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

Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[JoeShmoe950]

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.

Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program

[ZaMoose]

I believe politics (both development and global) played a roll in this. The primary developer on SodiPodi was being a bit authoritarian and capricious in the ways he incorporated changes, etc. and some people didn't care for that.

Cool

[Mind Booster Noori]

This is really good... But wouldn't it be better if there was a Gimp plug-in to add vectorial drawing support?

Re:Cool

[BenjyD]

Better vector support in GIMP would be nice, but I think that the Vector vs Raster is too radical a difference to incorporate nicely in one package with a good UI. I think the workflow for most web artists is draw in vector (Illustrator etc) and then finish the image in raster (Photoshop etc).
A vector drawing package on a par with commercial offerings would be a huge addition to the free software world, and UI is very important in that area. Sodipodi is pretty good, IIRC.

Re:Cool

[Deusy]

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.

Trivial?

[th1ckasabr1ck]

"...one of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format"

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.

Re:Trivial?

[Bishop923]

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...)

Re:This bothers me

[_Sprocket_]

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.

Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:

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...

Re:Why SVG?

[farnerup]

SVG is a lot easier to support than EPS.

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?

Re:Why SVG?

[dmoore]

EPS is an output file format. It is not meant to be an intermediate file to be edited. For example, SVG keeps track of what objects are "grouped" and their relationship to each other. EPS just contains the lines, curves, characters, etc to be displayed.

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.

How bout we shut up about killing?

[Rhesus Piece]

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?

Correction about "brainchild"

[Bryce]

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. :-)

Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export

[MenTaLguY]

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.

Re:This bothers me

[Bryce]

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.

Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:

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...

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. ;-)