not free software.

Re:Why SVG?

[RAMMS EIN]

``What is the problem with EPS?''

EPS is lots and lots more complex than SVG. SVG is XML, which was purposefully designed to be simple, whereas EPS is a full blown programming language.

Re:Why SVG?

[nagora]

Even if your program had a complete postscript interpreter, how would it translate an arbitrary program to something that makes sense in a gui?

But I work across the hall from a Mac user who does this all day every day and has done for at least 15 years. How does a Mac doe it?

TWW

Re:Why SVG?

[jovlinger]

eps is friggin' turing complete.

it is a fantastic final format, ready for printing, but it makes a crap file format, in that it has no declarative value: it is an executable.

This means that in order to be useful you need to have semantically meaningful coments in the file.

Re:Why SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Illustator uses a very limited and mitilated version of Postscript as its .ai format. And because most other PS and EPS producing programs use a very limited subset of the language in very similar ways. In other words, it's pure luck. PS was good as a printer language, but the decision of Adobe to base a vector editor format on it was a disaster. The amount of stupid hacks they had to do in their AI files to keep them editable over the years boggles the mind. Note that NONE of their competitors ever used EPS or PS as native format, only for export/import. The limitations of PS held AI back for a long time; it was one of the LAST vector editors around to implement transparency, for example.

That's why PDF was a success - it was basically a codification of a very limited and therefore tractable PS subset. Everyone has moved to PDF, even the AI format in last versions is PDF based. Which is much better than PS, but still rather stupid. Note my words: Adobe itself will be moving AI towards using SVG as a native format, simply because their old format is such a huge mess by now.

Re:Why SVG?

[KrispyKringle]

If I'm not mistaken, EPS is just built on PostScript (hence the acronym, Encapsulated PostScript). Anywhere EPS is accepted, PS is likely to be as well, although I don't believe you could say the reverse (though I doubt anyone would have a problem with either). Point being that EPS, as far as I know, provides little benefit over PostScript in terms of compatibility or features (you can export Illustrator to PS, if I'm not mistaken--but I may be). Meanwhile, there aren't any common browser plugins for browser-based viewing of EPS the way there is with SVG, so it's not really great for web-use.

I can't come up with a great reason to abandon EPS--I don't know a lot about it or it's limitations--but SVG does at least do a couple of things EPS does not.

Re:Why SVG?

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

EPS is PostScript. There are maybe a half dozen things that you can't do in EPS or must do that you otherwise have freedom to ignore in PS.

The problem with EPS as a file format is that it is too powerful. It is a language far more than it is a standard file format. To make a EPS importer you need a major chunk of code to parse all the possible EPS files that one could generate. You need a PostScript parser - a complete one. You just don't need the PS renderer. You need all the memory management and font handling.

I am not an SVG expert (I'm not sure I qualify as a PS expert either, but I work with it for a living), but I think it is much simpler in theory to implement one than a PS interpreter. Especially since the base language is XML and the parser for that already exists. I also believe that animations (automation?) in SVG is based on Javascript (and/or others?) so that already exists too.

Last, SVG has a nice structure. (E)PS is pretty damn free-form. Writiing tools to work with SVG without actually having to parse all of it is much easier than doing the same with EPS.

Re:Why SVG?

[WWWWolf]

As I see it, SVG is "The Future." As for "real world", I believe SVG will be in the "real world" pretty quickly, and it's already gaining a lot of foothold, which can only be a good thing.

It works fine as an editable format that can be worked on in many different applications without losing any data in between (EPS is just an intermediate format that loses editing-related information) - there's common stuff that specifies the image data and additional, program-specific stuff can be added with additional XML namespaces (sodipodi and inkscape both do this).

Also, you can put any kind of XML metadata inside SVG, for example, Dublin Core elements, Creative Commons tags, you name it. You can do that much hot "semantic web" stuff in it, I suppose.

SVG also interfaces nicely with web browsers, right through the DOM. (At least in theory. Let's wait until Mozilla finally gets SVG out of the alpha, and Microsoft to catch up within a decade or two =) Think Flash, but without a stone wall between the plugin and the browser.

Also, SVG supports graphically stuff that's pretty hard to find in PS world. I still have slight problems getting alpha blending to work beautifully in EPS files (at least in OSS apps!), but I've not had any problems with that in SVG.

SVG is technically easy to work with. It's just XML with some plain-text sublanguages (like path declarations). It is not a Turing-complete language like PS, but it's rather purely just data, so it's probably far easier to work with. Yeah, in this respect, it's perhaps not as "powerful" as PS, but I've mostly seen PS's "power" being used only in gimmicky situations. Algorithms may get you to the stars, but Data gets you pretty damn far in real world.

Re:Why SVG?

[nagora]

Yeah, in this respect, it's perhaps not as "powerful" as PS, but I've mostly seen PS's "power" being used only in gimmicky situations

I'd have to say at this point that I've yet to see a non-gimmicky use of XML - probably the most pointless invention in computing in 60 years. But that's a different flame...

TWW

Autopackage!

[arvindn]

The latest contribution that I think will have widespread and exciting ramification's was brought to Inkscape quite out of the blue by Mike Hearn. Mike's project, called AutoPackage, seeks to solve the perennial problem of easily installing software on Linux. It wrappers the underlying RPM, Debian, etc. systems with a friendly GUI front end, similar to what's used on Windows. Mike's hoping Inkscape can help be a good proof of concept for his work, and we're looking forward to gaining an extremely easy installation mechanism for non-technical users.

Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.

Re:Autopackage!

[IamTheRealMike]

There are already nightly builds of Inkscape CVS available for autopackage 0.5.1 here. To those who haven't used autopackage before, download and run that file.

Note: there are known issues with certain (rare) setups which have a non standard umask and X security settings. If you are on a stock Red Hat/Fedora install all should go smoothly (let us know if it does not). If you have tweaked your umask or have X security too restrictive (programs run as root must be able to connect) things will break.

If you want to test inkscape quickly and you are on x86 Linux, this is an easy way to do it. Just be careful. autopackage is in beta. If it breaks you get to keep the pieces.

Re:Autopackage!

[rowanxmas]

Hot Damn!!!

AutoPackage is the coolest thing ever! I am frankly amazed that Linux install could be this easy. I am now off to package my own work with it if I can...

Re:Autopackage!

[IamTheRealMike]

Slow down cowboy, we're not really ready for that yet. In a few weeks 0.6 would be released and your packages will break.

Check in with #autopackage on freenode, or autopackage-dev before you do that so we can give tips and so you can keep track of what's going on.

Request Features here.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like inkscape, but you find there is a feature you need is missing, request it here.

The Inkscape developers have implemtneted loads of cool features already, and you can help it make it even beter.

You can even contribute patches if your feeling bold.

Also, here is the Roadmap on their wiki.

Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[noewun]

Now I have to sit though more crap about an "Illustrator killer". I have no love lost for Adobe, but this kind of marketing hype ends up making those who sprout it look stupid.

There is a reason Adobe owns the market for graphics applications; despite their best efforts (cf. application bloat and corporate arrogance). Photoshop and Illustrator are still the best combo out there for bitmapped/vector graphics.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

other than the guy who submitted the article to /. where does it claim to be a illustrator killer? All it claims is to be a vectorial art program, which it is.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[noewun]

You, Anonymous sir, are correct.

My bad.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[Omnifarious]

So, by your rationale, no project should be even mentioned anywhere until it's better than any non-Open Source project that overlaps its space?

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[noewun]

My statement was specific to calling Inkscape an "Illustrator killer."

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[aardvarkjoe]

No, by his logic, no project should be called a " Killer" until it comes to within a reasonable distance of the Evil Non-Free Software. You can talk about Dillo all you want -- it's a pretty cool program -- but referring to it as an IE-killer would be pretty stupid. Same with calling the windows calculator a Mathematica-killer.

To be fair, I don't know how close Inkscape is to Illustrator; though from the comments here it sounds like there's quite a way to go.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[damiam]

I believe the words "Illustrator killer" came after the phrase "where development is headed". No one said anything about Inkscape currently being an Illustrator killer.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[noewun]

I still think it's a silly thing to say. Because of the nature of the print and pre-press world, there are an enormous number of things which must be considered to produce an industry leading graphics app - it's more than having cool filters or being able to draw . Calling an app an "Illustrator killer" is, to me, leading with your chin.

"Illustrator challenger" maybe.

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[MenTaLguY]

Agreed.

I'm one of the founding developers. We might joke about being an Illustrator killer occasionally, but really that's not what we're about. That wouldn't be a healthy focus, and the _best_ we could hope for in that case would be becoming a (marginally) better Illustrator clone.

That wouldn't be so great, IMO. Illustrator does a lot of things, but it doesn't always do them well, and the UI is painful at times.

Realistically, we are going to do some things well which Illustrator does poorly, and we will do some things poorly which Illustrator does well.

We just wanna make a good and useful tool and be the best we can be dammit. All this "foo-killer" stuff is silliness. ^^;

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

VECTOR ART not "vectorial art"

- grammar neo-Nazi

Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . .

[Omnifarious]

I didn't notice that anybody had called it an 'Illustrator killer'. But, I think calling any software a category killer is a little silly. It has built in monopolistic thinking that won't do anybody any good in the long run.

It's in the CVS version

[Anonymous Coward]

Grab the CVS version and import your files. Don't forget to report any bugs encountered in the import.

web-friendly XML format ?

[Anonymous Coward]

he's kidding right ? SVG died when us web developers realised to draw a few animated cubes took 100k of source code, at least flash is small filesize due to its binary format , why should i care its not human readable jpg isn't , neither is swf

SVG is on the same shelf as VRML in my toolbox

Re:web-friendly XML format ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging a format on the base of its file size is stupid, to put it mildly. You can always save your files as SVGZ (gzipped SVG) and get nice small binary files. Inkscape supports reading and writing SVGZ transparently.

Its called The GIMP 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

The GIMP UI is "bad" folks have remained awfully silent after this version came out. The CVS version is kicking ass too.

Re:Its called The GIMP 2.0

[youknowmewell]

Personally, I find the GIMP 2 UI to be easy for my uses. However, going from PS to GIMP is like going from using a calculator for dividing, to using long division. Things like an inner shadow which are simple to implement in PS take many more steps to implement in GIMP. Because it's so easy to make an inner shadow with PS it makes it easier to experiment, and it saves me time. However, I want to use a Free alternative to PS for things like web design and GIMP is that.

