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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.
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.
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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?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
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
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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...)
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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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. :-)
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. ^_-
DNA just wants to be free...
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
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. ;-)
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. ^^;
DNA just wants to be free...
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.