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
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
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
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.
> I see now that postscript and .eps support has been enhanced, hopefully the transparency/gradient stuff won't bork the output too much now.
Gradients in PS/EPS export work now (with some limitations, see Release Notes). But transparency does not work simply because PS has no such thing, and "emulating" it is an enormous hassle.
> all the output is always antialiased... any ideas?
That's one of the problems with our renderer currently. It only has the AA mode. Hopefully this will be fixed when Inkscape is ported to use Cairo.
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.