Boolean operations

[SIGALRM]

Boolean operations are features found on fairly high-end graphics editors, at least the ones I've used. To my knowledge, even PSP8 doesn't support boolean. Looks like a nice product; hopefully the sum of it's cool features will make it worth using in place of, or in addition to, the GIMP.

I'd be more interested in...

[Ratchet]

... a Corel Draw killer. Sure Adobe makes some nice tuff, but in my opinion Draw is better than Illustrator in just about every aspect.

Re:I'd be more interested in...

[Anonymous Coward]

And Visio is better than both.

And you know it's true. Don't be a hater.

Re:I'd be more interested in...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be more interested in ... a CorelDraw killer.

Well, seeing as how well they've handled all their other lines of business, I'd say that the most successful CorelDraw killer will be Corel itself.

In the beginning, it owned graphics on Windows boxes. At the time, Mac Illustrator was at version 6 and Windows was stuck at 4.1 - which was incredibly dated. It wasn't until they made it to version 7 of Illustrator that there was platform parity. During those years CorelDraw could have really cleaned up. But their sprawl and focus on every other business venture and failure to make earlier versions of Draw play nice with service bureaus left CorelDraw to be considered a hobby tool. It's never escaped this perception.

Illustrator isn't killing CorelDraw ... Corel is.

Mod parent down, is Abode fanboy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the post rewritten, in a way that would get -1, troll instantly.

Oy - first OpenOffice.org Writer

Now I have to sit though more crap about an "Excel killer". I have no love lost for Microsoft, but this kind of marketing hype ends up making those who sprout it look stupid.

There is a reason Microsoft owns the market for office applications; despite their best efforts (cf. application bloat and corporate arrogance). Word and Excel are still the best combo out there for word processing/spreadsheets.

Stop Moderating up the Abode trolls, you will only spawn more.

Re:What makes this a killer? -----AMEN

[FudgePackinJesus]

If Inkscape or Sodipodi causes true believers like Everaldo and Jimmac find no reason to hop on their Macs then there you have it.

In my background

[The-Bus]

I have found Macromedia (previously Aldus) Freehand extremely usable and with a generally less klutzy interface. The only problem I have is exporting text to Photoshop, as Photoshop refuses to recognize any fonts (and this is on the same machine!). Converting the text to paths fixes the problem*.

My main concern is that because Adobe has the very profitable Illustrator, they are not making the changes to Photoshp that they need to. All vector-based software converts the vectors into pixels (since it needs to be viewed on the screen) - and for most printing applications, vectors don't exist, it's just made into an image and still limited by the printer's resolution. Why aren't vector graphics integrated into Photoshop? Photoshop 6 and beyond have started to integrate them a bit more but it is extremely primitive and about 10,000 times easier to simply do it in Freehand, cut, and paste as pixels or paths in Photoshop. An image is an image is an image. Photoshop should be able to do vectors. It takes a lot of work for code but being able to apply filters to vectors would be simply amazing. Think of the way Photoshop applies filters to text currently: The text can change and the filter is simply re-applied. (The text is basically vectors anyway). Freehand does this to some extent but "blurs" by creating more vectors (and it's therefore not as natural as Photoshop's blur, nor as realistic).

However, the main thing that I see as a problem here is that the /. community thinks that GIMP is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. For a lot of people yes, but these are the people that use about 5% of Photoshop's feature set (and don't need to spend $799 on an image editing program). For anyone doing anything remotely professional GIMP is completely inadequate, and developers should be sure to get both the feedback of "Regular Users" as well as professionals using that software. Gimp looks like what sendmail would turn out to be after consulting with a grandma who knows email because she uses Outlook Express. Bottom line: Don't use GIMP as a measure, it's not that good!**

* Which is what you should be doing anyway, especially if dealing with third parties that may not have your font.
** From the replies it seems a lot of people just need "simple" solutions for image and vector editing. For basic tasks, GIMP is fine (changing sizes, cropping). I have no qualms there.

Re:In my background

[t_allardyce]

Illustrator can do everything you say (ie apply effects to vectors) and of course is much more compatable with photoshop to the point that you can open a photoshop image in illustrator with layers and all. GIMP is catching up but yes its still inadequate for allot of things. I don't see that it would be that hard for Adobe to literally just merge Photoshop and Illustrator into one, but i'd imagine they had thought of that and found it counter-productive. Photoshop as the name suggests is mainly for 'photos' but the two work very well together aslong as you do the right thing in each.

Inkscape is getting there quite fast (havnt checked what colour models it supports?) but GIMP to me is really missing adjustment layers and non-destructive adjustable effects, otherwise i'd use it all the way!

Re:does he know any other program?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Nowhere can you edit an object on the canvas and see all 100 of its clones update. The closest you can get is Flash "symbols" but they are not editable side-by-side with their instances, so it's not quite the same thing.

CVS Version already "in production" use

[Anonymous Coward]

my companys designer already uses it for various stuff he does (websites, posters, ads, icons, etc) and he frickin' loves it.

to be honest, i've never been into vector graphics myself (i'm a photoshop user myself) but this thing really seems to make things easy - there are so many assisting tools which help you to achieve thing you want.

and it uses svg. i'm drooling baby.

