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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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This is really good... But wouldn't it be better if there was a Gimp plug-in to add vectorial drawing support?
Mind Booster Noori
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.
Evolution or ID?
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.
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?
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.
Evolution or ID?
It's a great discussion on how, when you've got the right players and attitude, Open Source can really work.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!!
I use inkscape all the time as a jump start for any svg based graphics i build.
.css or use a style block for styles and i have a 99.999% solution.
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
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"???
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!
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.
Click for offensive t-sh
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...
My sig could be your sig!
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 :)
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
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.
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.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
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.
Sigs cause cancer.
... a Corel Draw killer. Sure Adobe makes some nice tuff, but in my opinion Draw is better than Illustrator in just about every aspect.
If Inkscape or Sodipodi causes true believers like Everaldo and Jimmac find no reason to hop on their Macs then there you have it.
"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.
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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.
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?
Illustrator from version 10 on can save in SVG format and Inkscape reads them in perfectly!
-- Now more the mirth, scrape here in the face...
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.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
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.
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.
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
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.
DaRatThe 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.
I saw that shot more than a few times back when Starbuck was a man. ~ lucabrasi999
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.)
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.
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!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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.
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.
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!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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 are a fork of the Sodipodi project; this is highlighted further on in the article.
DNA just wants to be free...
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...
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).
DNA just wants to be free...
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. ^_-
DNA just wants to be free...
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.
Thank you.
DNA just wants to be free...
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.
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).
Dr. Rick
- "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" (Nigel Tufnel)
- Zort! (Pinky)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Time makes more converts than reason
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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Does Inkscape allow embedding of fonts in SVG?
"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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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