Slashdot Mirror
Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer
bulia byak writes "After several months of frantic work by the evergrowing developer community, the aptly numbered Inkscape 0.42 is out. The amount of new features in this version is astounding. Quoting from the (gigantic!) Release Notes, "while some of the new features simply fill long-standing functionality gaps, others are truly revolutionary". Check out the screenshots and grab your package for Linux, Windows, or OSX." The screenshots are pretty mind-blowing; this isn't a 1.0 release, but I think you'll agree it's worth checking out.
By some weird coincidence, I downloaded this two hours ago. It hasn't crashed on my yet during this time, so I can say that it is sure seems more stable than the 0.41 release.
None of the above. It's vector graphics - Illustrator, FreeHand. It's about as good for vector graphics as Gimpy is for raster, although I much prefer Inkscape's interface over The Gimp's.
"Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG)."
Don't you hate it when some application gets into "news" and you are supposed to already know what it does?
Just including this blurb from the homepage would have been enough:
Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG).
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. 42 is the 'answer to everything'.
You might want to disregard this comment. It only makes me want to wince. You were better off not knowing, probably.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
Q: Is Inkscape ready for regular users to use?
Yes, while it's far from being a replacement for commercialware, the codebase provides for a large portion of basic vector editing capabilities.
do.what.promptcmds
For anyone who is thinking of grabbing the OS X version, please note that like OpenOffice, InkScape is using X11 to render its display.
I'm a bit disappointed, as this does make it somewhat less nice to use on OS X, however it isn't v1.0 yet, so I'll remain hopefully optimistic.
Yaz.
Oops.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Come On. If you get a crash, REPORT IT! Right here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=604306&group_ id=93438&func=browse
And please note that we never have more than a few confirmed reproducible crash bugs in the tracker. (Currently just 2 I believe, and not fully reproducible at that.) We simply don't tolerate them. We, you know, fix them. Quickly and mercilessly. (Other types of bugs get fixed too, so don't worry).
There are two kinds of graphics - raster and vector. Raster is what you see when you use photoshop/gimp/paint, where you see a 2-dimensional grid of pixels, and each pixel is shaded a certain color. In vector graphics, everything on the page is a shape with certain properties (size, rotation, transparenecy, 'etc), and those vectors are overlayed on top of each other. As someone who creates a lot of diagrams (I'm doing a PhD in engineering and I contribute to Wikipedia a lot), I can tell you that doing it is a lot quicker using vector graphics programs than raster graphics programs.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If you're used to photoshop's interface then just look up GimpShop which is just a clone of photoshop's interface using Gimp. I happen to be used to Gimp's interface more now so I'll stick to how it is right now.
Actually... yes. it's XML. Looks vaguely familiar if you've poked at postscript (which is also human-writeable - and a complete programming language for a printer-type device. Heard tale of a raytracer implemented in postscript... having poked at the language, I quite believe it, too.) - I think I might just use SVG now :)
But much more convenient to run perl or vim than bash... bash is for calling other programs to do your work for you :)
Please submit your crash report:
http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php
with as much details as possible, ideally with a backtrace.
> keyset that Adobe and Macromedia apps use?
Because there are many other nice apps that we borrow from. One is Xara X. Another is (yeah) Gimp and other Gnome apps. We can't be a monkey of a single app, and sometimes we can't be a monkey of anyone because we do some original stuff too.
> holding space should enable the panning tool
We don't have a panning tool because we have lots of other ways to scroll. The best of them are middle-drag and ctrl+arrows. Try them, you may like them better when you get used to them.
> holding alt (not shift) should make the zoom tool zoom out rather than in.
That one makese sense - alt+click is currently unused in zoom tool, so i think I'll enable it to zoom out _in addition_ to shift+click.
> Also, double-clicking on the zoom tool should revert to "standard" zoom--not open the preferences panel.
Just press '1' to get 100% zoom. And it would be horribly inconsistent to make doubleclick work different on zoom tool than on other tools.
