On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, bulia byak wrote:
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 13:34:14 -0400 From: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Inkscape users list inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Inkscape for AI users: a revert war :)
Recently the wiki user Kwixson has significantly expanded and rewritten the "Inkscape for AI users" document on our wiki. Some of his edits seemed strange to me, and I proposed my variants. Unfortunately we could not reach a consensus, so after several mutual reverts we decided to post here and ask for the help and judgement from the community.
The latest revision with our extensive comments is here:
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?IllustratorUsers
Below I briefly list the things I disagree with.
- To begin, I really appreciate the input on this document from the
user who obviously knows AI well. This is some kind of expertise which I personally lack, so I would not be able to write such a document all by myself. Obviously it must be written from an AI user's point of view and use AI terminology and concepts.
I take it this document was intended to eventually become a Tutorial and be shipped with Inkscape?
- However, Kwixson's approach seems to go further than that. He
apparently wants this document to describe _only_ those things which you can do in Illustrator, and describe them exactly _the same way_ as one would do them in Illustrator, even if Inkscape offers more convenient methods. I think this is wrong.
I did feel the article tried too hard to make comparisions and it did seem a little like Inkscape marketing/propoganda. I can understand how immensely proud you are of your work on Inkscape but this is not the best place for it and if anything it is likely to piss of Illustrator users instead of make things easier for them.
I think comparisions should be kept to a minimum. I dont know if you are aware of it bulia but you use very strong language and your arguements always seem very passionate but from how our disucussions are resolved and comments from a few people I can understand (or at least I believe) that it is mostly imagined hostilty on my part.
A lof of the content in that article does not relate directly to teaching Illustrator Users to use Inkscape and could be moved to our section about what we can lear from other software. http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AdobeIllustrator10
The comparisions and descriptions about how great Inkscape is makes the article much longer than it needs to be. We should try and keep the articles technical if not necessary neutral or unbiased.
I can't abide the use of unnecessary acronyms and abbreviations in technical writing. I so I have changed it from "can't" to "can not" (but a general restucturing of the document will probably soon make this redundant).
I dont think it would hurt for inkscape to make the effort to call always open (non-transient) utility windows Palettes and to use the term Dialog for the more traditional modal (and less often non-modal) transient dialogs. I've always hated how the GNU Image Manipulation Program failed to make this distinction.
- With Kwixson's approach, Inkscape would always seem inferior to AI,
because you can't win just by copying.
I think Inkscape is successfully following an "Embrace and Extend" strategy. I think "Copy or Improve" is the way to go do the same or better, not just different for the sake of being different. And inkscape is taking influence from a variety of diffent sources, not just Adobe so I think there is not much risk of being caught in that dead end.
Inkscape is already expending in different directions like InkView and other projects. Inkscape needs only to do something useful, anything useful, and ask artists to include Inkscape in their work. There is no real need to compete head on with other projects or try to replace them.
You can't be a better Illustrator than Illustrator, you need to be different to be better. And indeed Kwixson's text has a generally condescending tone and phrases like "is much less responsive", "is not as intuitive" etc. We need to be honest about Inkscape's weaknesses, but these judgements were often not based on any real weaknesses.
We probably need to be clearer about the underlying purpose and intent of the document and make it clear that such subjective judgements are entirely inapprorpriate. The document uses strong language and talks about superior or inferior, when a less subjective or neutral terms like "different" would be <strike>better</strike> more appropriate. ;)
- After all, who is this document for? Those who like AI the way it
is will never switch, so it seems stupid to target them in such a document.
In all honesty the notion of "switching" is a total dead end. It sets up unrealistic expectations and only leads to disappointment. Anyone who wants to promote Inkscape should try to promote it as another useful weapon in an arsenal of tools rather than any foolish attempt to replace tools that artists know and are happy using.
Any difference this document highlights should be considered carefully as valuable feedback and a potential opportunity to improve our terminology. (I happen to think the world has moved on since Illustrator and the term clones is no longer an obscure technical term and is in fact more approriate than trying to figure out what is meant by 'symbols' in this context.)
I think we need to target those who are used to AI but are looking for something different and better. And therefore we must stress our strengths and differences, explaining them in a way which is easy to understand for AI users.
Inkscape is free.
The only significant cost I can think of is that of learning to use Inkscape.
There is very little reason why anyone should be encourage to through out software they have paid for and works for them. Inkscape can work with your other tools not against them.
Let us not talk of replacing other software but providing alternatives and providing useful software.
Now on to specific examples.
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.
I would step back and say that it may not be the best idea to have these comparisions on our page about what we want to learn from Adobe Illustrator. A more objective comment might be about Inkscape having a different set of keybindings and that are no real plans to directly copy their keybindings (a task which is made much more difficult by Inkscape having keybindings for almost everything).
It would be better to simply say that Inkscape has more keybindings and let that speak for itself rather than being emphatic about that necessarily being superior.
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.
There might be a way to rephrase this like: "Illustrator users may be more comfortable converting Shapes to Paths but it is worth trying out the Shapes as they sometimes offer different/unique and useful behaviours" or somthing like that.
We should probably ask Kwixson to be a little bit more reserved about removing things and try to mostly add rather than remove.
C. In the section on Node tool, Kwixson provided some very cumbersome descriptions of how to convert a segment from curve to straight line and how to continue a path. When I proposed much simpler and more straightforward ways to do the same, he insisted that his descriptions closely match the way AI does this and therefore must stay. Once again, I don't see why one should go through all this when there's a much simpler way. Disclaimer on this point: I cannot even claim to completely understand Kwixson's descriptions, so I may have missed something important in them. Please anyone who knows AI's path editing, review these paragraphs and let us know what you think.
I hope that helps. I drafted this a few times but I'm still not quite sure I really said what I wanted to say but I hope we can put all this information to good use and redirect Kwixons enthusiasm and avoid this kind of conflict.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://www.abisource.com