Inkscape 0.44 - Faster, Bigger, Better

bbyakk writes "After 6 months of development, Inkscape 0.44 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features: Layers dialog, docked color palette, clipping and masking, native PDF export with transparency, configurable keyboard (including Xara emulation), Outline mode for complex drawings, innovative 'node sculpting' and lots more. Check out the full release notes, enjoy the screenshots, or download your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X."

Comments

Wow

[barry_the_bogan]

From www.inkscape.org
Latest stable version: 0.43 Download Now!

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

So look at the URL for the tarball and get creative: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/

No Packages yet

[vonFinkelstien]

They are waiting to "officially" announce the release when the packages are ready. You can download the tarball now, however.

i dunno

[cimmer]

Banner on the site says "Last stable version: 0.43". I'm a little nervous about putting my mission critical doodling on a new release.

Re:i dunno

[msloan]

This was a very early slashdot, the site was still being updated, in fact. Must have been a dev or hardcore user that reported it.

Re:i dunno

[treeves]

I've used it since 0.41 and have been using the development pre-0.44 releases, no problem, WinXP on a ThinkPad. Even 0.43 is pretty cool. 0.44 adds some more functionality. Try it. You'll like it. It looks like the guy who reported it is Bulia Byak, one of the main developers. It's one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net.

PDF Support

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat. How good is the PDF support with this latest version? Can we edit PDF documents reliably now? Export is fine, but import, edit, and export is what I am looking for.

Re:PDF Support

[MenTaLguY]

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat.

You heard wrong. :)

We are going to continue to improve our PDF support, but it's not a central part of our mission. Also, whatever PDF support we have is going to be largely limited to that subset of PDF functionality which is representable in SVG.

Re:PDF Support

[Ray Radlein]

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat.

Actually, it is the open source replacement for Duke Nukem Forever. It's an understandable mistake.

Re:PDF Support

[macurmudgeon]

You're wrong. It's actually a pirated version of a standards complient Internet Explorer that got stolen from the Microsoft squash vault.

Re:PDF Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat?

Re:PDF Support

[MenTaLguY]

I've never used Acrobat, so I wouldn't know what to suggest. Depending on your needs, e.g. pdftk may fit the bill. Generally it's better to look at the features you need and then search for a tool based on that, rather than looking for a 1:1 replacement for a particular application.

Re:PDF Support

[kimvette]

Just FYI, Adobe's creative suite can work with SVGs and it creates PDFs just fine.

Having to export to PNG and then using Gimp or another tool to save a PDF is a pain because it does not retain the individual elements and increases the file size (obviously).

Re:PDF Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Scribus?

Re:PDF Support

[aichpvee]

LaTeX

Firefox Users

[timeOday]

Based on the screenshots, I thought the Inkscape font rendering looked really bad. Turns out, it's only because their screenshots are quite large and Firefox squishes them down to fit on the screen. Firefox ought to use some more sophisticated downsampling algorithm instead of simply discarding rows and columns of pixels, but there you go. If you move your cursor over the pictures and get a magnifying glass, click it to see the real quality of the Inkscape images.

Re:Firefox Users

[sankyuu]

I find native SVG rendering on firefox interesting, for instance this graphic of the Uluru. I still find it cool that you can click on the picture to view its source.

But since SVG needs the Adobe SVG plugin on IE, i usually draw my clipart in Inkscape or Sodipodi (i forgot which has better Japanese support) then export it to PNG.

Re:Firefox Users

[grammar fascist]

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I might just code this up. It's been bugging me for years. With 3 Ghz machines, there's really no excuse.

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

Click on the image and it will display in full scale in Firefox.

Re:Firefox Users

[Taimoor]

Ah, but that would use up extra CPU time and RAM, and we all know how resource friendly firefox tries to be...

--Nick

(Ahhh... Capitan! We're takin on -1 Trolls. Abandon Ship!)

Re:Firefox Users

[Mekabyte]

Firefox 3 will have resampling since it uses Cairo for rendering. You can try out a nightly build to test that feature.

Re:Firefox Users

[werewolf1031]

Where's the -1 Obvious mod when ya need it?

Or, if the image scaling bothers you, just disable the "Resize large images to fit in the browser window" setting in the Advanced tab in Options.

Re:Firefox Users

[mh101]

Open Preferences, then go to Advanced, and General. Uncheck "Resize large images..." and FF will no longer shrink the images.

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Bilinear interpolation would be even easier and would still be better than what Firefox does now.

Re:Firefox Users

[grammar fascist]

I just got two Funny moderations. Was it this?

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I wasn't joking, this is exactly how you'd do it correctly. Is this gobbeldygook to your average Slashdotter? Have I been hiding in the lab too much? Is this what grad school does to you?

I need to get out more, apparently.

Re:Firefox Users

[njh]

No idea why you got a funny, but gaussian isn't really the best choice. There are standard libraries that can do the right thing anyway (libmagick, libgdkpixbuf, etc) so perhaps you should just grab one of them and use that.

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

So the imminent Firefox 2 is still gonna have crappy zoom? Oh well...

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could use a bilinear filter which is faster, simpler and more common for image resizing. That they went ahead with a nearest-neighbor image resizer when a bilinear resizer would be trivially more code (and if it's vectorized, could be faster than nearest-neighbor too!) shows inexperience. No one who's ever done any kind of multimedia coding would have made the decision that mozilla/firefox did. It makes me wonder what other questionable or unlearned decisions were made in the code.

Re:Firefox Users

[MenTaLguY]

Seconded -- bitmap transformation/scaling has been done to death these days. It'd be insane not to use one of the many existing libraries out there -- and indeed, Firefox 3 will be using cairo for that purpose.

Re:Firefox Users

[Lehk228]

there is more to it then that, you need to make sure all tabs coordinate to ensure resampling doesn't use too much CPU time, otherwise a single badly coded (or maliciously coded) page could slow the system down significantly

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking to the same mods who consider 'Firefox scales full page image views' as 'Insightful'. Yikes!

Re:Firefox Users

[wfberg]

Or you could use a bilinear filter which is faster, simpler and more common for image resizing. That they went ahead with a nearest-neighbor image resizer when a bilinear resizer would be trivially more code (and if it's vectorized, could be faster than nearest-neighbor too!) shows inexperience. No one who's ever done any kind of multimedia coding would have made the decision that mozilla/firefox did. It makes me wonder what other questionable or unlearned decisions were made in the code.

I think they didn't bother with it because they had other priorities. When firefox resizes images, it looks better than IE, which is their priority. (Really, IE makes a horrible mess of resizing images, especially when it does so to match your display's DPI settings..)

Re:Firefox Users

[Juggle]

Isn't that disabled by default too. I didn't even know firefox offered that as I find it to be one of the most annoying things a browser can do and hate having to specifically disable resizing large images in IE where it's the default selection.

I've been using Firefox for years but since I find that "feature" annoying as all heck I've never even looked for a way to turn it on and never missed it.

Complaints about non-default behaviour always kind of make me chuckle. Like when people setup painfull looking color combinations for their desktops...and then complain about how unusable xxx is because of the colors :D

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

lack of experience is a generous way to put it. I wouldn't have done nearest-neighbor resizing when I was 12. this has been bothering me for years too.. it seemed so obvious that I figured they must be strictly following some outdated html spec or something.

Re:Firefox Users

[reclusivemonkey]

Maybe the /. crowd thought you assuming everyone had 3Ghz machines was funny?

Re:Firefox Users

[dytin]

Firefox's default is to resize images. I agree though, it's an annoying "feature" and I wish that it weren't the default, especially since they use such a crappy resize algorigthm.

Re:Firefox Users

[consonant]

Slashdot: Where the truth is funny, and the trolltalk is insightful ;)

Re:Firefox Users

[nacturation]

Speaking of font rendering, take a look at this screenshot -- what happened to the missing word "as"? It reads: "The paragraph contains spans of text styled differently well as forced line breaks..." instead of "... as well as...".

Re:Firefox Users

[the_olo]

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I suggest optimizing Your approach for speed. After all, not everybody has a 3GHz machine (granted, outside the USA).

