So much for an unbiased write up, the Grid Mesh Tool rocks! (Well it produces great looking results, I haven't quite gottne the hang of using it yet).
I've taken screenshots and grabbed a few samples http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/
Screenshot of Adobe Illustrator CS showing the About Inkscape SVG (139 kb) http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/A... I was interested to notice that Adobe Illustrator CS doesn't render the About Inkscape SVG correctly (it also seems the version of librsvg used by the EOG viewer doesn't render it correctly either). The white part was not shown, I didn't make any changes, although I have selected it to show it is still there. It seems Adobe Illustrator isn't correctly interpreting the compound paths.
Screenshot of Adobe Illustrator CS showing the Graph Tool(s) and tooltips for various graphs (81 kb). http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/A... The screenshot shows many of the hidden tool options that you access by clicking and holding on tool button for a few seconds (and I should point out that usability people think click and hold is generally a bad idea). The screenshot was altered to include all the tooltips at once and usually only the active tool is coloured.
Screenshot of Adobe Illustrator CS in fullscreen mode with menubar showing a simple Bar Chart created using the Graph Tool. (53 kb) http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/A...
As soon as I tried the graph tool I immediately saw the potential for Gnome Office integration and the reuse of existing components if developers are interested. Embeddding Gnumeric graphs into Inkscape! Gnumeric can already be embedded using bonobo which unfortunately is not a cross platform technology but Gnumeric is evolving towards being crossplatform so Jody Goldberg (Gnumeric maintainer,) may be able to suggest a better way to do easily produce a portable graph tool dialog based on Gnumeric. The Gnumeric graphing engine is in a seperate library adn the graphs have an SVG backend, hopefully this would allow the graphs to be embedded and the resulting graphs could be embedded as SVG so that Gnumeric would only be needed for the creation not the viewing of graphs.
From my brief playing around with the Adobe Illustrator Graph tool I
didn't think it was particularly well done. It wasn't very obvious how to adjust the data of the graph (figured it out eventually though) and it was even less obvious how I might convert from one graph type to another without needing to create a whole new graph. My point is that if Inkscape were to have this feature it could easily do a better job of it.
Screenshot of Adobe Illustrator in fullscreen mode with menubar show the sample file Flower.ai that is included with Adobe Illustrator (195 kb) http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/A... I turned on a whole load of differnt pallettes and tried to show as many of the tools as I possibly could, and I made some selections so you could see the Grid Mesh.
I was told that it would be important to get some postscript out so I converted the sample Flower.ai file into EPS and SVG formats (with some slightly differnt options in each case) and the files are here: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/
I only have a 30 day Trial of Adobe Illustrator and although I'll try my best to produce lots of screenshots and write ups I urge you all (even the busy developers) to help out and try Adobe Illustrator CS as well or perhaps try Corel Draw (Corel Graphics Suite 12) or Macromedia Freehand (or Xara X from Bryce, or Deneba Canvas* from ACD Systems, or Jasc Web Draw) or any other vector graphics program that inspires you. Perhaps even some CAD or 3D graphics programs would inspire you, from what I've read Corel Graphics Suite 12 includes many advanced alignment guides and tools that make it quite useful for simpler technical drawing.
Enthusiastically Yours
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
PS Thanks for the software.
PPS I bet I've forgotten something, I probably should have broken this into several smaller emails.
* I got a 'free' full copy of Canvas 7 (current version is 9) inlcuded with Computer Arts magazine (annoying online registration required so I haven't tried it yet), published in the UK by Future publishing. Anyone else in the UK might be interested in trying it out.