What about Sodipodi?

[suso]

"There have been a number of popular Open Source vector graphics tools such as tgif, idraw, Sketch, and xfig, but one of Inkscape's distinguishing features"

Ahem! What about Sodipodi? I think it's very worthy of recognition. I guess their developers haven't done enough to promote it.

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[darksmurf]

A good number of the developers on Inkscape used to work on Sodipodi but left for various reasons. Read the mail lists for the details.

The Inkscape project is (as I understand it) flying past Sodipodi in features partly because it has a more liberal feature inclusion process.

Bryce deserves a good bit of credit for that.

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worthy of recognition, hence the comment in the article that credits it as being part of inkscapes history (Inkscape forked from SP)

"Inkscape (by way of Lauris Kaplinski's popular Sodipodi project) is derived from Gill, one of the first Open Source SVG editors, and so follows a long history of serving the SVG needs of the community."

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[gr8_phk]

I believe Inkscape is a descendant of Sodipodi. At least it was started by a bunch of Sodipodi developers. You'd think they'd have forked the code when they went their own way rather than starting over.

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[suso]

Ahh, ok. I wasn't aware of that. Cool actually that all that work that went into sodipodi isn't just being ignored.

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did fork the code (if advogato was not down I would go to search some reference on this), but it's not very well advertised on their site...

Re:What about Sodipodi?

[GenCuster]

they did fork the code ... Inkscape is a sodipodi fork.

The Open Source Office is here, and getting better

[SteamyMobile]

This is yet another component of the Open Source Office. Right now, OpenOffice.org and Evolution together provide a great deal of functionality, and programs like this one are going to fill in. When OpenOffice 2.0 comes out, with good KDE integration, everyone else will be trying to catch up with Linux on this. Here at SteamyMobile, we already use all Open Source office products.

-----------
Mobile porn faq

Not another Photoshop troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop complaining and report some bugs already. If 5% of the photoshop trolls on this site reported bugs and stopped spreading FUD Adobe would of gone out of business.

That Troll link you posted applies to the mac version only, which a poor port. The native linux version is a lot better.

So stop trolling and start bug reporting and Helping

Re:Not another Photoshop troll.

[The-Bus]

It's not so much bugs as the interface. It's not made anything at all like any application before it. Considering that most graphic artists come from a Mac ("hold your hand" background*) the GIMP interface is counter-intuitive. It's not so much bugs as it is an interface and features issue. And I can report that, but I bet it will offend the developers.

* This is not a flame on Apple. I like them. I'd like it more if I could afford them!

+1 informative? Moderators on crack *again*.

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from the "repost" above:

Hair is frizzled and days unwashed, asscrack just barely half wiped in a frenzy to return to her monitor, having taken a large shit earlier.

Yeah, that's "informative."

Fucking idiot moderators.

As a user, I'm disturbed

[mveloso]

"We figure that the best way to evaluate an idea is to code it up and see how it works in practice. A working feature now is better than a perfect implementation that still isn't done."

What they're saying is "we'd rather introduce features that don't quite work and fix them later instead of making sure the feature works and make sense before we add it to the app."

This is why open source gives some people the heebie-jeebies. With Photoshop, Illustrator, etc the vendor waits until a feature works, then releases it. It may not have all the bells & whistles that people want, and it does get refined as time goes on, but they do wait until its perfect (in its current state) before releasing it."

The user is not a guinea pig that you can f*ck around with.

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[schemanista]

The user is not a guinea pig that you can f*ck around with.

The user isn't going to be using 0.xx releases. These are for early adopters, developers and testers, who are only to happy to f*ck around with themselves. If the user wants this program, then the user can wait for a milestone or until the code hits the magical 1.0 release.

Do you remember Illustrator 1.0? I do. Most users would not find it very useful at all.

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't fucking around with users as guinea pigs. They are giving users an opportunity to provide valuable feedback on upcoming features such that the users get what they *really* want rather than some ivory tower design that turns out to be useless in the real world.

This requires multiple development releases as opposed to the single big releases that Adobe or other proprietary SW companies put out. Hopefully, the end product is of comparible quality (the price certainly rocks ;-).

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[Anonymous Coward]

With Photoshop, Illustrator, etc the vendor waits until a feature works, then releases it.

Ummmm.....what?!? I take it you have never tried to actually use Adobe products in a production environment. I daily work around 3 "features" in Indesign and Photoshop that just don't work (crash the program consistently on mac and pc). At least the gimp developers will mail me back and tell me that they won't add a feature for the foreseeable future. Adobe just claims it works and then never delivers.

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[Anonymous Coward]

With Photoshop, Illustrator, etc the vendor waits until a feature works, then releases it. It may not have all the bells & whistles that people want, and it does get refined as time goes on, but they do wait until its perfect (in its current state) before releasing it.

You and I must be living in different universes, then. Propeprietary vendors are at least as bad feature whores as Open Sourcerors... those bells'n whistles are THE very first thing sales people get added, well before things that would make things more stable or easier to use.

And yes, I'm software engineer and have worked for a few shrink-wrap software vendors, including Adobe's biggest competitor.

This is not to say developers shouldn't try to think carefully about what to add, how and when, just to point out commercial companies are not much better. It's just that THEIR process is a black box, and outsiders generally do not see how screwed up it is, whereas process (or lack thereof), goals, philosophies and practices of Open Source projects are usually transparent and can be freely debated.