Have a look at gdk-pixbuf: they have implemented a "Tiles" scaling algorithm that seems ideal for this task: it's faster than bilinear interpolation, and the result is similar to bilinear when reducing the size.

It looks like nearest neighbor only when enlarging, but Firefox will never do that anyway...

Look here . Chosen quote:

GDK_INTERP_TILES
This is an accurate simulation of the PostScript image operator without any interpolation enabled. Each pixel is rendered as a tiny parallelogram of solid color, the edges of which are implemented with antialiasing. It resembles nearest neighbor for enlargement, and bilinear for reduction.

Also, see this Mozilla bug.

Re:Firefox Users

[Watson Ladd]

What does that make your post?

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks fine scaled on the Mac. I suspect that Firefox is using an OS provided image scaling mechanism, and Firefox on Windows is using some crappy Windows image scaling API call, whereas on the Mac it is calling something non-retarded.

Re:Firefox Users

[Nocterro]

It has the pattern of a joke, so mods just assumed they'd missed it. Call it a collective inferiority complex, better than opposite.

Re:Firefox Users

[MenTaLguY]

I think that may be a typo.

Re:Firefox Users

[gardyloo]

Based on the screenshots, I thought the Inkscape font rendering looked really bad. Turns out, it's only because their screenshots are quite large and Firefox squishes them down to fit on the screen.

      Funny, on my version of Firefox (1.5.0.4, on both Windows and Linux), and for many versions heretofore, you just click on the "squished" picture, and it gets blown up to full size, with full resolution.

Re:Firefox Users

[Bryce]

That screenshot was made right after the word wrapping feature was implemented, and at the time it did have a tendancy to "lose" words around tight bends and such. There may still be a few glitches like this one in the word wrapping code, so please keep an eye out and report it (with sample file) where you find it.

Re:Firefox Users

[BusterB]

I've been using the Firefox nightly build today (says it's 3.0a) - it supports smooth downsampling. The current Konqueror does too.

Re:Firefox Users

[AvitarX]

The mods say trolltalk.

Re:Firefox Users

[grammar fascist]

No idea why you got a funny, but gaussian isn't really the best choice. There are standard libraries that can do the right thing anyway (libmagick, libgdkpixbuf, etc) so perhaps you should just grab one of them and use that.

There's a good chance one of those is linked into Firefox already, and does the Gaussian thing. By the way, the Gaussian is the most correct choice, since, provably, it's the only convolution kernel that will result in a downsampled image without any aliasing at all. Other methods (uniform averaging, cubic kernels, etc.) approximate this.

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to read Double Your Dating by David D. I mean REALLY.

Re:Firefox Users

[grammar fascist]

You really need to read Double Your Dating by David D. I mean REALLY.

I'm not sure my wife would like that at all...

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you honestly think slashdot users need to be told this?

Re:Firefox Users

[njh]

I don't think that is right. I think gaussian has the wrong model for the human visual system for scaling and tends to result in images that are too blury. Gaussian might be optimal if you had no other information, but in this case we have a lot of special information about what is expected. For a start, pixels are square (particularly on LCDs), but gaussians are circular. bessel is just as much work as gaussian, but seems to be prefered, e.g.

Re:Firefox Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you need your wife's approval to read a book? You're a bigger wuss than I thought.

Re:Firefox Users

[Tack]

Agreed. Go vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98971 (note

Re:Firefox Users

[m874t232]

I wasn't joking, this is exactly how you'd do it correctly.

Convolving with a Gaussian in order to downsample an image is not a correct way of doing it. It is, however, a reasonable and practical way that will usually give visually good results.

Is this what grad school does to you?

I dunno. If you're in grad school and you do image processing, then you really should know the correct way of downsampling images, but you apparently don't.

Re:Firefox Users

[grammar fascist]

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Let me try that again. Thanks for setting me straight. Your from-the-hip straight-talkin' has totally changed my mind. I especially appreciate that you didn't present an alternative, allowing me to infer that you know everything, and that my puny mind couldn't possibly grasp whatever amazing thing you know that I don't.

What a life-changing event this has been.

Re:Firefox Users

[m874t232]

Well, you're some character: first you claim authority and tell people incorrectly and without any justification that "X is the correct way of doing Y", and when others tell you you're wrong you get testy. Justify your claims, demonstrate that you know at least something about a field, and then--maybe--others will take the time to give you explanations.

Re:Firefox Users

[trentblase]

See, THIS is the one that should have been modded funny!

Re:Firefox Users

[trentblase]

Yeah, except it pisses off people like me who read "you're wrong, no you're wrong, no you're wrong" and nobody ever puts up specifics and then I learn nothing. And I'm so tired from reading your useless dialogue that I don't have the energy to look it up myself! And I missed my nap!

Re:Firefox Users

[trentblase]

It looks like nearest neighbor only when enlarging, but Firefox will never do that anyway...

Now that's a feature I'd like to see in the next version. For when your porn is just too darn small!

Re:Firefox Users

[m874t232]

and nobody ever puts up specifics and then I learn nothing

I think the problem is in how you put things. If you wrote "I believe that X is the right way of doing Y because of Z." instead of "The right way of doing X is Y, period." then (1) you come across as someone who it is worth giving feedback to, and (2) the "Z" part tells people how they can give feedback to you.

Re:Firefox Users

[trentblase]

Are you talking to me? I think you're talking to me. In this situation, I was a lurker. Two other parties were arguing about X and Y and nobody was giving Z, which was my complaint. I didn't need feedback.

Re:Tried it.

[MenTaLguY]

What's the problem with the SVG it produces? Just an issue with verbosity, or what?

Packages only availible on SourceForge

[onlysolution]

Be sure to use the link in the article to get the compiled packages, as the official site has not been updated with them yet.

Re:Packages only availible on SourceForge

[Bryce]

'Tis updated now. We're still waiting on RPM and DEB packages. Gentoo users can get an ebuild here (if our wiki survives slashdot): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingG entoo

Re:Tried it.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the problem with the SVG it produces?

It's not a Microsoft "standard". You've just responded to an astroturfer.

Who's the genius?

[TheModelEskimo]

So...why announce the software when you can't even download the binaries for it yet? Somebody jumped the gun. Now, 85% of the /. comments are going to be "why is it just a source tarball? Open Source sucks!!!" ...sigh...

If you want to try it out and you don't like compiling, wait another day for the official binaries, then give it a whirl - this Inkscape release really is that good. Very fast, excellent illustration tool. Congratulations to the dev team.

Re:Who's the genius?

[Anonymous Coward]

They jumpd the gun, it's realease .44, what do you expect?

Re:Who's the genius?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's available for Windows, which is the only platform I care about :-p

I like plants

[Joebert]

I find the L-System Effects really intresting, I'll likely install the application just to play with thoose.

Re:I like plants

[grammar fascist]

I love Inkscape. I do CS research, and I use it for illustrations in slides and papers. Gradients, highlights, anti-aliasing and such really make diagrams stand out. It's not any more difficult to work with than Word's or OpenOffice's vector drawing tools, either.

Re:I like plants

[ultranova]

I love Inkscape. I do CS research, and I use it for illustrations in slides and papers. Gradients, highlights, anti-aliasing and such really make diagrams stand out. It's not any more difficult to work with than Word's or OpenOffice's vector drawing tools, either.

And of course there's the ultimate power tool: XML editor. Being able to directly hack the image source and see the results immediately is the Real Ultimate Power.

Whoever decided to include that was brilliant, and not as in Paula Bean.

Re:I like plants

[MenTaLguY]

I wrote the current incarnation of the XML editor back when Inkscape was still Sodipodi, but as far as I know the original idea and implementation belongs to Lauris Kaplinski, Sodipodi's maintainer.

Excellent.

[hullabalucination]

I've really enjoyed watching the progress of this app, along with Scribus and the GIMP. Inkscape has become one of the tools I use day in and day out (especially in conjunction with Scribus) and even though I can run older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator on my FC5 box, I've really come to value Inkscape even though it doesn't have the collection of power tools that the Windows vector apps have (in all honesty, some of the "power tools" in those other guys are just imagesetter-chokers and you're better off leaving them be).

