Hi Inkscape developers,
This is my first posting to the developer list. Some of you may know who I am, others won't.
I'm a member of the Scribus development team, and I recently enjoyed the privilege of being invited as a speaker to the "swiss publishing days 2014" in Winterthur/Switzerland (http://swiss-publishing-week.ch/index.php). In terms of Open Source software, there was a talk about Scribus and another one about Photoshop alternatives (Photoshop Elements and GIMP). There was also a Mac + Eizo screen for everyone to use, which was especially set up to test PS, PSE, and GIMP, as well as Scribus and its PDF export with Acrobat. Please note that this was a commercial event, and its main sponsor was Adobe! Also note that it was for the first time in the history of the conference that alternatives to Adobe's traditional domains were being presented.
What I found astonishing was that while *everyone* knew about GIMP and many were aware of Scribus, *no one* had ever heard of Inkscape! Now they have, and they're definitely interested ;)
Many of the very nice people from Swiss training companies I talked to are more than eager to provide training, given Adobe's stranglehold and its new licensing scheme. In the case of image editing, enough companies have already switched to GIMP, which is why offering GIMP trainings is already profitable.
Interest in Scribus is growing, too, especially since the quality of its (print) PDF export has been there for everyone to test.
At lunch during the conference, I was approached by a pre-press engineer, colour management and Adobe-certified Acrobat/InDesign/Illustrator trainer who was asking questions over questions. He approached me again during dinner, and because he had so many questions, and I had to bring my laptop to the table, so he could play with Scribus. His verdict (after 3 hours): "Once you have polished this ("this" being Scribus 1.5.0svn), Adobe and other vendors won't be amused."
He also played with the stable Inkscape branch and was very impressed by its features for creatives. However, and this is something he rightfully noted, at least the printing business needs reliable PDF export, including CMYK and spot colours, colour profiles and font embedding. He said to me that, unless Inkscape embraces the PDF requirements of the printing industry, it will never been taken seriously, SVG::Print notwithstanding. What Inkscape needs is colour-managed PDF export and support of some print-specific PDF versions, especially PDF/X-*. It also needs to support CMYK and spot colours in PDFs. (Not my judgement; his!)
This posting isn't meant to criticise your fantastic work. I only intended to make you aware of the issues that still exist in professional environments when it comes to replacing AI. In terms of features Inkscape is already able to compete with AI, and sometimes it's even better. It's just that PDF thingy that prevents Inkscape from being used by the majority of pre-press professionals.
Kind regards,
Christoph