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[MenTaLguY]

Bear in mind that the main Inkscape developers are also heavy users. We have to eat our own dogfood, so that usually keeps us from doing anything too stupid (for very long).

That aside, if you don't like the way the project is run you can always fork or find a different one. That's how we started Inkscape after all, and I'm not going to be hypocritical about it. ^_-

Re:As a user, I'm disturbed

[Anonymous Coward]

if the inkscape developers keep things modular and configurable and continue to welcome change and new ideas and be generally wonderful friendly people a fork wont ever be necessary.
Instead the delicate balance needed to allow a branch could be achieved without the burden of too many features in the core or the acrimony of a fork.

How bout we shut up about killing?

[Rhesus Piece]

Although the poster seemed to think so,
I really don't believe the Inkscape folks
are trying to make an Illustrator Killer anymore
than Linus is trying to make a Windows Killer.

Like most OSS developers, they are just trying
to make good software that is free and does what
they want it to do.
When people start calling them ___ Killers,
then we get all the crap about "But Gimp can't
compete with Photoshop!" and suddenly
they get compared and deemed poor because they are
not as good as the best product in the world
in that particular field. Of course not,
they're younger, less complete, impeded by
patents, and worked on for free.
Judge absolute worth, not relative worth,
and if a free product isn't good enough
for your purposes, buy the one that is.
Let's just avoid characterizing things as
Davids to the commercial Goliaths, k?

Inkscape or Sodipodi?

[krygny]

I recently, for the first time, went looking for an SVG editor and found both Inkscape and Sodipodi. They seemed so similar and even seemed to share some of the same code (IANA programmer) and I couldn't figure out which project has the most critical mass. 'twould seem, Inkscape.

Re:Inkscape or Sodipodi?

[Rhesus Piece]

Inkscape is a Sodipodi fork.
IIRC, they wanted it to be C++ and had a different idea of how the development process should go, so it was split.
In retrospect, judging by features and popularity, it looks like the Inkscape folks chose well.

Reasons to fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think the main motivations were to change the code to C++, to rely on third-party libraries if these were actively maintained and (I think) were available on different platforms, to get an interface more HIG-compliant and to make emphasis on a small core with extension capabilities.

But you could read it better in this pages of Inkscape's wiki.

Sad but true

[grahamsz]

Corel could clean up if they went cross-platform with the draw suite. They were too focused on making their office run in java.

I'd drop $150 on a corel draw for linux in a heartbeat.

Missing important features

[PastaAnta]

Last time I tried Inkscape I was surprised that no support for Layers could be found. IMHO Layers is an essential feature in any decent modern graphic editor. And what is the deal with the "Spiral" tool as a main drawing tool? Does anybody ever have a need for a spiral drawing tool? In my eyes it seem like the featureset is more determined by the inherent capabilites of the SVG format rather than the needs of the users.

But OK, OK... it may be because my need is for technical drawing tool more than an artistic drawing tool. You may also read the opinions in the The Grumpy Editor's diagram editor followup

Re:Missing important features

[grumbel]

I can second that, the spiral tool seems to be rather useless and especially rather limited. Nothing wrong with having one, but it shouldn't be limited to spirals. A lot of other drawing programms have stuff like that too, but they don't only provide spirals, but also pseudo 3d blocks, arrows and other stuff.

About the missing layers support, I don't consider it much needed in a vector graphic application, yes it should be there and is a nice additional feature, but with grouping one can already get pretty similar things done.

However one very important feature currently missing is blending (ie. morphing one polygon shape into another), without it its almost impossible to get good looking shadows and highlights into vector graphics. Sketch already had blending for quite a while.

Re:Missing important features

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I've not used InkScape extensively (yet), so I might be wrong here, but I found myself wanting a "layer palette" type thing just so I could see all the objects, the grouping, perhaps give them meaningful names and to be able to raise/lower objects and/or groups of objects.

This *might* be related to the fact that I've been using vectors in PSP7 for a number of years which does support this.

Does anyone know how this kind of thing works in Illustrator? (albeit the Inkscape folks prolly shouldn't duplicate Illustrator in anyway!!).

Re:Missing important features

[jiawen]

I don't know about Illustrator, but CorelDraw has better layer support than PSP, in my experience. Renaming groups, moving them up or down, editing them from the list, etc. all work better in Draw than in PSP.

I haven't used Illustrator, but I've used CorelDraw a lot. It's a very nice standard to aspire to.

Re:Missing important features

[Anonymous Coward]

it is hard for the developers to be aware of all the vector graphics programs out there, especially as some of them run only Linux (i think there was an old version of CorelDraw for linux though).

it would be very helpful if you could file detailed bug reports and suggestions and provide screenshots of Corel Draw.

Re:Missing important features

[Anonymous Coward]

The XML editor tool provides a basic tree view which might help although I find that it provides a bit too much detail some of the time but other times it is much clunkier than a straight source viewer with syntax coloring

Layer support is planned though, which should make things easier.