Now that Krita supports CMYK tiff files (with color management) the day has pretty much dawned in which I no longer have to jump over to my lone remaining Windows box to do some sort of previously-necessary file format conversion.

Re:Excellent.

[icepick72]

even though I can run older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator on my FC5 box, I've really come to value Inkscape even though it doesn't have the collection of power tools that the Windows vector apps have

I was looking for comparisons, and this serves me well. From somebody in the trenches it's comparable to older versions of CorelDraw and Illustrator. I wish the creators of these packages had more time and resources to push them up front into the running. I would like to see Inkscape burst out and be widely used and competitive to the most popular applications.

Oops

[ReverendRyan]

They should have thought of that before it got posted to slashdot. Oh well.

Re:Oops

[Pieroxy]

They should have thought of that before it got posted to slashdot

You must be new here. Have a nice first day.

Re:Oops

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Yeah, I remember MY first day. That was the good old day. *sigh*

Release Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

It took forever to load the release notes page. The google cache is over here http://google.com/search?q=cache:Zs9PSqgG0yoJ:wiki .inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes+inkscape +release+notes

Re:Tried it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having used Inkscape a little, it seems to introduce a lot of excess code into its files (although it may do it less now). Residue from deleted objects and stuff. It's also difficult to make sure your shapes have good names, although this is a problem with any GUI editor that auto-names objects. If I were producing SVG that I actually wanted to read, I'd hand code it, or at least give the generated code some frequent reviews to make sure it makes sense. Seeing box1, box2, box3, and group1 doesn't tell me much about what I'm looking at. My rule is: if you want readable code, then you have to write it.

Screenshot of .44 in action

[TheModelEskimo]

Been using it for the past few days for a hobby project so I thought I'd post this. It shows the new layers and color palettes.

http://www.friendlyskies.net.nyud.net:8080/inksc reen.png (Mind the space in the address)

Sorry it's in KDE, seeing how Inkscape is GTK...at the moment Skype isn't working in Gnome, so... :(

Re:Screenshot of .44 in action

[Jesus_666]

Sorry it's in KDE, seeing how Inkscape is GTK...at the moment Skype isn't working in Gnome, so... :(

I have already contacted the seGregation ans Kapartheid teams. Their thug squads will arrive soon to make an example for why one should never, ever mix KDE and GTK apps of you.

Re:Screenshot of .44 in action

[aichpvee]

Does anyone know when they're going to fix this little problem of inkscape using gtk? Or at least the dialogs. I don't see why windows users should get native integration and users on Linux can't.

Re:Screenshot of .44 in action

[TheModelEskimo]

Inkscape uses the same GUI code on all systems. It was postulated in #inkscape that you are seeing the GTK-Wimp theme in Windows which could be causing some confusion.

Re:Screenshot of .44 in action

[aichpvee]

Inkscape uses the same GUI code on all systems. It was postulated in #inkscape that you are seeing the GTK-Wimp theme in Windows which could be causing some confusion.

No, I'm seeing the batshit insane gnome file dialogs on Linux. I'm not really sure wtf your post is meant to say but windows users don't have to put up with that crap and neither should I.

Re:Tried it.

[killjoe]

A subject of a cross platform open source SVG designer comes up and you reccomend a product that doesn't produce SVG, is proprietary and only runs on windows as an alternative?

Come on now, give the astro turfing a rest.

oh no

[OriginalCopy]

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

What platform were you using Inkscape on, and (roughly) what were you doing when the crash occurred?

Re:oh no

[mughi]

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now.

Why, here ya go: Reporting Bugs.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Inkscape encountered a user error. You will now be beaten with a Garden Hose.

Re:oh no

[kimvette]

Try the latest CVS and report back.</StandardOSSReplyWithoutReadingActualBugRepo rt>

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT saying the Inkscape folks do this, but the maintainers/developers of some projects do. Confirmed or not, configuration issue or bug, their standard off-the-hip response is "try the latest CVS code" without giving ANY thought as to:

  - the technical ability of the audience
  - is this a configuration issue or is it something actually impacted by code defects
  - is this an RTFM issue that the user can be pointed at a HowTo for?
  - is this a bug with exposed gui for unimplemented features, in which case pointing even advanced users at CVS is a total waste of bandwidth and processor time

Again, I'm not saying the inkscape folks do this (in fact based on the quality of their releases, their HowTos and sample documents, and their web site, I'd assume they're one of the more friendly groups) but some OSS project members DO and it drives people away from even considering "that commie linux shit" earning an undeserved bad name for all of OSS in some people's eyes.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I was asking for a bug report, as opposed to just a crash message.

You know, so it would be possible for Inkscape developers to track down whether or not this is a bug in their codebase.

Re:Tried it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard an Illustrator user complain that their .ai file "wasn't readable enough".

Re:Tried it.

[MenTaLguY]

To be fair, most people never hand-edit AI files. It's more expected for SVG, though.

Inkscape _does_ let you manually reassign ids if you don't like the autogenerated ones, however.

A good program for LaTeX users...

[ghettoimp]

Inkscape 0.43 has a nice export to .eps feature. It's still sort of clunky to use, and the fonts don't always come out quite the same, but I like it a lot better than xfig. Not sure what else I can use for this sort of thing. Looking forward to 0.44.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[dnixon112]

What other formats can it export to? swf? Seems like a great tool that will hopefully solve the 'chicken and egg' problem with SVG.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[CRCulver]

EPS only works with plain LaTeX, which a lot of installations are moving away from. In fact, "latex" on some systems is just a symlink to "pdflatex". You'd do better exporting your images to PDF.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I'd love to see the Export to combined latex/ps export that xfig has. For me this was always the most comfortable thing since it does not cause any problems with dvipdfm. If you want to replace fonts in ps-files with LaTeX fonts and use dvipdfm, you get serious problems.

If someone from inkscape reads this, please please please :-)

mk

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some reason why it would make sense to use plain latex then convert dvi to pdf, instead of using pdflatex?

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[ghettoimp]

Ah. Yeah I usually use both regular latex and pdflatex.

But it's quite easy to create a .pdf from an .eps using "epstopdf".
    epstopdf foo.eps

And in fact you can generate the EPS from the command line too:
    inkscape foo.svg -E foo.eps

So you only need to put the .svg file into your subversion repository, and your makefile can generate everything else.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[bbyakk]

We have export to "Latex with PStricks" which works for many people.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[kimvette]

It's nice except that if you do any alpha blending you lose all alpha information when exporting to eps, pdf, ps, etc.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[ultranova]

You'd do better exporting your images to PDF.

Which doesn't preserve gradients and masks, and, at least under xpdf, looks horrendous due to not being antialiased (which is likely to be xpdf problem and not an Inkscape one). And the situation is only going to get worse as Inkscape gains support for more SVG features, such as filters.

Keep your images as SVG if you can and export to PNG if you must.

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[CRCulver]

...looks horrendous due to not being antialiased (which is likely to be xpdf problem and not an Inkscape one).

Have you examined PDF images file in Evince or xpdf built against the poppler backend? Recent developments may have fixed this problem.

Keep your images as SVG if you can and export to PNG if you must.

Well, pdflatex does take PNG, so that's a solution that works as long as you won't need to print the document at different sizes (where the scaling possibilities of PDF come in handy).

Re:A good program for LaTeX users...

[ultranova]

Have you examined PDF images file in Evince or xpdf built against the poppler backend? Recent developments may have fixed this problem.

Well, I tried the Gnome PDF viewer (dunno if it was Evince or something else), and that antialiased the document nicely, but it still didn't show masks and was absurdly slow compared to Inkscape or Inkview. In fact it's the same speed as Batik, and that's Java-based, for crying out loud.

Batik doesn't seem to like Inkscapes masks either, BTW. I wonder which one is buggy ?

Well, pdflatex does take PNG, so that's a solution that works as long as you won't need to print the document at different sizes (where the scaling possibilities of PDF come in handy).