To summarize, we welcome any feedback, and very often we honor it, but also quite often people just want us to imitate exactly their favorite app without realizing that (1) there are other vector apps which are just as worthy of imitation, (2) Inkscape's way of doing it may be actually better, or (3) we can't do that because that would break consistency of Inkscape behavior in unpleasant ways.
If all the linux distros get rid of GIMP in the next release in favor of Inkscape, this thing is gonna be a hit
To give a more concrete example of what the other folks are saying:
If you're designing graphics for a print brocure or (as in my case recently) wedding invitation, and you're not trying to do photographs, a vector graphics program is just the thing: You can edit your work easily, and the final result can be rendered at whatever resolution it's going to be printed at. Many effects which are a PITA if possible at all via raster software (such as shaped text) are standard features in good vector editors.
If you're retouching a photo, you need a raster editor. Period. So really, you can't replace one with the other. They both have their place, and both are necessary.
Inkscape is utterly fantastic, so is SVG.
.svg file in Inkscape, right-click, go look at "object properties").
.svg natively, it sure as hell depended on bitmap formats for exporting to alternative formats properly... I see now that postscript and .eps support has been enhanced, hopefully the transparency/gradient stuff won't bork the output too much now.
.SVG files to a rasterised image format such as .PNG without the lines being anti-aliased - I've even tried the "crisp lines" properties in the .xml file, and Imagemagick's "convert" program with the "-antialias" switch, but nothing seems to work... all the output is always antialiased... any ideas?
SVG is an XML format. You can describe arbitrary shapes using basic polylines, circles, squares, etc. and animate it too - all using XML. It's a W3C standard. You can even use CSS for your vector graphics!
I've been working on a very complex piece of software that does some work vectorising bitmaps. It has a non-standard (but basic) intermediate file format that I needed to visualise in a hurry.
By using Perl and installing the SVG lib from CPAN, I was able to write a program in just 3 hours that parsed this app's crazy intermediate line-vector files and turn it into industry standard SVG files that can be viewed with a web browser, or with Inkscape.
Because every element (every line, piece of text, circle, etc.) has an object ID, and being XML you can mash your own custom properties onto things, I found Inkscape very useful for not only visualising these files but exploring other non-visual things I was able to mangle into the line segments (open
SVG and Inkscape have been invaluable for exploring how my refactoring of this application has affected the output...
There was just one problem: For a program that uses
Also, I still cannot find a way to export
the animal is an ermine, the painting is the "ritratto di dama con ermellino" ("portrait of a lady with an ermine") by Leonardo da Vinci. it's part of the princess Czartoryska collection in Kraków.
BTW, I don't mean that in a condescending way; it's just a consequence of specialization and it's human nature to assume everyone has some passing interest in the stuff that fascinates or occupies us. I'm sure the proteomics folks here could rattle off half a dozen names of very cool molecular modeling apps, but as someone who spends his days writing Java web applications, not one of those names would ring any kind of bell for me. In return I expect most of the proteomics crowd has never heard of Tapestry or Wicket or the JSP Standard Template Library.
Now if only we could get the editors to realize they ought to include descriptions of the stuff they're posting about. It would not have been so much burden, I think, to add the words "vector illustration tool" right before the name of the program, especially since the editor edited the story anyway to add a comment to the end.
since it assumes I want the interface to be in incomplete/poorly translated Japanese language, and doesn't seem to give me any way to change it to English.
Sounds like you want this page. First scroll down to the bottom and read "Locale Testing" to see how to set the language. Then scroll up and learn the process of making improvements to an Open Source application's translations. Remember that translations only improve when someone (such as yourself) contributes a few hours to help improve them. ;-)
Just so there are no misunderstandings here: Though there is an OpenOffice version for the Mac that is in fact only accessable via X11, everybody uses NeoOffice/J instead because it is aquafied to the point where it runs normally. Oh, and it is GPL.
And now back to your scheduled program.