Re:Cool: Canvas handles vector and raster

[DaRat]

Canvas from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba) handles Vector and Raster/bitmaps within the same application beautifully. Canvas is primarily a technical drawing/illustration package with image/raster graphics and page layout support. In terms of functionality, Canvas is sort of a technical/precise version of Illustrator with 60-80% of Photoshop functionality and light InDesign/Pagemaker layout capabilities added in.

Canvas is a commercial application, but it's a must have tool for me as an interface designer.

DaRat

Stupid Inkscape Trick

[tntguy]

You can tinker with a (Conway's) "Life"-type thing by repeatedly simplifying paths -- just select your path and hold down Control-L (on Windows at least).

/bored at work

Illustrator killer

[tit4tat]

If he wanted to write an Illustrator killer, shouldn't he have called it "Killustrator"? Oh, wait. That name's taken.

(Sorry, couldn't stop myself.)

Re:Layers

[ishmalius]

Yes, layers are nice, and I like them myself. But how do you store that information in the SVG format?

Maybe storing each layer as an invisible node that the user can't alter, might do it.

There are a lot of features that the developers want to provide (multiple pages, scripting, whiteboard), but just haven't brought into fruition yet.

Be patient. Or better yet, contribute. There is room for all at the table.

ummm, Save as has EPS as an option

[Anonymous Coward]

The Save as dialog has EPS as an option in the dropdown list of file formats you can select.
Or you can import the SVG into Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) which has excellent compatability with inkscape produced SVG, and which will output to EPS or PDF.

Request Features here-Scripting and Plugins

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Inkscape have a plugin, and scripting capability?

Re:Request Features here-Scripting and Plugins

[gnugnugnu]

not yet, the article says Javascript is in the works and there are some Perl scripts available but I dont think they are directly hooked into Inkscape

Re:Request Features here-Scripting and Plugins

[gouldtj]

Does Inkscape have a plugin, and scripting capability?

Well, I'm working on it. Currently we can use external scripts that look to the user like they are fully integrated into the program. The scripts basically import/export SVG and then get pulled into Inkscape.

This is only the beginning.

The extensions architecture is designed to allow alot more flexibility than that - but it isn't very mature yet. The Javascript support is getting better, pretty soon plug-ins and scripting will be supported there. We hope to support many other languages also.

That was a long way to say - not quite yet, but it is on the short list.

Re:In my background: FH, PS, AI, etc...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I agree. FreeHand has many advantages over Illustrator - a big one is MULTIPLE PAGES (duh!). However, it's largely moot, as it seems to me that Macromedia has pretty much scuttled FreeHand development.

This leads me to the same quesiton: why doesn't Adobe roll Illustrator into Photoshop? It wouldn't be *that* hard.

And that leads me to the same conclusion: there's no point in cannibalising one app for another. It's why Illustrator never had multiple pages - it would have hurt the Pagemaker (now InDesign) product slot.

What will always prevent GIMP and Inkscape and other apps from really making inroads on Adobe, is the same reason FH never beat Adobe, even though for many years it was clearly the better product. That reason is EDUCATION. People use what they learn on. Hundreds of (so-called) Art Schools are churning out thousands of "Graphic Design Professionals". what software do they know and trust?

Adobe.

Why? because it's what they learned on.

Why? Because Adobe has pursued an extremely aggressive loss leader campaign in getting their creative apps locked into art schools. In fact, the evil Evil EVIL "Art Institute International" (a multinational for profit conglomerate that has dozens of "Art" schools all over the world) is Adobe's single largest sales client, with many thousands of seat licenses. Schools like AI spew these kids out by the squillions onto the art job market and what do they know? Adobe.

So when they do get a job, they use Adobe products, and these products are ordered by colleagues and bosses who also *learned on Adobe.* It becomes self perpetuating, much the same way Microsoft has dominated the Office productivity market.

Because of this, Inkscape might be useful by the time it's 1.x, but it's NEVER going to be an Illustrator killer.

Illustrator's UI shares many similarities with Photoshop and InDesign and After Effects and Premiere (IIRC- it's called the Adobe Workflow or Standard UI or something like that) and this UI design has been refined for many years, and successfully prosecuted (for instance, they won a case against Macromedia Freehand for having a tabbed Inspector several years ago) both legally and in the market.

I don't see GIMP getting a decent UI anytime in the near future, or even distant future for that matter - the thing is a mess- and I don't see Inkscape integrating their workflow into the GIMP's inconsistent trainwreck of a UI. So, right there out of the gate, AI and PS have a critical advantage.

Oddly, I don't see this as much of a problem for GIMP or Inkscape - they will remain bit players in the greater scheme of things (IIRC, the really hard and important stuff, like CMYK management, is so over patented, I don't see how either GIMP or Inkscape will be able to work around it), where Adobe's strategy of a unified UI is goingto be very destructive is to the likes of Apple Computer.

How? Like so:
Adobe is no longer developing Premiere for MacOS. their DVD software has never been developed for Mac OS. Their Audio software is Windows only. The only thing in their video development line that is still on MacOS is After Effects. So, now to use the Adobe Video suite, you have to be on Windows. People use what they learn, and they will be learning on Windows, as schools like AII et al cowtow to their software source, Adobe. so they get the Adobe Video suite, and start churning out jillions of junior league video editors / DVD developers / etc. they all use Adobe, and they all use Windows.

It's a sad sad world.

RS

I'm pretty disappointed.

