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Inkscape 0.47 Released
derrida writes "After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, including: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X." We've been following the progress of Inkscape for years (2006, 2005, 2004).
As a person who uses vector drawing programs from time to time, this program was a great find. Having pirated Corel Draw installed, mostly for rubbish reasons, was also bad - for bloat reasons, law reasons - and sanity reasons. I remember that Corel then (>5 years ago) had so much bugs, slow and unresponsible, bad support for local fonts, unstable. For all my purposes Inkscape is by far better program - compact, standards compliant, fully functional, and frankly I enjoy using it much better than Corel Draw. Couple bugs yes, but brilliantly reliable compared to horrible nightmare that is (was?) Corel Draw.
Everytime I've looked at Inkscape in the past its idea of 'standard' SVGs is about like Word's idea of 'standard' HTML, even when you switch to the standard svg format rather than its extended version.
I'm grabbing it now, but I see nothing in the release notes about this particular issue. I see things about adding more extensions which is great and all, but I use SVG because its a documented standard that I can work with in my own software, I'd love to suggest Inkscape to others, but until its capable of producing version 1.2 SVGs with text flows that work with Apache Batik is useless. The font improvements look promising, as long as it isn't retarded and storing all text as curves.
Heres to hoping ...
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Saving SVGs from GIMP is like saving PDFs from Photoshop.
Sure, it outputs a SVG file, but the editor is focused on editing bitmap images. Most people will get a PNG or JPG embedded in an SVG when saving an SVG from GIMP.
In the past (Its been a while since I've used GIMP so this could be completely different now), saving an SVG from GIMP would first render most everything too a raster image format, then just embed a single or multiple raster images in the SVG, turning the SVG into basically a wrapper around the layers of rasterized images.
Inkscape is intended to work on shapes and not rasterized images. Text doesn't get rasterized before saving, it gets written to the file as texts using a specific font or as curves. A rectangle is stored as a rectangle object with which a border style, fill style, and maybe a filter. Circles, and other polygons are the same.
Later when you want to resize an object stored as a shape rather than a rasterized image, you just scale the shape, there is 0 quality loss. Resize a rasterized image in GIMP to something larger and you'll start seeing artifacts rather quickly. Changing the border color on a rectangle in GIMP would require you to select the area around the rectangle with manually, with a magic wand tool, or maybe a script, then change the color of the individual pixels, overlaying the existing pixels. With antialiasing turned on this can quickly turn into a mess as it blends in with the existing colors or the background. Changing the border color in Inkscape will result in a final image without the mixing of colors associated with rasterized images as the file is really a set of instructions for drawing shapes. Instead of changing the individual pixels directly, you change the command that creates those pixels in the first place.
Inkscape is to GIMP what Flash is to Photoshop or GIMP.
SVGs also allow for animation and scripting in the file itself. Not scripting like you normally use with GIMP, but scripting like producing animation, allowing for interactivity kind of like a web page. With SVGs you can create user interfaces and applications and use them in an SVG viewer with proper support. At one point I was working on (just for fun) a clone of the Evony Flash game written in SVG and javascript. You could open it with Apache Batik or Webkit and 'play' the game. Clicking on various 'buttons' would call javascript functions to do the backend work, talk to the server, ect.
SVG is comparable to Flash in most ways except the lack of sound and video support, which are handled by other standards. Flash uses ActionScript, SVG uses Javascript.
Theres a lot of other differences and a lot of commonality between the two from an outside perspective, but you'll find that if you're editing a photo, you want to do it in GIMP. If you're drawing shapes, flowcharts, and the like, you'll want to do it with an SVG.
I read somewhere, although I can't verify it, that Southpark (The TV show, if you live under a rock) is done using SVG. Even if it isn't, Southpark would be something SVG is perfectly suited to doing, where as doing it in GIMP would surely suck ass for the guys doing the drawing and animation. It'd be relatively simple to do with SVG.
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Anyone with a need to create simple vector-based drawings should check out Inkscape. I use it for figures in presentations and for box diagrams in academic documents and have found nothing better. The finished product looks great.
It's also handy for editing PDFs after they are exported from R (Statistical Package). Often something you can't easily tweak in R can be fixed very quickly in Inkscape.
The best thing about it is the interface: very easy to pick-up, yet extremely flexible. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the UI design.
RS
I'm no artist, but I do like to create things, so I use many tools to do just about anything. But I don't want to spend many hours learning a tool, as I just want to create something quick and easy.
Now, in my years I've come across many tools. Closed source/open source, free/payed. I've used anything from mspaint to photoshop, from milkshape to 3D studio max. I've tried GIMP, Blender and Inkscape as open source tools. And quickly dumped GIMP and Blender, they are not userfriendly for entry level at all. Blender doesn't allow you to do anything unless you spend a few hours just configuring things and doing tutorials, which is a pain in the ass compared to 3D studio max (yes, you get what you pay for, 3DS Max is not cheap). Milkshape is also much easier to use then Blender, but has much less features, still I think Blender could learn from it.
About the same goes for GIMP vs Photoshop, but in that respect GIMP is much friendlier then Blender. However, photoshop still seems to have an edge in entry level usage.
And then we had Inkscape, installed, started, and go. No problems at all, didn't need to look for any alternatives. Now, I only use 10% of the features of these programs. But for everything I used I think Inkscape is the only that really should get the 1.x version stamp.
As others have said, this is a real gem of an opensource program. I've been using it for years (skencil previously), mostly in designing dials for wrist watches.
Best wishes,
Bob