Ted,
That's interesting, are you having any deployment issues on a network?
Well, we never encountered any problems on that side... Inkscape smoothly run on all the machines here (win 2000 and win XP)
Why did you guys decide to try out Inkscape?
Our designers (including me) just loved the interface (very intuitive and simple). Inkscape's work with tablet is also very smooth, so one of our illustrators use it almost on a daily basis. The tracing tool is one of the most used features by our printing designers: we use it specially to trace bitmap data that aren't available in curves, that we need to use in large scale printing (like logos, slogans etc...). Also we use Inkscape to create webdesign elements (all kind of buttons, panels, etc...). Inkscape's export to bitmap is one of the smoother available on the market today. We compared it to Illustrator CS, Corel Draw 12 and Photoshop's rasterising capabilities, and Inkscape almost always had better results, specially on smaller details/graphics. For example all the icons and smaller graphics on that web are made in Inkscape: www.czechwalker.com
Are you doing print work with it, or mostly web?
Unfortunately Inkscape is not mature enought to be used in printing because of the lack of real CMYK / LAB/ HSB support (SVG 1.2 needed here), very poor export capabilities (yesterday I posted a bug report about resulting PDF files, #1541366) and the poor direct printing possibilities. Everything that comes out from Inkscape is RGB, so talking about printing with Inkscape is a little too soon. Inkscape is still just a supporting software, interesting to print designers by a few of its functions. One of the biggest breaktrough for Inkscape in the field of printing (after the CMYK/LAB/etc... support) will be a descent PDF exporting capability. By descent, I mean the ability to: - generate multipage PDF documents (that hopefully will be possible with SVG 1.2 spec.) - export in the PDF printing spec. (PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3) - define the bleed and slug areas (for offset printing) - add crop, bleed and registration marks, file infos/comments, color bars. This is what actually does Corel Draw, and it is widely used in our studio for small to medium printing jobs (business cards, brochures, booklets, fliers etc...). The resulting PDFs are directly sent to the printing house.
Another field of use for Inkscape that we (at Lumen Design Studio) see for the future, is the creation of SVG graphics for mobile devices (SVG Tiny/Basic spec.). If Inkscape in its future releases will have the possibility to select the specification of the created file, it will become an irreplaceable tool.
If you'd like, we can actually write some kind of article about the use of Inkscape in our design studio, some kind of interview of every designer, describing the use of Inkscape in every field (printing, webdesign, etc...). Maybe posting it in the wiki will help others to realise what can be done with Inkscape :)
I'm very thankful to all the Inkscape devellopers. You managed to create one of the most attractive vector drawing software available today, and you still devellop it very fast. Thank you!
Best regards from Prague, Mourad Mokrane Art director Lumen Design Studio www.lumenstudio.net T +420 777 164 358 F +420 221 085 247
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Gould" <ted@...11...> To: "momo" <momo@...1386...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:47 PM Subject: Inkscape at Lumen (was: what about bug 1535218???)
On Wed, 16 Aug 2006, momo wrote:
Many thanks to Mental for fixing it, we can now continue to test Inkscape in a production environement (we have it installed on every machine in our graphic design studio)
That's interesting, are you having any deployment issues on a network? Why did you guys decide to try out Inkscape? Are you doing print work with it, or mostly web?
--Ted