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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 general rule, "1.0" doesn't really hold a lot of significance in the open source community with regard to actual usefulness. A heck of a lot of the (very stable) stuff I use is < 1.0.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
But you forgot to say why!
Many times, developers will have a list of features that they figure are "1.0". They may not have reached all the features yet, but the features developed thusfar may be very stable.
A case in point is my own set of backup scripts (this is not) Backup Buddy. I've been using them for years, they work very well, stable even with very large sets of data. (Well into the TBs currently, managing over 100 backup sources in 24 hour rotation)
But I don't consider them "1.0" yet because I always envisioned a handy-dandy web interface for managing backup rotations, verifying backups (currently working) and recovering files 1-by-1 securely. So, I edit config files. (aw shucks)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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 ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As a general rule, "1.0" doesn't really hold a lot of significance in the open source community with regard to actual usefulness.
It's rather a pity that so many projects like Inkscape might be overlooked by all those folks living outside the open source community.
Where Rev. 0.x = Beta state, maybe, and Alpha, more than likely. Immature. Unstable. Basic features missing or unusable.
Think of it as another handicap, like naming your premier photo editing program The GIMP - which to the outsider translates simply as "crippled" and "sexually perverse."
Their roadmap states that the 1.0 milestone is "full SVG 1.1 support".
gimp is a rasterized graphics editor. Inkscape do vector graphics.
Dunno, but what they didn't fix was the incorrect naming of save/export.
They seem to think save is anything that outputs a vector format, and export is anything that outputs a bitmap, rather than the normal definition of save being anything you can re-open with zero loss of data, and export being things you might lose data (possibly all of it) if you try to re-import.
I lost a *lot* of time when I "saved" a load of files as pdfs, and then got told inkscape couldn't reopen them.
If you want to do any serious graphics work, I'd recommend using Windows instead, the majority of graphics applications "just work" on it and there is not as many backwards compatibility issues forcing you to upgrade constantly in Windows as there is in OS X. There isn't even a 64bit version of most graphics applications for OS X (this includes Photoshop) due to Apple's policies on what APIs and languages you can use to make 64bit GUIs.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
The step from 0.46 to 0.47 has taken them over a year. They have some major architectural refactoring efforts still in the pipeline ("Separate sections of code into various libraries for use by other programs" for 0.52 -> 0.53). While it's an impressive program that I use daily (with little complaints, apart from stability issues on Windows at work), I get the impression that their roadmap is such that if they follow it, they will never get to 1.0.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
1) yes, illustrator works just fine reading/writing pdf as it's save format
2) yes, anything in the list of formats under "save" should allow me to open again... if it won't, it should be under "export" not "save".
As someone who works with Illustrator a fair amount, I implicitly know that pdfs can be reopened and worked on just fine without losing any data at all. I call this function save.
Inkscape does not have this feature, and thus should put pdf export in the export section, not the save section.
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
It's called karma-whoring.
None actually - Extensions/Modify Path/Color Markers to Match Stroke. Happy now?
Do as you would be done to.
STILL NO FREAKING SUPPORT FOR CASE SENSITIVE FILESYSTEMS ON OSX FROM ADOBE. WTF. MIGHT AS WELL JUST TURN ON THE CAPSLOCK KEY.
I refuse to buy another Adobe product until they freaking fix that. Whats worse is that I'm finding that my reasons for paying a small fortune for Creative Suite is rapidly going away. Sure its nice and would make things easier, but I'm just learning alternative, although slower, methods of accomplishing the same thing with less feature rich software.
If CS5 doesn't do it, its unlikely that I'll bother with Adobe in the future, I'll have too much time invested in knowing how to use other software better.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Checkout Apache FOP. The future you're looking for above is available in SVG files using flowed text.
Of course the problem is still a lack of editors with flow support. They all want to flow it themselves and manually position the text for some retarded freaking reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
What's wrong with that?
The problem is that the version number is something that has semantic relevance to most users, and the vast majority of programs don't think of version 1.0 as 'perfection', they think of it as (usually) the first reasonably feature-full, stable, release. Giving a program a version of 1 makes it sound like a beta or worse, which gives at least some users the impression that it may not be stable or acceptably solid.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Except that pdf is an open format that's actually remarkably simple to parse.
I just tried it too, it still didn't succeed in correctly importing the files (close, but no cigar).
Note the word there though – import, not open. It imports and exports pdfs (possibly with data loss), it does not save and open them (which it claims to).
Yes I filed a bug report, a long time ago, and yes, I contribute to Open Source projects.
Inkscape fills the hole left by !Draw when leaving RiscOS.
;-)
It's kind of in the family.....
!Draw -> ArtWorks -> Xara -> Inkscape (interface heavily influenced by Xara)
Pushing it I know, but nice to think of it like that, so I do!
You, sir, have apparently never seen a Frontpage 2000 output, otherwise you wouldnt draw such a nonsense parallel to inkscape.
I saw a lot of frontpage HTML output and i work with Inkscape too, and the comparison does NOT fit in any meaningfull way.
The most visible difference being Frontpage using custom markup IN ADDITION to standard HTML that was crucial to render the page as seen in Frontpage.
Inkscape uses a SUBSET of standard SVG and its output is does not contain markup needed to convey the visual information (There is some additional markup in the Inkscape .svg file format using separate namespace used only to persist additionla editor information)
Get your facts right pls. before you post.
And finaly, from the apparent emotional style of your post, i am not sure why you accuse other being fanboys, while displaying evident signs of being rigid batik fanboy yourself.
have a good day
mmm
can someone please tell me why a simple graphics editor takes 190Mb disk space?
I suppose that the Windows package includes the entire gtk+ toolkit and various support libraries, too. The Debian package of Inkscape is just 20 MB because Debian has the libs in separate packages (which are often already installed for other purposes, such as GNOME, anyway). Here's the dependency list: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/inkscape.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I'll add my voice to this. Give me applications that are focused and good at what they do, don't create some hideous hybrid that merely does everything badly. Besides, GIMP is really the wrong tool for creating books. You should be exporting graphics from whatever program you use and then importing them in a proper desktop publishing program. If you want Libre software, you can look at Scribus for these purposes. (That has some notable omissions such as decent table layout, but it might be sufficient for your needs). You don't want to be making a book in GIMP! (Or Inkscape). Use the right tools for the right job.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
What you said sounds really, really, really stupid to me.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
If it's "remarkably simple to parse" then why it is so hard to find a non-Adobe application that can easily edit pdf files?
No sig for the moment.
And why is the spec almost 700 pages, and why does everybody I know who has tried to work with it cursed it up and down?
Why did you reply with something unrelated? Were you trying to get easy karma by posting something trite at the top of the discussion?
Interesting you (and those who replied to you) should mention Blender's difficult interface, because that's one of the main things they're working on improving right now. Just yesterday they released the first Alpha of a the new 2.5 series, with an extensively (completely?) redesigned GUI meant to be easier and more logical to beginners, and both the GUI as well as keyboard shortcuts are now completely customizable.
Here is the page with info on it: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/
The final new version (which will probably be version 2.6) is expected to be released in mid-2010.
Let me summarise the thread:
* beelsebob quite rightly pointed out PDF should be under Export and not Save, since Inkscape can't load PDFs
* BitZstream wrote many rambling pieces about how it wasn't compliant with the full SVG standard, most other people found it a jolly useful piece of software and were quite happy using it
* people were generally unimpressed with bytesex's idea of merging Inkscape into GIMP
* a few lamented the demise of Artworks/Xara
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France