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.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.