[Noose For A Neck]

I was hoping for an uglier, more business-hostile name for it to complement the Gimp, like "Tard" or something. Just picture giving advice to your co-worker at a graphics design firm:

"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."

Re:I'm pretty disappointed.

[WWWWolf]

"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."

...and on their free time, people use Tile Molester for retrogame development. Graphics programs have to be aggggrrrrrressive. =)

Cool-Scribus

[Anonymous Coward]

A nice thing is that Scribus can accept SVG images.

Now the only thing either it, or OO needs to work on is the generation of E-forms (Adobe 5.08 can accept fill-in-the-blank PDF's).

Correction about "brainchild"

[Bryce]

Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading

Quick correction - I was one of several people that founded the Inkscape project, but I definitely can't claim credit for the application itself. As mentioned in the article, it derives from Gill and Sodipodi, so if it is anyone's "brainchild" it would be the developers of those projects. That said, Inkscape as it is today is the amalgam of a number of people's ideas and hard work, so it is most definitely a team effort. :-)

Not that easy-Cultural migration.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Offtopic rant: Why is every software company deemed NOT successfull if it doesn't kill its competitor? You don't have to be Microsoft to be successful..."

We didn't have this problem until Linux took off. Now it's "killer" this, and "killer" that. Not only has MS given us such things as BSOD, and FUD, but the "killer" attitude, that it's users propogate.

Inkscape = Sodipodi fork

[MenTaLguY]

We are a fork of the Sodipodi project; this is highlighted further on in the article.

Re:Layers

[MenTaLguY]

Basically, the plan is groups = layers. I implemented a first cut at that a long time ago (set inkscape:groupmode="layer" on a group [hopefully I'm remembering the attribtue name here..]), but nobody's gotten around to doing UI for it yet.

I expect it'll get done fairly soon since even I'm beginning to feel the pain of not having it implemented all the way yet. ^_-

color models

[MenTaLguY]

Color models are going to be tricky ... SVG is currently limited to only sRGB by CSS2/3. We're trying to find clean ways to extend SVG/CSS without breaking backwards compatability (and of course we're tracking future W3C proposals along these lines).

Re:color models

[justsomebody]

Good question is if W3C specs will be enough for vector drawing app.

It even raises a good question.

Goal of Inkscape? Vector drawing or W3C compliant. Even Sodipodi had a lot of messages on this theme.

Best solution would be two SVG formats, W3C and another that implements features made impossible by SVG specs.

Re:color models

[MenTaLguY]

W3C compliant, I think. We are trying to modularize the code more, though, to provide a basis for other (possibly non-SVG-based) tools (implemented by us or someone else). It might eventually mean an internal or external fork, but that's okay. People gotta do what they need.

The other thing is that once we've reached a decent level of SVG-compliance we should be in a pretty good shape to get involved with the development of the SVG spec and help nudge it in appropriate directions.

So we'll see how it works out.

Inkscape is awesome!

[ecloud]

I tried it the other day, and my first impression is man, I won't be missing Corel Draw anymore! It even has some features Corel doesn't. I liked Sodipodi somewhat before, but this is much better.

Now somebody needs to fork Dia and make it work as well as Visio.

Re:Inkscape is awesome!

[Aaton]

Dia and Xfig have some features I would love to see in Inkscape. I actually prefer Xfig over Dia for drawing layouts and wiring plans (checkout the library for some 2u machines ). Dia is better for doing UML objects and such. Then there is DiaCanvas which seems more like Inkscape.

The item I like about Xfig is I can create template objects quickly and easily and add them to it library of objects. The last time I tried to make an object for Dia I just gave up.

Now if Inkscape could export to the .xfig format and Xfig to the proper .svg format that would be great! Using both tools would save me sometime.

from an Inkscape founder...

[MenTaLguY]

Thank you.

Education in Never, neverland.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I agree. FreeHand has many advantages over Illustrator - a big one is MULTIPLE PAGES (duh!). However, it's largely moot, as it seems to me that Macromedia has pretty much scuttled FreeHand development."

Proprietary software can be dropped at any time.

"This leads me to the same quesiton: why doesn't Adobe roll Illustrator into Photoshop? It wouldn't be *that* hard.

And that leads me to the same conclusion: there's no point in cannibalising one app for another. It's why Illustrator never had multiple pages - it would have hurt the Pagemaker (now InDesign) product slot."

Proprietary software will not have features that "cannibalize" any of their other products, even if easy to impliment.

"What will always prevent GIMP and Inkscape and other apps from really making inroads on Adobe, is the same reason FH never beat Adobe, even though for many years it was clearly the better product. That reason is EDUCATION. People use what they learn on. Hundreds of (so-called) Art Schools are churning out thousands of "Graphic Design Professionals". what software do they know and trust? "

And yet our intrepid poster uses "never" in spite of the things already mentioned. Education by definition is a changeable commodity. Remember when people use to know COBOL and PASCAL? Also Adobe products aren't the ONLY thing that art schools use (but it's easy to get that impression from marketing 'that's their job')

Re:The Open Source Office is here, and getting bet

[jiawen]

More importantly to this topic, OO Draw is really a pretty good vector graphics program. It has layers, boolean operations and pretty good gradient controls. Its node controls are a little clunky, but having layers makes it better than Sodipodi, in my book.

