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Inkscape 0.42: The Ultimate Answer

Posted by timothy on from the holy-maloney-that's-getting-slick dept.

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.

10 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. Replacing? by coop0030 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Obviously I didn't do too much research, but what does this program replace?

    The Gimp?
    Photoshop?
    Fireworks?

    Does anyone use this program? How does it perform compared to these other programs that do similar thiings? This is assuming that the programs listed are the ones being replaced.

    1. Re:Replacing? by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Does anyone use this program? How does it perform compared to these other programs that do similar thiings?
      Well, I showed it to my girlfriend (who is an art student) and she likes it a lot. She certainly likes it much better than the Gimp, since the interface is so much better. I'm not sure if she thinks it's better than Illustrator, but it's probably at least close.
      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    2. Re:Replacing? by aussersterne · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Call me a loser, but I love the interfaces of both bash and The GIMP.

      I absolutely adore filename completion, arrow-navigatable history, the heavily customizable prompts, command-line editing, and other aspects of the bash interface.

      I also absolutely adore the "per-image context menu" interface of The GIMP that makes it easy to have many image windows open and tiled at the same time in focus-follows-mouse mode without causing problems related to relating menus to images as would apply in the "one menu for the entire app, all images" interface in Photoshop.

      --
      STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    3. Re:Replacing? by gehel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There is even a web server in postscript !

  2. Oh sweet mistress by azdruid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As an avid user of Inkscape, I have followed the Inkscape development process closely throughout all the betas released leading up to this version. This is probably the OSS application I use the most, aside from Linux and Firefox of course. Inkscape's original base code was from the Sodipodi vector editor, which had an interface resembling that of the GIMP. The primary goal of the Inkscape project was to take that codebase and write a GTK interface conforming to the GNOME standards, as well as adding many new features. Even though the early releases were notoriously unstable, the feel of 0.42 is significantly improved over past builds. Even if you are remotely interested in drawing or vector graphics, I recommend you take a look at Inkscape. It still doesn't have any of the fancy features in Fireworks, which I do hope will someday be added, but right now its probably the best FOSS vector editor. And it uses SVG too, a nice opensource XML standard. Downloads are available for Linux and Windows.

  3. If even I can use it effectively... by HorsePunchKid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's sad to me that people do not seem to know what Inkscape is yet. It's a wonderful tool. Others have already made the Inkscape:Illustrator :: Gimp:Photoshop analogy. I would point out, though, that despite my preference of Photoshop over Gimp, Inkscape is far, far easier to use than Illustrator and yet still covers all of the basic vector graphics bases.

    Even with my very minimal skill, I've managed to create some decent graphics. Here are a couple of traces, a decent Domo-kun, some calligraphy, and all of the non-photo graphics on this page (hypercube projections) I did in Inkscape. I love it, and it's only on version 0.42!

    --
    Steven N. Severinghaus
  4. Re:OS X version not Aquafied. by Rylz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This brings up something I've been wondering. If GTK had an Aqua version, Inkscape as well as a LOT of useful programs could run natively in Aqua. Hey, it's been ported to Windows, porting to Aqua shouldn't be too much harder... But then again I have no experience with developing for Aqua so I guess I can't really talk.

    --
    Sometimes you've gotta roll the hard six.
  5. Re:CAD by Vo0k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    People, keep engineering stuff away from Inkscape! We need a decent vector gfx ARTISTIC program! XFig is for tech vector drawings, add this kind of stuff there!

    --
    Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
  6. Re:CAD by Bryce · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Something I have wondered about as well. Can Inkscape (maybe in the future) include support for say printed circuit board (PCB) design or more importantly, electronics schematics or digital logic diagrams (with the gates etc)

    We do intend to improve some of the technical drawing capabilities, such as line auto-routing, over the next couple releases.

    Beyond that, well... we're quite open to patches. (I personally would love to see more technical/engineering drawing enhancements added to Inkscape.)

  7. Inkscape rocks by Ice+Station+Zebra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used it to de-uglify a bmp logo for a client. It looked like it had been run through Microsoft Paint with lots of jagged lines and such. Find a program called autotrace on sourceforge that converted the bitmap to svg. Edited the xml file to remove the objects that I didn't want (based on colour). Then loaded it into inkscape and cleaned it up and recolored it. Client was impressed. His graphics person had been unable to do it without recreating the whole thing. It only took me 1 hour.