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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
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.
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!!
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).
Ceci n'est pas un post
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!
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.
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
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 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.
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.
What's Photoshop's market share on Linux? I've not seen any figures.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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?
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
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.
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...
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...
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.