"Draw Freely" is also a part of our registered trademark, so changing it is unlikely at this stage.
Fair enough. Though you'll hear me say this again when it comes up in the future. ;)
Of course, I always thought "Illustrator" was a bad name for the proprietary vector program by Adobe. One was more likely to design in it than do much drawing/illustration for the lack of "drawing" tools.
I would have thought the entrants to the contest would have given quite a lot of good examples of how drawing in inkscape is possible.
To my eyes, more design went into the entries than drawing. Esp. the winners. :) In fact, I didn't see many that looked like freehand drawings using those tools in Inkscape.
You might be right that the tools aren't The Best™ but I wouldn't say that means it's not possible to draw or that inkscape shouldn't aim for making drawing easier.
That's not what I said, though. :) I'm saying that Inkscape is lacking in freehand drawing tools that simulate real-world drawing mediums... Drawing is just one part of design though. You could look at it like: Inkscape is way more than *just* a drawing program. This is typically how I see it, and definitely how I use it. I've drawn things in Inkscape, but it's not the strong-point of Inkscape as it stands.
I honestly think Inkscape is a great Inker. Take a sketch from gimp or a scan and draw around the lines with clean shapes.
I guess you could say that's drawing... but it sounds like a bit of a stretch. The drawing was done in GIMP... so why is Inkscape "Draw Freely"? :)
Brilliant. So "Ink Freely"? Then there's all the other things you can do with Inkscape, hundreds of ways it's useful in workflows.
My point exactly. Design covers everything from drawing, to composition, to typesetting, to layout of raster graphics like photos, etc, etc. This is why it seems more of a design program than a drawing program to me.
So overall, I wouldn't say Inkscape is just a design tool. Some would claim it's not The Best™ design tool just as much anyway.
I would not say it's just a design tool either. I'd say it's one of the *best* and *most flexible* design tools available in FLOSS. But I probably would not say it's one of the best drawing tools in FLOSS. That may change in the future, but as it stands, I still think drawing (freehand) is one of the least developed features of Inkscape.
My 50p / 2¢
That's inflation for you! ;)
-C
Best Regards, Martin Owens