On 2/21/06, Aaron Spike <aaron@...749...> wrote:
Seems that both Xara and Adobe are giving credibility to the really abominable unnaturalness and baroqueness of this approach. ;-)
Sure, but they both are much older than Inkscape. I don't know if they would choose to do the same thing if they were writing their applications from scratch now, as opposed to 10 or 15 years ago.
One thing I did not mention in my last mail is that, even when I do need PS output emulating transparency (and I do need it sometimes), at least Xara's attempts to do it have always been useless to me. The joints between the bitmap and vector parts of the image are always too unpredictable and too visible, which ruins the output. In all these cases, to do it right requires human intelligence: I group all things that use transparency AND most other thing that logically belong with them (usually they all constitute a loosely understood "background") together and export them all as bitmap. The rest of the composition (usually only text and sometimes line art) I export as PS. Then I quickly reassemble the bitmap background and the vector text in AI and send the result to the client (most clients require AI or PDF). This works nice, but as you can see, I can do (and I actually do) just the same with Inkscape+AI as I used to do with Xara+AI, so Xara's intelligent rasterizer-in-PS is of no use to me. YMMV, but this is my experience.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org