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Inkscape Version 0.91 Released
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they've switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.
I like Inkscape. It's generally a great program. But its most serious problem is that it uses GTK+ as its toolkit.
GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI to this hideous, unusable UI.
The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace. It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it.
It will be a lot of work, but they need to port Inkscape from GTK+ to Qt. Qt is a much better toolkit. It looks great. It works (and actually works, in that the resulting software is perfectly usable!) pretty much everywhere.
GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Inkscape devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.
I'm just a designer, and I've never done any C++ programming, but I'm thinking that maybe I'll have to learn it so I could potentially contribute to any effort that arises to fix the UI of Inkscape.
One of the coolest things about Inkscape is that it does a good job of converting bitmapped images to vectors, which is especially nice if you want to combine source elements created in a raster-art program at wildly different scales. This capability is found in other software, I know, but Inkscape makes it relatively simple and (at least if you're going to use the results *in* Inkscape) saves some steps.
This is also a fun way to decompose images into constituent color layers, separate them, and then play with the resulting layers -- cool high-contrast results sometimes in combining just 2 or 3 of the resulting layers.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Inkscaper Alexandre Prokoudine provides a nicely visual article about the release, including a video to demonstrate some of the new things you can do with it: http://libregraphicsworld.org/...
My current business depends on Inkscape. I use Inkscape's 'gcodetools' plugin to generate gcode for a CNC mill. I can go from designing to cutting in five minutes flat. I'm not sure if it is included in this release, but you can get it in the beta.