Of course the best solution would be to externalize the Inkscape / Inkview rendering engine into a library, and let other programs use SVG directly. Scribus, for example, desperately needs this - it's SVG importing function is pathetic, not even handling gradients correctly (or at all, in fact).

I can think of many many many instances where a reasonably fast SVG rendering engine would be very usefull; for example:

• Store the textures in a 3D game as SVG and render them to the approriate size at program launch and resolution change (possibly caching them so that the program launch time is reduced in subsequent launches)
• All icons and icon-like structures of any program (actually, with scripting, the whole interface down to binding it to underlaying code) could be SVG
• In short, all 2D graphics in any program.

Re:Tried it.

[SirSlud]

you wrote complex svg drawings in a simple xml editor? got a screen shot of this masterpiece?

you link to an MS app that can't output to SVG in an article about an application that is for greating SVG graphics?

I've been on slashdot for 8 years, and I never truely believed in astroturfing until your post.

Did anyone see this?!?!

[RickBauls]

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inksca pe-0.44-outlineview.png thats just purely... simply... insane! I wish I had enought time/patience to do something like that.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[xerxesdaphat]

I'd say it was done with a graphics tablet, much like sketching with paper and pen, not placing each individual line with a mouse/keyboard. Still, seriously amazing... I've never been able to grasp drawing, not only can I not lay everything out in my head properly, but my hands shake and I can't draw lines with any consistency hahah. Perhaps why I never like to use the mouse if I can help it. Visual artists are sufficiently advanced that they're indistinguishable from magic to me ^_^.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fairly simple in Inkscape. Just import your favorite picture and do a trace bitmap with multiple scanning, color.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[ral8158]

It isn't really that hard to do.

Well, yeah, it is, but we artists don't want to be known as people with too much free time.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been able to grasp drawing, not only can I not lay everything out in my head properly, but my hands were amputated after that bomb explosion hit my unit in Iraq hahah.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[chris_eineke]

Yeah, and Slashdot isn't exactly helpi... OMG!! Ponies!

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[Lehk228]

try moving your hand using your arms not your wrist, i'm not very good at drawing but every time i see someone who it, they keep their wrist stiff and move their arm for most stuff

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[xerxesdaphat]

I don't think it's my wrist setup; my hands tend to shake all the time. I think it's something to do with playing music for many years... I know for certain the way I hold the bow has left my little finger with a groove in the flesh; I wouldn't be surprised if the tension in my hands is what causes them to shake. Probably like programmer-RSI. I will try out moving my arm though instead, it might be able to improve my unreadable writing as well.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[ScislaC]

Hehehehe... I can assure you that there was no bitmap tracing done whatsoever. My wife will confirm this as she watched me draw most of it from scratch (what she didn't watch was when I was on my lunch breaks at the office). I actually have a ton of progressional snapshots done during the creation, I need to string them together to show the process for people. It changed a LOT from beginning to end, and will change even more once we have SVG filters in place.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[ScislaC]

The only things done with a tablet were the hair and the veins on the leaf. Everything else was done with a mouse. Personally, I can't sketch with a pencil or pen to save my life... and that's why vectors are my medium of choice. You can always go back and non-destructively tweak it. Seriously, if shakiness is your problem, if you have vision and an understanding of curves/aesthetics/vectors (or whatever... you basically need to know what pleases your eye), you too can make some magic. :)

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[TheModelEskimo]

The results of a trace wouldn't look anything like that wireframe. With a trace you get very random/unintentional-looking contours that all add up to the finished product, so you get a more impressionistic effect by looking at the individual shapes. It's obvious he hasn't used the trace tool for this.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[MenTaLguY]

Yes, that's exactly right. A lot of beginners try to draw mostly with their wrist and fingers, which doesn't work well and tires you out fast. Most practiced artists do a lot of their drawing motion from their upper arm/shoulder. Of course, you also have to draw larger for this to work well; beginners also tend to draw too small.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[kimvette]

That is great (as someone else mentioned obviously done with a graphics tablet) but it's an absolutely insane number of vector objects. Impressive that a free app can handle that complex of a document. :)

When they (Inkscape) implement proper PDF and eps support, Adobe should really start to either fear open source, or embrace open source operating systems and port their creative suite to Linux before people start retraining themselves in other applications. Heck, they're starting to lose their competitive edge on PDF composition as kword matures. Inkscape's GUI is quirky but easily learned, and is fantastic for creating illustrations, so the need for Illustrator on Linux (and Windows, etc.) is beginning to fade.

I really ought to start donating to open source products I use. As it is I buy distributions we use at my office, but the Inkscape/kword/gimp/etc. developers don't see a dime of what I pay Novell, Mandriva, etc. for the distributions.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[kimvette]

Inkscape tracing works nowhere near that well, at least not in .43. I haven't tried .44 yet.

Red arrows?

[AxelBoldt]

So is inkscape finally able to produce a red arrow with a red tip? Up to now it was impossible.

Re:Red arrows?

[Anonymous Coward]

a line and a triangle will do the trick, but i guess you mean using a marker on a path

Re:Red arrows?

[TheModelEskimo]

I just tried it. It works fine, and I'm sure it worked in previous versions as well:

1. Create normal arrow
2. Select the curve with the arrow point on it
3. Ctrl+Alt+C or Path --> Stroke to Path
4. Select the arrow tip in node selection mode and color it (both stroke and fill can be colored)
5. Thank you, drive through please.

Re:Red arrows?

[_xeno_]

Nope! The problem here is really the SVG spec, though, in that markers can't exactly inherit useful properties from the line they're being marked on.

My reading of the marker section in the SVG spec says that "fill: inherit" and "stroke: inherit" should be cause the colors to inherit off the parent element.

However: With arrow-heads, the arrow is being filled with a color, and the line is being stroked with a color. Even if Inkscape allowed markers to inherit stroke/fill properties from their parent, the best you could do is have a black arrow-head with a red line around it.

Even so, it's still possible to create red arrows with a red tip, just not easily. First create your normal arrow and set the tip onto it. Note the name of the arrow head you used. Next open up the XML editor. (Yeah - we're heading into tech-land here.) At the very top of the tree there should be a node marked "svg:defs". Open this up, and find the "svg:marker" element that has the same ID listed as the arrow head you used.

Click on it and then click the "duplicate node" button (it's the third from the left on the toolbar). You'll now have a new marker with a new, weird ID. You can edit the ID to be something like "red arrow head" or something useful.

Anyway, click on the "svg:path" element located within the "svg:marker" element. Click on the "style" attribute listed in the right pane. Edit the "fill" attribute listed below, changing it to match the color value of the line you want to use. Press Control-Enter to commit this change.

Then, finally, select your original arrow in the document. This will highlight the node for the path. Edit the style attribute here and change the appropriate "marker" element to point to the new ID of your new arrow head.

You may now optionally curse both Inkscape for making the process this boneheaded and the SVG spec for offering no way to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a marker might want to be filled with the same color the path it's being placed on was stroked with.

Illustrator

[Compuser]

Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator.
Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?

Re:Illustrator

[Anonymous Coward]

don't know where to begin. illustrator is missing so many nice things that inkscape has. why don't you just try the new release?

rwst

Re:Illustrator

[Compuser]

Let's start with the one I care about most:
CMYK support in Inkscape is ...

Re:Illustrator

[ultranova]

Let's start with the one I care about most:
CMYK support in Inkscape is ...

AFAIK SVG format only supports rgb, so Inkscape is never going to support CMYK.

Re:Illustrator

[AC-x]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

It would have been a hideous omission not to include it in the standard, they'd never get anyone working in print to use SVGs without it.

Re:Illustrator

[dankelley]

Illustrator: expensive Inkscape: free

Re:Illustrator

[t_allardyce]

I major feature that was missing is non-destructive shape unions, intersections and differences. These are in the pathfinder feature of Illustrator and they are pretty much a staple of any serious illustration work. I think it might kind-of be in Inkscape in this release but im not sure.

