On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 13:34 -0400, bulia byak wrote:
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.
This is indeed one of the things that Inkscape is superior to Illustrator. I did miss being able to move a node in a fine-grained manner at a zoomed view. AI only allowed me to move by the absolute unit which was a huge jump.
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.
That also doesn't seem to be a valid approach. Specific shapes can be a huge time-saver in many use cases and the classic shape editing would very much slow down the process. Many times I would have killed for perspective transformations on top of shapes. It just does wonders to workflow being able to easily modify attributes of a shape later in the process. I loved that about 3D Studio Max ages ago.
If the purpose of the document is to help former AI users to get used to Inkscape, it *should* show the new concepts behind Inkscape and not propose workflows that may appear to be similar to AI, but are in fact a lot slower.
cheers