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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.
Is it just me, or did they morph a woman holding a ferret into a classic "wardrobe malfunction" by using some cool filters?
Geez, I need to get a life.
-Scott
My other sig is a Glock
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
For Linux, Windows or OS X.
;)
Uh.... I prefer Linux just like most of us, but I like my GF better.
With a witty sense of humour like that, i'm suprised you even have a GF
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Bash has a better interface than The Gimp.
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
Check out the screenshots and grab your package for Linux, Windows, or OSX."
I just don't go around grabbing other guy's packages. Let us leave that to your *.so and S.O.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Right, ok. I understand that reference. But 0.42 != 42. Either the developers are missing 41.58 of something or they're saying that the program is 1/100th of what it should be.
I'm with you. The /. introduction seems to have been written by an ex-politician's speachwriter. It used lots of colorful words but, in the end, I still had no clue what the program did or who it was for. Sounds exciting though. Heck, I'll vote for 'em!!!
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
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.
Oops.
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"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I can't help but note a strange karma whoring smell. I don't mean to encourage these types of posts (which, while related, only provide superficial information an a subject that almost everyone knows about), I do wish to point out one thing with which I cannot come to terms.
Vector graphics is not an alternative to raster graphics. Raster graphics and vector graphics have two mutually exclusive applications, even though both offer visual sensory input as an end result.
Using only the Adobe product names for the two different digital graphic forms, it is not difficult to recognize this. Photoshop's specialty is manipulating raster images, and the main application would be photos. For example, PS is great for doing things like white balancing and color filtering, i.e. post processing of captured images. Illustrator, on the other hand, is great for creating scaleable and animated visual medium (cartoon-like illustrations like clipart, or flash movies).
The tradeoff is realism. BTW, one subset of vector graphics is in fact 3D modeling, and this relation becomes especially apparent with NURBS. 3D models aren't very realistic plainly rendered, even with simple materials. They require textures, which are bitmaps (rasters), to create the illusion of continuity.
Finally, on a tangent, it should be noted that vector graphics are mathematically intensive to render, whereas raster graphics tend to be memory intensive to render.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Well, you see, Inkscape 0.42 is the ultimate answer, your problem is that you have not yet worked out what the question is. Once you know what the question is then I'm sure everythign will be apparent.
Hopefully the Inkscape team are working on finding the ultimate question as we speak.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Apple was colossally dissapointed today to learn that Perl, 4th Ed. is a fun and informative way to introduce open source. A new IBook and Apple mini are expected to get a handle on Vista while also hitting the shuttle during launch. With the USA getting ready to pass its science crown to China, the Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta has gotten underway, leaving Microsoft and Google fighting for the skies. With the annual cost of the Microsoft monopoly predicted to top $10b this year, thousands and thousands of hours of PVR TV are being used to make new google homepage features the state of solid state storage. Where is the British EFF? Just around the corner, according to UEFI, formed to replace the BIOS after Microsoft began checking for piracy. With China releasing its 2nd generation MIPS chip just days after Sony agreed to stop payola, Voltron, Nerdcore, and the shuttle Discovery all will be coming to a theater near you.
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.
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"
But seriously, when 85%+ of your audience uses a particular browser, doesn't it make sense to design pages with it in mind?
Not really. First off, I think people are going to judge Inkscape's value not by its website but by how good the application itself is.
Second, our "audience" is not just any random user, but rather those good users that are likely to also contribute to Inkscape in some way - testing, bug reports, PR, patches -- or even just helping us improve the website. People who are unable or unwilling to install a proper Open Source web browser are probably also not the type of good people that would be contributing Inkscape. Thus, IE users are probably not our target audience anyway.
Third, building a huge userbase is not really among Inkscape's principle goals. We want to be a great application that helps make Open Source successful, and we want to promote Open Standards and do what we can to help other Open Source projects. Thus, while we'd like to look good in all browsers, it's most important that we look good in the Open Source browsers, even if (especially if!) they represent only 15% of the marketshare.
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.
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.)
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.
> In any case, that's really Bad News for the future of the app.
I've seen this very attitude ever since the start of Inkscape. It's not too frequent, but it does happen with surprising regularity. "You dare to ignore my beloved Illustrator/Freehand/whatever, you're DOOMED." I try to give them our reasons and show them _our_ way of doing it, but they just won't listen.
I think by now, Inkscape's explosive growth and the tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers.
You simply _don't get it_. (Luckily you are in a minority, but the fact that you don't get it still saddens me.) We're not in the business of creating an Illustrator clone. We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome. If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.
All I can say for certain is that it isn't a weasel, because a weasel is weasely wecognised, whereas a stoat is stoatally different ;)
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.