Next major feature is an effects stack which is needed in GIMP too. Both GIMP and Inkscape have really suffered from the lack of any dynamic non-destructive editing features and separation of various effects and styles from content - these are the way forward and things Photoshop and Illustrator users have had for years, you just cant seriously live without them and its a shame because non-destructive editing and separating content from style is really something the OS world embraces - obviously these two projects feel they have more important things to do, which is why no-one seriously uses either of them.

Just to give you an idea, Photoshop drop-shadow has single-handidly changed the entire web and graphic design fashion for nearly a decade, you can take any layer and add drop shadow - tweak the settings and then go back and change it any time you want, this combines with other effects to make an effects stack that is dynamically applied to layers and objects - this is a very simple principle and is so so incredibly vital I cant even begin to stress how much.

Re:Illustrator

[Wylfing]

Can someone post a detailed comparison of features between Inkscape and Illustrator. Which features are still missing (aside from PDF capabilities)?

I am not exactly an art guru, but I do use both Inkscape and Illustrator all the time. The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette (I use that in Illustrator a lot to save and reuse colors and gradients). Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.

I don't want to paint an overly grim picture of Inkscape, though. It's really quite good, and I am very eager to get my hands on this new version (but I'll wait for the debs).

Re:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

> I major feature that was missing is non-destructive shape unions, intersections and differences.

Non-destructive intersection is now possible, it's called clipping. Other types are not supported by SVG.

> Next major feature is an effects stack

We're working on that. Hopefully 0.45 will have this.

Re:Illustrator

[t_allardyce]

Nice, but are there going to be issues with SVG causing limitations? Whats the plan with that?

Re:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

One possibility is to wait for newer versions of SVG. Many good things are being added.

Another possibility is to implement something on top of SVG but in SVG-compatible way. For example, this is how we implement star shapes missing in SVG. This is not always possible, and even when it is, we do this only if it's something simple and limited (i.e. would not require pervasive changes across all of our codebase) or when the need for the feature is really very urgent. I may be wrong but to me, non-destructive unions or intersections do not seem to fall into any of these categories.

On the other hand, we have plans to implement "path effects" (non-destructive effects on shapes and paths) on top of SVG. This is relatively easy to do. Plus, in 0.45 we should have support for SVG filters, thanks to Google SoC.

Re:Illustrator

[wondafucka]

Illustrator CS2 has added an amazing raster to vector conversion tool. It was so-so up until CS2, but if you're trying to vectorize a photograph or drawing, it really is the bees knees.

Re:Illustrator

[t_allardyce]

Thanks, I personally think non destructive unions/subtractions like in Illustrators pathfinder are essential. I like mundane things to be taken care of by the computer rather than redrawing bits of shapes and wondering if im going to regret intersecting some shapes without keeping an original copy. The more dynamic it is the better.

I've been playing with the latest Inkscape I really like the text kerning/adjustment (key shortcuts) and the node tools feel better than illustrators! The star and spiral tools seemed abit pointless but then I played around with the parameters you can make some pretty good patterns. Stroke and fill is excellent and so are rounded corners - being able to re-size a box and still have the corners keep their shape. Another thing I just thought of tho - smart guides like Illustrators, definitely useful and format independent.

Re:Illustrator

[MenTaLguY]

Once SVG 1.2 is finalized, general non-destructive path operations should be possible in SVG.

Re:Illustrator

[Bryce]

The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette.

One of our top development priorities for 0.44 was a layer dialog; hopefully this will make doing things like locking/unlocking objects somewhat easier.

According to beta testers, due to a few fixes that were submitted by users, EPS and PDF are working more reliably, at least for common cases. Please submit bugs for any remaining issues - we have a summer of code student that will be focusing on improvements in this area for Inkscape.

The color palette is now dockable (one of the more noticeable changes), and it is also possible to bring in palettes from the GIMP (*.gpl files - place in your /usr/share/inkscape/palettes/ directory). More work is planned along these lines for the next release.

Re:Illustrator

[kimvette]

Layer Effects is a HUGE thing that Inkscape is missing (and gimp too). Inner glow, outer glow, bevel, and other effects can save an illustrator TONS of time, especially if/when adjustments need to be made. In order to duplicate layer effects you could go through 30 or even more steps to replicate what a single click in Illustrator can do, and backing out or making adjustments to the original vector requires going through all of those steps all over again, whereas in Illustrator the effect is reevaluated and reapplied on the fly with no further user intervention required.

Re:Illustrator

[Azghoul]

I might be too late to get an answer to this, but can you explain how your last paragraph (effects stack example of a drop-shadow) is implemented incorrectly in GIMP? For years you've been able to select a single layer, hit "drop shadow" and get a new layer, right underneath the one you're editing, with the drop shadow in it. Sounds exactly like what you're describing.

Re:Illustrator

[t_allardyce]

As far as I know you cant tweak the drop shadow in terms of blurriness for example - you have to apply a blur, undo, apply again etc and you cant then go back and change that without redoing the drop shadow. Same goes for the other shadow parameters you can tweak like fall-off curves (which photoshop can do).

The entire ethos behind GIMP is stuck in the 90's when destructive editing was the norm, fortunately its not that difficult to redesign since you're just changing how it applies filters. Even Photoshop still has plenty of filters that cant be used non-destructively, if GIMP did this properly it could out-do Photoshop!

Re:Illustrator

[atomicstrawberry]

Actually, the editing of gradients is really clunky in Inkscape, so I guess that is another thing that bugs me.

My experience with Illustrator has been that the gradient interface is absolutely horrid. Whoever it was at Adobe that designed it must seriously hate their customers. I'm not an Inkscape user (I tried it out some time back and it just didn't click with me at all) but if you say that Inkscape's gradient interface is somehow worse than Illustrator's then I don't think I want to be an Inkscape user.

Re:Illustrator

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-destructive intersection is now possible, it's called clipping. Other types are not supported by SVG.

This is just a symptom. The real issue is that Adobe Illustrator (and others) are vector graphics editors, but Inkscape is an SVG editor.

If you've been really paying attention, you could have seen this a mile off, when version 0.0x had a way to edit XML but lacked any useful editing tools. This is an example of using a standard for the sake of using a standard.

I wonder if Gimp would have ever gotten anywhere if they had decided to make it a "PNG graphics editor" instead of a bitmap graphics editor. Oops, no, no layers, the spec we've chosen doesn't support that, sorry.

Re:Illustrator

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have no idea what you're talking about, sorry. Inkscape has a TON of stuff that's not in SVG, implemented on top of SVG in SVG-compatible way. Non-destructive unions and intersections are possible too, we just have more urgent stuff to address right now.

As for your reference to Illustrator, it's especially hilarious. Let me remind you how Illustrator was the LAST major vector editor to support transparency, simply because its underlying format (PS) didn't have it.

Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

[Anthony Boyd]

I can't get the release notes. The page keeps coming up blank. So I have to ask, does this version do anything for stability and memory usage? 0.43 is a beautiful, beautiful piece of Open Source software, but I can make that poor application slow to a crawl by playing with the font size & fill for a large chunk of text. I can send my whole computer into full-on swap frenzy by having Inkscape color-trace a bitmap & then playing with the points of one of the resulting layers.

I love Inkscape. It finally did what Sodipodi couldn't or wouldn't do. But right now it's this pretty, crashy thing-with-lots-of-potential. I'd consider stability, speed, and memory management to be huge potential features at this point. What's happening on that front?

Re:Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

[msloan]

Many crashes have been fixed in this version. As for the release notes, I can access them.

Verbatim from the wiki:

Speed

In addition to the Outline mode which makes it much easier to work with complex drawings, this version of Inkscape also provides significant speed improvements in many areas.

