On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, miriam clinton (iriXx) wrote:
Just to introduce myself (hence top-posting, forgive my netiquette) - I'm a graphic designer, and while not a coder, I've joined several of the graphics tools developer lists to contribute from a designer's / usability point of view (an idea originally suggested to me by RMS when I explained to him why designers weren't moving to GNU/Linux).
Cool, well welcome aboard. :-)
I can't speak for other graphics projects but we definitely value getting feedback from users, especially those with design backgrounds. Usability is a key issue for us as well, and often put out new features for review and feedback on usability. We encourage downloading and testing the nightly snapshots, so you can provide critique on stuff that's getting development attention right now. We also place importance on keeping discussions friendly - as you can imagine we often find people with a lot of diverse viewpoints on things. :-)
I assume that Inkscape is attempting to be a form of Adobe Illustrator / Quark Xpress clone.
No, not exactly. We pull in ideas from a lot of different tools, and occassionally even come up with our own. We have no intent to clone any particular application, and are certain to disappoint someone looking for e.g. an open source drop-in replacement for Illustrator or Xpress. Obviously, there's pros and cons to this approach, but it's the approach we decided on pretty early on and it's been working fairly well so far.
We do have a rule that if we find ourselves in a tither over how to implement a feature, or can't come up with a better approach, to default to mimic Illustrator, although so far I don't think we've had to invoke that rule. I think this has forced us to really struggle to get each feature as high quality as possible.
Text inside a box, in Quark, is the essence of the program. This is a big problem if SVG code doesnt allow this.
SVG permits this using the TextFlow capability. We've implemented this for 0.40, but it's not yet advanced enough to say Inkscape implements true "Text In Box". Definitely a needed feature, and I'm sure we'll get it in time. For now it's a bit on the experimental side:
http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.40-CVS-linux-flow-01.png
Also, there doesnt seem to be an option to draw a text area, in which you could fill text, align left, right, center or justified.
Right. That is still to be implemented.
I'm no SVG coder but I would presume these things to be possible - and if Inkscape is going to compete with proprietary products (which at this stage it is already doing well) - then this will be an absolute essential.
You're correct. These are also necessary features for doing technical drawing (flowcharts and the like), which a number of people are passionate to see. This has actually been a long term goal since the start, and Text In Box is one of a set of needed features to achieve that. Line markers were added a while back, and work is underway to add object-linking.
Generally, the way development goes is that the backend rendering of a feature comes into being first, with the GUI controls to edit that feature following on later. For instance, I understand that with this release, Inkscape can render and manipulate linked objects, but there's no controls to create or edit the links within the tool. These can be expected in upcoming releases.
Same thing happened with layers; the basic core for layer management was there in 0.39, but there was no way to edit layers; that's been the focus for this release.
The attaching text to path is excellent though, and works very intuitively - this is my issue as a designer, as designers think in pictures- we don't work very well with an application that thinks like code. So far I've found Inkscape the most intuitive out of GIMP, Inkscape and Sodipodi (which I fail to get my head around).
Thanks! I think our secret is that our developers are also designers, and that we also have a tight feedback loop with users. So if you have ideas, please don't be shy about sharing them.
Bryce