On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Nathan Hurst wrote:
Alan Horkan wrote:
All I am trying to say is that Inkscape cannot please everyone and that it makes most sense to look first at Illustrator (and Freehand and maybe CorelDraw in that order of precedence).
Ah yes, because free software can only chase the tail lights of commercial software. Here was me thinking we'd evaluate ideas based on merit...
I think that it is most important to match the behaviour of other gnome apps.
njh
This is surely a topic that could be discussed heatedly and vigorously, but for the sake of keeping good company it would be best if we didn't!
However the issue of Illustrator compatibility is an important one and I think we need to have a position as a project, since the topic is certainly going to be asked again and again if we don't.
It is a very good point that Illustrator is a dominant application and that many users will be familiar with it already. We could do much worse than to clone Illustrator! However, has not been a goal of either Sodipodi nor Inkscape, and I'd daresay it probably shouldn't be. It's important that our developers feel they have the freedom to make unique design decisions if they feel the need, because we want to encourage contributors to be creative (and hopefully prolific!) and not feel constrained to (boring?) reimplementation work.
How does this sound as a compromise position:
"Where a better solution cannot be found, default to the way Illustrator does it."
I think this emphasizes that we want to encourage developers to be creative and try new ideas, but gives them a standard of measure to compare against. And more importantly, for developers who are unsure what to do it gives a reference they can start from.
What do folks think?
Bryce