• Thanks to optimizations in the renderer, Inkscape's screen redraw is faster by at least 10%, and in some cases (such as complex stroked/dashed paths at high zooms) up to three times faster.
• Optimizations in the Node tool resulted in noticeable speed gains for node editing. Thus, switching to and from the Node tool (with a path selected), as well as selecting nodes in that tool, are now at least ten times faster than before. Other operations, including curve and node dragging and move/scale/rotate operations on multiple selected nodes, are much faster as well. This is especially important when working with complex paths; with these optimizations, paths containing several thousand nodes, though still slow, are much more usable.
• An optimization in the attribute setting method made operations such as moving multiple objects with arrow keys at least 30% faster compared to 0.43. This is especially noticeable when you are moving clones selected together with their original (e.g. a clone tiling), in which case Inkscape now works three to four times faster.
• Interface icons are now rendered in the background (from SVG source in share/icons/icons.svg) when Inkscape is idle, rather than waiting for all the icons in a menu to render the first time you pull it up. This eliminates the annoying delay when opening menus for the first time.
• Previously, zooming in to view a small portion of a path (especially big and complex path), there was a very noticeable slowdown and memory use increased dramatically. We optimized the renderer to only process the visible part of a path, and as a result the rendering speed is now almost the same at any zoom up to the maximum, providing up to 10-40 times speedup compared to the previous version (the closer is the zoom, the greater is the gain).
• The Path > Break Apart command is now dozens of times (up to 100x) faster for complex paths with thousands of subpaths.

bugfixes

• Reading a document with an incorrect namespace URI not only did not cause Inkscape to complain, but could also "pollute" Inkscape's internal namespace table, resulting in an "infection" of subsequently saved documents by the incorrect namespace. This is now fixed, but as a result, documents with incorrect namespace URIs will no longer load. You will have to edit them in a text editor to fix the namespaces.
• With newer versions of GTK, dragging with graphics tablet pen did not work in some tools and contexts (in particular, in Node and Rectangle tools). This is fixed.
• Scaling of objects with stroke in Selector used to cause undesired shifts of the scaled object, as well as scaling it in the dimension which was intended to remain untouched (e.g. slight change in width when you scale only height). All these problems are now fixed, both for interactive scaling by mouse and for numeric scaling via the Controls bar, and for both values of the "Scale stroke with objects" option. Among other things, this means that stroked objects no longer lose snapping on scale, and that the "Default scale origin" option in the Selector tool preferences finally works as designed. Caveat: There may still be problems if you scale a selection that contains objects with different stroke widths.
• Scaling of stroke now works for objects that didn't specify stroke-width; before, they always ended up with the default 1px stroke.
• The bounding box for text and flowed text objects did not include stroke width. This has been fixed.
• Stroke miterlimit on text objects was misinterpreted in absolute units instead of multiplies of stroke width (resulting in miter joins rendered as bevel).
• The

Re:Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

[MenTaLguY]

Stability should be a lot better across the board in this release. Memory usage is better in selected circumstances (and we've fixed the most major memory leaks). Give it a try and see how it works for you.

Memory usage dialog

[Anonymous Coward]

This new version features a special "about memory" dialog.

But at my system, the "standard malloc()" memory keeps increasing and increasing, even if I start the application and go to this dialog directly without doing anything. Perhaps since a new string is constantly allocated for displaying the statistic?

Well let's see if it crashes spontaneously when I leave it on ;)

Re:Memory usage dialog

[MenTaLguY]

(Speaking as the person who wrote the memory dialog)

There's a memory leak in the memory dialog's treeview widget. I've not been able to track it down yet (it may be a gtkmm issue), but I think your guess is roughly correct.

Re:Memory usage dialog

[HeroreV]

Wow, this is why I love Slashdot. Some dude happens to mention something and the dude who created it replies to him! That's pretty awesome!

Re:Memory usage dialog

[palad1]

Wow, this is why I love Slashdot. Some dude happens to mention something and the dude who created it replies to him! That's pretty awesome!

I created awesome, thanks for your support!

Re:Memory usage dialog

[rk]

"I created awesome, thanks for your support!"

I've been looking for you! I've got some patches to make "awesome" into "totally awesome" and was wondering where to send them.

Re:Memory usage dialog

[cakoose]

Ironically, your post epitomizes something I hate about Slashdot.

Ink Question

[Monkelectric]

Could Inkscape be used to generate art for a videogame? Are there any libraries to render this stuff?

Re:Ink Question

[MenTaLguY]

Yes, and yes. It's been done, too -- just off the top of my head, there's Monsterz, but there are other games using SVG graphics as well. Since SVG supports scripting via Javascript (given appropriate browser support), some people have even written games for the web in SVG directly. Browser support isn't widespread enough to make a Flash-killer yet, but if you're just rendering graphics for your own traditional game engine SVG graphics are certainly an option today.

Re:Ink Question

[Olematon]

Monsterz has Best Software License Ever. :O)

Re:Ink Question

[Kman_xth]

Altough Monsterz is a fun game, it doesn't actually use svg graphics. If you look at the game files, you'll see that the graphics are supplied in .png format. The graphics may have been created using vector based composition, ingame they're just regular pixels.

While we're on the topic, using SVG (or any other vector based graphics format) directly in a game could be unwise. Mainly because the strongly increased rendering power needed to nicely display the vectors (anti aliasing the edges for example) could ultimately slow down your game.. a lot.

Re:Ink Question

[Lehk228]

if you process the vecor images into raster images during install, you can allow the game to be scaled up to indefinite high resolutions by the end user just by clicking a button

Re:Ink Question

[MenTaLguY]

The best time to do it would be at game or level startup time rather than install time. These days your graphics properties are probably going to end up as OpenGL textures; while you could use an OpenGL-targeted SVG rendering library in realtime, it's usually not worth the overhead except for visually simple or very dynamic images.

Re: game art

[mughi]

Could Inkscape be used to generate art for a videogame?

Yes. Depends on what and how you're planning to do things. The GNOME games migrated to SVG artwork quite a while back.

Another approach is to create your artwork in SVG and then render to bitmap at different sizes. This mirrors a lot of the workflow used for creating icons.

Are there any libraries to render this stuff?

As far as libraries go, there are librsvg and KSVG for a start. For other gaming needs, one can do some interesting things with SVG and XHTML in a browser with a little JavaScript sprinkled in.

Is the mega SVG file size solved in this release?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried the Inkscape 0.43 version came on Tomahawk Desktop. Files sizes of each of my medium size drawings were nearly 20MBs!!!! My computer grinds to halt if I try a professional grade drawing. Is this issue solved in the new version? If this is solved, I think something can be done with Inkscape although its at very elementary stage.

Re:Tried it.

[PhrostyMcByte]

you wrote complex svg drawings in a simple xml editor? got a screen shot of this masterpiece?

Nope. I wrote simple svg in an xml editor and previewed it in Batik while writing. Why? Because Inkscape produced rather odd and bloated code that made it hard to understand just by reading the xml. Maybe this new version has better output, I havn't used it for a few months. I'm not expecting perfection, but for simple stuff it's reasonable to expect Inkscape (or anything else) to produce readable output.

you link to an MS app that can't output to SVG in an article about an application that is for greating SVG graphics?
I've been on slashdot for 8 years, and I never truely believed in astroturfing until your post.

I mention a alternative I found better for vector graphics, and even caveated that it doesn't support SVG and that is what sucks about it. It's called "discussion". Feel free to bring your own alternatives and experiences to the table. But because I mention a Microsoft product in good light I must be trolling, right? FYI, Expression was a Creature House product. MS only recently acquired it.

Re:What is the motivation behind this?

[pembo13]

Here's hoping your just being sarcastic.

Re:Tried it.

[msloan]

Man, and I thought I was perfectionistic. You could have put all that effort into doing a little coding to make inkscape output what you'd like. It probably wouldn't be that bad. The optimizer someone was working on (to remove unused gradients etc) might have made it into .44, I'm not sure.

Terrible summary

[Tim Browse]

Seriously, what's up with the summary? It explains what Inkscape is, so you don't have to go and find out, tells you what's happened, gives you information about the new features, has useful links for stuff that is relevant and that you might be interested in as a result.

This is not what I'm used to on slashdot.

Where are the editors?!

Re:Terrible summary

[ZachPruckowski]

Dude. It was the middle of a Friday night. Maybe they were wasted and playing a prank on geeks worldwide.

Inkscape versus Xara?

[Peturrr]

Since Xara has been opensourced and is freely available on Linux, the question arises: which is better? Is there really a big difference between them in terms of speed, features etc? Which one do you recommend?

