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

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"???

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.