Recently the wiki user Kwixson has significantly expanded and rewritten the "Inkscape for AI users" document on our wiki. Some of his edits seemed strange to me, and I proposed my variants. Unfortunately we could not reach a consensus, so after several mutual reverts we decided to post here and ask for the help and judgement from the community.
Since I've been an AI user for a little under 10 years, I think I'll check it out tonight when I have some time. I think I may be able to offer some more perspective from another user of AI.
- To begin, I really appreciate the input on this document from the
user who obviously knows AI well. This is some kind of expertise which I personally lack, so I would not be able to write such a document all by myself. Obviously it must be written from an AI user's point of view and use AI terminology and concepts.
Agreed
- However, Kwixson's approach seems to go further than that. He
apparently wants this document to describe _only_ those things which you can do in Illustrator, and describe them exactly _the same way_ as one would do them in Illustrator, even if Inkscape offers more convenient methods. I think this is wrong.
Agreed. This is VERY wrong. The more that inkscape improves, the harder AI is for me to use. The only reason I use AI anymore is because it allows multiple pages as well as color profiles (like my pantones... which I'll probably never have in Inkscape, but that's minor since CMYK will suffice). There are maybe a few features that AI offers that we don't have yet, but there are RFEs filed already, so I'm not too concerned.
- With Kwixson's approach, Inkscape would always seem inferior to AI,
because you can't win just by copying. You can't be a better Illustrator than Illustrator, you need to be different to be better. And indeed Kwixson's text has a generally condescending tone and phrases like "is much less responsive", "is not as intuitive" etc. We need to be honest about Inkscape's weaknesses, but these judgements were often not based on any real weaknesses.
I think that responsiveness is partially a platform issue. There are some areas where Inkscape seems unresponsive on win32, but when I boot over to Linux it flies. But as for something being intuitive, that's mostly a matter of opinion. If I grew up peeling potatoes by spinning one around and using my teeth to peel the skin off, I'd probably think it was more intuitive than having to use a device that's not a part of my body. Bad example, but you get the point. I think it's more of a "what someone is used to" issue than anything else. There may be some areas where it is more intuitive (node editing for example), but in my experience, Inkscape is more intuitive all around.
- After all, who is this document for? Those who like AI the way it
is will never switch, so it seems stupid to target them in such a document. I think we need to target those who are used to AI but are looking for something different and better. And therefore we must stress our strengths and differences, explaining them in a way which is easy to understand for AI users.
You are correct. If people love AI and can afford it, they have no reason to switch. I think we should maybe target those who use AI because that's what they were trained with, not because it's really a choice. Schools don't typically teach anything but Adobe anymore, which is why this documentation is very important.
Now on to specific examples.
A. Kwixson has removed my mention of keyboard accessibility, in particular keys for screen-pixel-sized transformations, claiming this is not important. I've seen this attitude before from other AI users; they tend to dismiss this because they don't have it. Those who are really using Inkscape (or Xara, where I got the idea from, though by now Inkscape's keyboard is superior even to Xara) will disagree.
I tend to think he's wrong. It's very handy and incredibly helpful and dismissing such a useful feature is just plain dumb. Inkscape has some of the best kb shortcuts around and should be recognized for such.
B. In the section on shapes, Kwixson has removed my explanation of the difference between a shape and a path and the unique features that shapes offer. Instead he inserted an advice to do Ctrl+Shift+C (convert to path) as soon as you created a shape, to be able to node-edit it! This is because AI does not have shapes as such, treating everything as paths. I think this is plain stupid. Inkscape's shapes are clearly superior to those of any other program I know, and we must present them as such.
Inkscape's shapes put all others to shame in my opinion. Plus, doesn't the SVG spec describe shapes as well? (not just paths... if I'm not mistaken) I always keep a shape a shape unless I HAVE to change it to a path for some other editing I can't do as-is. I had shown an artist friend of mine how cool our shapes are and he was surprised because he hadn't seen any software that offers such intuitive controls. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but has Kwixson even used the shapes as shapes and not just converted to a path right away? If anything, an in-depth explanation about how our shapes are different... and BETTER, is how it should be presented. Converting to a path right away is just a shot in the foot for editing and usability.
C. In the section on Node tool, Kwixson provided some very cumbersome descriptions of how to convert a segment from curve to straight line and how to continue a path. When I proposed much simpler and more straightforward ways to do the same, he insisted that his descriptions closely match the way AI does this and therefore must stay. Once again, I don't see why one should go through all this when there's a much simpler way. Disclaimer on this point: I cannot even claim to completely understand Kwixson's descriptions, so I may have missed something important in them. Please anyone who knows AI's path editing, review these paragraphs and let us know what you think.
I will have to review his descriptions and post again later. I do have to say that in a lot of ways, it is more difficult/cumbersome (non-intuitive as well) to edit nodes in Inkscape than in AI. But it goes without saying that I know of many RFEs for improvements to the node editing facilities in place, so once again, I'm pretty sure we'll change for the better and be the best in this area too. The node editing tool in Illustrator makes my workflow quite a bit faster, that's not even the add a node anywhere on path issue, but it's one of their node editing tool is just damn good.
After I review the wiki page on it tonight, I'll post my follow-up comments.
-Josh