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xara still isn't in widespread use, if at all. Releasing source code is one thing, getting it to compile cleanly accross the board is something else and I suspect they are still some way from a stable release.

Inkscape is very good, especially so for pre 1.0 software. I previously used sodipodi extensively and was pretty worried about the inkscape fork, specifically the move to C++ and use of GC. Inkscape could have gone horribly wrong, fortunately the developers are delivering. Kudos and much thanks to them, it's a great app.

COMPLETELY OT: Does anybody know what happened to apng, the backwards compatible animated PNG spec proposed by the Mozilla guys? It was Vlad and Pav working on that IIRC and the big issue for the PNG folk was that the mime type should be x-video/png instead of image/png (rolls eyes - apparently animated images are videos now).

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[FooAtWFU]

I thought the animated PNG spec was called MNG and that even Mozilla threw out support for it since it was being used absolutely nowhere (and was a bit bloaty. even for Mozilla.)

Oh, wait, Wikipdia tells me there's an APNG too. Hmm. From the looks of the links there it's still highly experimental and I don't think anyone's using it.

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[shish]

apparently animated images are videos now

... yes? They are "now", just as they always have been :-/ How on earth are you defining "video", if not a series of frames, normally shown in quick succession to simulate movement?

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[Anonymous Coward]

The supposed bloat of MNG was less than the bloat of GIF.
There was a bug report which detailed how if the developers had replaced the gif inside Mozilla with and included MNG support it would actually save on disk usage.
so much for bloat!

When mozilla switched direction and became Firefox they just weren't interested in promoting a platform and open standards like MNG.

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

[HeroreV]

Is the mega SVG file size solved in this release?

Is that really a fault of Inkscape of is it just an attribute of using XML?

<reallyLongDescriptiveString>data</repeatingTheRea llyLongDescriptiveStringJustInCaseYouForgotWhatKin dOfElementThisIs>

I call bullshit

[Kawahee]

"innovative 'node sculpting'"

You mean like the way Flash has been handling it for years?

Re:I call bullshit

[WillAdams]

And before Flash, FutureWave Smartsketch (on which FutureSplash Animator which was Flash 1.0 was based) --- my copy running on Windows dates from 1994 --- don't have a machine running PenPoint anymore, but I think my copy for that was dated 1992.

William
(who will have to finish up his feature comparison chart of vector drawing programs)

Re:I call bullshit

[Ant P.]

The Flash editor runs on Linux now? Last I heard they barely had the player working...

Re:I call bullshit

[MenTaLguY]

Hmm, what did you think we meant by "node sculpting"? It's basically proportional node dragging with a pressure-sensitive falloff radius. You do find that in the mesh editors of a lot of 3d apps, but as far as I know it's the first time I've seen it in a 2d vector application.

Re:I call bullshit

[Kawahee]

With Flash you can create a line, and drag it out with the mouse. Similarily, you can create a path by adding nodes, and then sculpt it. I just made this example.

Re:I call bullshit

[MenTaLguY]

So, wait, you're saying that if you select multiple nodes in Flash and drag one, rather than following in lockstep, the rest of the selected nodes will be influenced depending on tablet pressure and their distance from the node being dragged? Because that's what we mean by "node sculpting", and I don't remember Flash working like that back when I was a heavy Flash user.

c.f. the original Node Sculpting thread: http://inkscape-forum.andreas-s.net/topic/65646

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

> "innovative 'node sculpting'"
> You mean like the way Flash has been handling it for years?

Throwing around the word innovative is asking for trouble and sure makes it smell like bullshit but it is an interesting feature.

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have no idea what node sculpting is. Study this informative screenshot:

http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0 .44-nodesculpting.png

Re:I call bullshit

[WillAdams]

Flash doesn't burden one with keeping track of nodes or only initiating a drag at a node (though it will indicate if a drag starts at one --- the only one I'm aware of).

As I noted it's been this way since before 1992.

William

Re:I call bullshit

[MenTaLguY]

Right, so ... I'm having a hard time seeing what you're objecting to. "Node sculpting" is a feature for node editing, not Flash-style editing. In the new version you actually can (using the node tool) drag segments directly rather than manipulating nodes, which is a little bit like dragging segments in Flash, but that's a totally separate feature from node sculpting.

Re:I call bullshit

[MenTaLguY]

Er, by "you" I meant Kawahee, the OP who seemed to be under the impression that "node sculpting" meant Flash-style segment dragging.

Re:Tried it.

[mlewan]

I think the main reason you were modded down was that you didn't say anything about why you were disappointed with Inkscape's SVG. I would probably have modded you "Redundant" if I had had mod points.

You had a fairly weak case for mentioning EGD in this thread, but you made it even weaker by not giving much information about it except that you for some unspecified reason find it "awesome".

Zero Install link

[tal197]

Until it's on the main site, Zero Install users can drag this link to get it:

http://0install.net/tests/Inkscape.xml

It uses the RPM, which works on Ubuntu/5.10 and Debian/testing if you have the appropriate libraries installed:

apt-get install libglitz libstdc++6 libgtkspell0 libgnomevfs2-0 libxslt1.1

You don't need to be root to install this way. Make sure you tick 'Help test new versions', though, or you'll get the previous 0.43 version.

Bigger AND faster??

[Anonymous Coward]

Not very often you see the words "bigger" and "faster" in the same sentance.
I guess that kills all the OO.o bloat accusations...

Gamegraphics with Inkscape

[biscon]

We use inkscape for drawing backgrounds for our adventuregame. We postprocess the resulting pictures with the Gimp, since its easier to add details with a raster editor. If you wan't to render SVG's directly there is libsvg, but a more game related library would be libsugar which is capable of rendering SVG's using OpenGL.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libsugar.

Btw. I want to thank slashdot for telling us about Moho, it rocks our 2d animated world ;)

Inkscape rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, all those bashers don't know shit. As a professional graphic artist, I use Inkscape on a dauily basis for icon work and illustration. So it may not have all the features that other ilustration solutions have - flash, Illustrator etc. - but it is amazingly fun to use, and the development team is very nice and responsive to requests from the users. The ease of use is amazing. The interface is very polished, the mouse-keyboard combos allow for fast drawing and tweaking of existing art.

and yes, I own copies of Adobe's products, but for some things I simply prefer Inkscape. It's that good.

Glow Effect?

[scorp1us]

Can someone tell me how to do a glow effect? Its a gradiant where the core is either not filled or solid of the gradiant start color, then fades to the gradient stop color radially, outwards.
Imagine a physical sign, like on a buildingwith neon behind it. You can't see the neon, but you can see the glow on the wall behind the sign.

This is the one thing I can't figure out how to do. Mostly because of courners. If I peacie it todether, the corners never look even. (Not to mention a huge hassle!)

Re:Glow Effect?

[MenTaLguY]

For now, you can sort of tediously fake it with a lot of transparent gradients -- otherwise, you'll have to wait for 0.45 to implement SVG filter effects, which are basically a whole suite of dynamic raster effects. I don't think any other vector application will have anything like it.

Re:Glow Effect?

[MenTaLguY]

I don't think any other vector application will have anything like it.

Well, except for the ones that also support SVG filters. :)

Re:Glow Effect?

[Peganthyrus]

I haven't played with Inkscape (I probably will once I finish my current project, this release looks interesting), but the usual way to do this in Illustrator is a "blend" - you draw your inner shape, then draw your outer shape, then select them both and do object->blend->make, which causes the program to interpolate between them. Every vector package I've played with has blends (except for Flash, which goes to great lengths to completely disguise its vectorness) - I'd hope Inkscape has them as well.

Or you could do a bitmap blur in AI. I know AI offers a couple bitmap effects that it claims are SVG-related, so Inkscape might have these too.

What "chicken and egg" problem with SVG?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get an idea about how much is going on with SVG on http://svg.startpagina.nl/

Donation?

[biscon]

Since this thread is being read by at least one of the developers, I want to say: thanks guys, you rock!.
I have recently founded a company with a few friends and Inkscape 0.44 came just in time, to address some issues
we were having editing large SVG's in 0.43. We badly needed the optimisations to the rendering engine as well
as outline mode.

