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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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Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
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?
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. :-)
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.
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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. ;-)