On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 7:11 PM, JiHO <jo.lists@...400...> wrote:
On 2009-September-14 , at 07:53 , Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> but let's face it --
> Inkscape is a tortoise crawling uphill to die at the top of
> Kilimanjaro. This really should stop.
I am sorry to concur that this is indeed a very big problem. When I
first used Inkscape (6 years ago), it felt lean and to the point. Sure
it was limited.
Sorry for joining the discussion this late but I'd just like to provide a little balance to our views of Inkscape. This is almost only based on personal experience but I'd still like convey how well Inkscape works in my production pipeline.
I've worked as a designer the last 8 years with various tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, Corel Draw, InDesign). The last 2 years, I've used Inkscape professionally as a "screen based" designer and I'd just like to say that working with this application is such a relief compared to working in Adobe Illustrator CSx and the like.
I normally use Fireworks for most screen based designs and slicing but as I'm trying to move to
Linux I'm also interested in moving to FLOSS design applications.
Things I enjoy daily with Inkscape:
* Beatiful, correct, slim SVGs! No bloat! It's even possible to explore the source by clicking individual elements in the drawing.
* Inkscape starts within 10-12 secs while Illustrator finally comes around after 30-35 sec
* With some tweaks, using Inkscape as a slicing tool for any web design file *does* work even if the export format is limited to .png. Inkscape is unique here in the sense that you can choose to export a certain area or just a single background image even if it's covered with other design elements. It even supports relative paths. The concept of slices has to be made somewhat clearer, though, maybe with the option of viewing the slices as coloured squares or make the names and paths appear on top of exportable objects at the right view setting.
* Quite powerful command line. Helped me convert 390 SVGs in a flash recently.
* Really fast and comfortable
* Excellent support for reuse of objects, colors, gradients and filters.
* Really fast and flexible path drawing tools. Almost redeems some of the inflexibility wrt stroke inside/outside/center on path.
* Really pleasant to be able to apply styles by copying and pasting between objects.
Areas for improvement
* Strokes - hard to use properly because it is not possible to set the stroke inside or outside the path, only centered on the path. This is especially troublesome with stroked text as the stroke can only be so wide before the fill colour is completely covered. Especially with stroked Affects the work quite a lot more often than anticipated. I must admit, this is one of the real time-wasters when drawing icons or doing other precision work that require high stroke accuracy.
* Semi-transparent strokes - kinda the same story here. This is actually a bit worse since it is hard to convince potentially new Inkscapers to create 2 shapes or to juggle a dynamic offset shape only to be able to have a convincing semi-transparent stroke on text or or around images.
* Filters - Hard to use at the moment but the filter presets help very much, of course.
* Toggle all toolbars/settings panels, palettes on and off. Like pressing F12, only more powerful. I do not mind the current amount of setting bars and toolbars as long as the can be toggled easily in and out of view. After all, this means that almost all needed tools could be available at the press of a button and then quickly removed as the drawing operation takes place. It's the mode of work I've grown accustomed to in other tools and it turns out to be very effective. Also, it's a *very* nice feature when when doing customer presentations of the design since all focus can be devoted to the drawing and not the GUI of the drawing application.
And BTW: Thanks so much for the new Windows Explorer save/open file dialog in 0.47! Supports filtering files by using wildcards (*) as a part of the filename, thumbnails, sorting by file size, modefied date etc. All you would expect to work under Windows. Only the preview is a bit lacking with regards to showing bitmaps embedded in SVGs but I can live with that :)
With regs,
JimmyVolatile