Re:Cool: Canvas handles vector and raster

[Anonymous Coward]

it will very likely be easier to add raster support to Inkscape than it will be to add all kinds of vector support to GIMP.

The inkscape team plan on adding layers, when they do it should be easy to export to MNG instead of PNG.

If you like Canvas be sure to checkout Inkscape and make some suggestions or comment on which features you think would be most important for them to add to get you to switch from Canvas.
The Inkscape developers know about Canvas, some of them are big fans, others are fans of Illustrator, and XaraX.

Illustrator killer?

[Dr Rick]

Yeah, just like GIMP is a Photoshop killer :) These projects tend to focus on the cool technology and the fact that it is open source rather than the actual needs of the actual user community (and that is not other open source developers).

Inkscape doesn't need to kill, its an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

the GIMP developers have no interest in "cloning" Photoshop, so much so that they are blinded and have failed to take a good look at Photoshop and learn from it.

Forking the GIMP is too expensive in time and resources, if the GIMP developers were more flexible features could be added without putting out the old school.

They finally added the menubar, eventually other features (or plugins) will be added with any luck.

GIMP 2.0 is a small improvement now the GIMP is at least usable but they still have a long way to go if they want to have a truly powerful GUI with really good workflow that will good enough to quite the critics.

> What's Photoshop's market share on Linux?

Does all of Disney running Photoshop on Crossover count?

> no ... marketshare because [it] is free

OpenOffice is free, market share has nothing to do with price, only the size of the userbase

Re:The Open Source Office is here, and getting bet

[Anonymous Coward]

> OO Draw is really a pretty good vector graphics program.

unfortunately its SVG export is limited and its SVG export is non existant but hopefully Inkscape and OODraw will become more compatible in the future and fill different needs.

Troll? WTF?

[uberchicken]

The poster makes a reasonable point. I fail to
see why his post is modded "troll".

If you disagree with what he's saying, then
reply.

Re:Troll? WTF?

[Dahan]

Hook, Line, and Sinker.

Re:Troll? WTF?

[uberchicken]

Explain yourself, O Wise One. I was trolled by moderators?

You don't get it...

[Millennium]

Judging a format on the base of its file size is stupid, to put it mildly. You can always save your files as SVGZ (gzipped SVG) and get nice small binary files. Inkscape supports reading and writing SVGZ transparently.

But see, that's an informed decision. People like the person you're replying to have this delusion that in order for anything to work well it must be totally self-contained, i.e. reinventing the wheel at every opportunity.

Re:Inkscape doesn't need to kill, its an alternati

[Xabraxas]

OpenOffice is free, market share has nothing to do with price, only the size of the userbase

Actually market share has a lot to do with price and nothing to do with user base. User base and market share have little to do with each other. Debian has no market share in the OS market but they do have a user base. A market implies commerce and price, which is not necessary for a distro like Debian, in order to have a user base.

Accessibility and system color settings

[jonadab]

One of the things that keeps me from being able to use sodipodi for more than
a very short amount of time at once is that it violates a fundamental rule of
accessibility and forces a certain background color on you. (The Linux version
of OO.o used to do this (though the Windows version never did), but it's been
fixed now.) Alas, Inkscape seems to have this same problem, forcing the
entire image area to be blinding white even if it's transparent as far as
SVG is concerned. This makes it basically unusable for me, as my eyes are
far too sensitive to light to have a blinding white background on a large area
of the screen extended periods. I go snowblind.

Can someone tell me where there's a setting in sodipodi or Inkscape (or any
other freely available vector graphics editor) to get it to honor my system
background color setting (any of them -- Qt, either version of GTK, or even
Win32, as I could do vector graphics on the WinMe box in a pinch if it would
solve this issue for me)? I'd like to do more with vector graphics, but as
it stands I'm going to have to mostly stick with doing overly-large bitmapped
graphics in Gimp and scaling them down to whatever size I need.

Re:Accessibility and system color settings

[Anonymous Coward]

Just set page background color to whatever you want in Document options in Inkscape (Ctrl+Shift+D).

Embedding fonts

[pkphilip]

Does Inkscape allow embedding of fonts in SVG?

not meant as a jibe at all :)

[timothy]

"Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair."

It's not meant as a jibe at all, so if it was easy to interpret that way, I apologize. My fault!

The reason I quoted that word is because it's often misapplied to projects (like this one) which have underlying organization not obvious to a casual observer, and which accept contributions from outsiders / amateurs / unseen helpers / what-have-yous. Specifically, the patch which inspired the linked article :)

In no way did I mean to be pejorative or negative, just the opposite. (Inkscape is a project I follow, because Inkscape, along with Scribus, I consider one of the most important things in getting free software in common use at schools.)

Cheers,

timothy

Re:Layers

[PastaAnta]

Maybe your are right, that is is difficult to store layer information in the SVG format. But you are only confirming my statement that "the featureset is more determined by the inherent capabilites of the SVG format rather than the needs of the users".

Layers are (IMHO) a major feature, and if SVG do not support this, some workaround should be found.

Well, I am impatient. So are many users! OK, no free lunch, and I would really like to contribute to many an Open Source project if only I didn't have this house and garden needing a hand - and in addition I have just become a father! Damn I know it, software is just so insignificant ;-)