We hope to make money on our product in a few months and would like to know if you take donations?.

Giving something in return for your excellent work would be nice, but we could not find the usual donation link on your site.

Anyway great work and thanks a lot :)

Re:Donation?

[MenTaLguY]

Well, if you really want to donate, you can do that using Sourceforge's donation page. We don't advertise the donations page because we haven't really had a need to solicit donations. :)

GIMP

[metamatic]

I just wish the Inkscape developers could redesign the UI of GIMP...

Re:GIMP

[Lehk228]

funny, i was hoping someone would make a GIMP style interface for inkscape

even better would be to, at some point in the future merge the two projects (after GIMP gets effects layers and other, more pressing things)

Re:GIMP

[qzulla]

Uhm, no. I like the gimp the way it is, thank you.

qz

Re:GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

> funny, i was hoping someone would make a GIMP style interface for inkscape

it was called Sodipodi
it was real popular

Re:Test, crumple, throw, return to Illustrator.

[bbyakk]

> No way to stroke outside or inside a path instead of centered on a path?

SVG limitation, comments to W3C please

> No way to turn off the visibility of the guff that indicates the current selection so that I can tweak layout easily?

Preferences, Tools, Selector, Per-object selection cue: None

Anything else?

Print support

[330Pilot]

Too bad I dont see any improvements to the printing capabilities in the release notes. Inkscape is really lacking in terms of printing.

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

[MenTaLguY]

Have you tried saving as "Inkscape SVGZ" rather than "Inkscape SVG"? Raw SVG, being an XML dialect, is kinda verbose, so there's only so much we can do about that. SVGZ is gzip-compressed SVG, which is (slightly) more reasonable in filesize.

All that said, 20 MB is unusually large in my experience. What exactly do you have in mind when you say "medium-size"?

Reason for funny mods and stupid features.

[sowth]

I think you got funny mods because:

• To some that probably does look like gobbeldygook.
• To others the idea of wasting processing time on scaling is silly. (What if you are raytracing in the background? Surely you want the job finished faster)
• Still some thinks spending effort to make mozilla work like IE is crazy.
• Unless you are always correcting people's grammar, people are going to think your nick is a joke.
• Is your sig a joke? (I don't get it)

I don't know why the Mozilla/FireFox developers are copying IE. Auto image resizing is stupid. It might not be bad to have a "fit image in window" menu option, but to have it the default is stupid. If they want displaying images to be nice, why don't they add zooming options and the quad arrow scroller widget from GIMP (the thing on the bottom right which allows one to scroll around the thumbnail instead of using the akward scroll bars).

While we're on the subject of stupid things, they also refuse to display an image if there are errors or the download isn't complete!?! WTF? Sometimes I only want to see the top half of the image anyway--especially if it is huge and I'm on dialup. What's wrong with that? Why would they put an idiotic message "this image contains errors" instead of showing the partial image??? Browsers have worked that way for as long as I can remember. It works, why change it? It's like they are trying to look as stupid as microsoft. Then again so many cheer KDE/GNOME, and those are just crappy bloated copies of the horrid Windows 98...

Re:Reason for funny mods and stupid features.

[grammar fascist]

Is your sig a joke? (I don't get it)

My sig points to my blog, which is a humor column a la Dave Barry's Mister Language Person, but for writers. It also targets bookworms.

Auto image resizing is stupid. It might not be bad to have a "fit image in window" menu option, but to have it the default is stupid.

I agree. The thing is, when people resize images in the "img" tag, it also does nearest-neighbor interpolation there. It looks terrible.

I suppose you could make the argument that it's supposed to in order to make the users shrink the images themselves (which is always better).

Re:Reason for funny mods and stupid features.

[ClamIAm]

Well, the Firefox implementation is quite a bit better than IE. In IE, I believe you have to restart your browser in order to change the image resize option. In Firefox, viewing a huge image makes your cursor into a magnifying glass, and you can click to toggle scaled and un-scaled.

But yeah, it's not the best feature.

Re:Reason for funny mods and stupid features.

[trentblase]

I suppose you could make the argument that it's supposed to in order to make the users shrink the images themselves (which is always better).

Of course this is better, but it's not always possible. I realize you weren't promoting this idea yourself, but just the idea makes me a little mad.

Re:Reason for funny mods and stupid features.

[sowth]

Yes, Firefox is better than IE, I just don't understand why so many open source programmers are copying horrid microsoft crap.

Re:CMYK

[mughi]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK

Actually, at the moment SVG doesn't support CMYK. However it is proposed that it will at some point. What you cited there was the proposed draft requirements from over four years ago. I think they might be getting close to finally putting 1.2 out, but even in the last rounds of finalizing SVG 1.1 they dropped things, so one mustn't count one's chickens before they're hatched.

In fact, back in April of 2005 they pulled back their draft 1.2 spec and replaced it with a simple placeholder stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.

Re:CMYK

[MenTaLguY]

In principle you can specify CYMK in SVG today using an appropriate ICC profile. You just don't get a CYMK-based imaging pipline.

Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've used Opera :P (Ctrl+mousewheel zoom)

Uninstaller?

[vain gloria]

Does this version have a proper uninstaller on Windows? 0.43 didn't.

Re:What is the motivation behind this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, seek professional help. That is not a normal thought sequence.

Wow to the moderators

[bogd]

Latest stable version: 0.43 Download Now!

Moderation: (1, Flamebait)

Just a little lower, we have another (similar) comment:

Banner on the site says "Last stable version: 0.43".

Moderation: (5, Funny).

The wonderful world of /. moderators...

Multi-page documents?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, can it do multipage documents yet, or at least be able to print documents larger than the viewed page outline without clipping htem off? You know, like corel draw could do in 1991?

please stop

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, the Gaussian is the most correct choice, since, provably, it's the only convolution kernel that will result in a downsampled image without any aliasing at all.

The Gaussian is not band limited, and hence if you convolve by a Gaussian and then subsample, you will get some amount of aliasing. The kernel that results in a downsampled image without aliasing is the sinc filter.

Really, if you don't understand a subject, please don't pretend to speak with authority on it. There are plenty of textbooks and other references that those who need to implement this sort of code can refer to. But because you write the kind of b.s. you write, other people will now misremember this subject as well, and we'll get even more lousy image processing code.

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi

We also do have a similar issue.

Following images were designed using Inkscape 0.43, here are the sizes of SVG:
1. http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/images/bittorrent -no-share.png (9.6MB)
2. http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/images/bittorrent -share.png (13.3MB)
3. http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/images/TDS/uses-b ig.png (2.2MB)
4. http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/images/TDS/softwa re-big.png (2.0MB)

The http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/images/bittorrent -share.png (13.3MB) was redesigned on Inkscape 0.44, SVG size increased to 14.2MB. Please note, only the arrows and words were copied from the old SVG.

If you are a developer of Inkscape and interested to look into this, we could send you the original SVG. Please let us know.

Thank you

Tomahawk Computers
Makers of Tomahawk Desktop
www.tomahawkcomputers.com

Download Statistics

[Kichigai Mentat]

From the Inkscape Website:

June 29, 2006
Just one week after the 0.44 release our software was distributed to over 54,100 users through the SourceForge download servers. The largest share was from the Windows users, who totalled nearly 38,000 downloads. The next highest number was from the Mac users with 9,115 downloads. The Unix/Linux users scored 7,104 downloads.

I find it funny that we have all these people talking about how this will finally be their opportunity to ditch their lone Windows box because they have a viable alternative to Illustrator. And what platform got the largest number of downloads? Windows. Something about Windows users doing the most downloading of an Open Source project (aside from FireFox) seems odd, or funny to me. I'm not too surprised that Mac users came in second (We like not having to shell out for Illustrator too), but the fact that UNIX/Linux came in last is shocking.

Re:Download Statistics

[bbyakk]

You forget that the vast majority of Linux users don't need to hunt down websites and download software from Internet, ever. They get all software worth having nicely packaged by their distribution. So the number of Linux downloads on SF is greatly underestimated compared to the number of actual users.