Linux Format UK Article
Hi all,
I wanted to let you know the Sept issue Linux Format UK has published a very nice review of Linux drawing applications, as well as a short tutorial for both Inkscape and Scribus.
Inkscape 0.38 got 8/10 overall and tied with OO draw to top honors. Overall a very positive review. Ease of use got 9/10. Many of the comments on missing features are already in 0.39 or are on the 0.40 roadmap.
Summing up, they said: "The future of Inkscape looks bright, especially if planned cooperation with Scribus and the GIMP comes to fruition, which would finally realise the concept of a full-spec graphics suite to Linux....The crucial omissions are support for PDF and EPS formats, though getting around this is not too onerous with a little help from Scribus."
If it is available locally it might be worth getting.
Enjoy, Peter
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 09:37 +0100, Plinnell wrote:
"The crucial omissions are support for PDF and EPS formats"
Can't that be gotten at rather simply through gnome-print? That's how (at least) AbiWord outputs to PDF.
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Plinnell wrote:
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 09:37:42 +0100 From: Plinnell <scribusdocs@...84...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, scribus@...119..., inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Linux Format UK Article
Hi all,
I wanted to let you know the Sept issue Linux Format UK has published a very nice review of Linux drawing applications, as well as a short tutorial for both Inkscape and Scribus.
We discussed it already in quite a bit of detail on the Inkscape developer list. (Inkscape also appeared much more briefly in issues 55).
Inkscape 0.38 got 8/10 overall and tied with OO draw to top honors.
concept of a full-spec graphics suite to Linux....The crucial omissions are support for PDF and EPS formats, though getting around this is not too onerous with a little help from Scribus."
if some one had time to evaluate the gnome-print support that we carried over from Sodipodi and make sure it works properly that would provide us with another way to generate PDF but it is unlikely to be as good as what Scribus produces.
- Alan
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 08:23, Alan Horkan wrote:
if some one had time to evaluate the gnome-print support that we carried over from Sodipodi and make sure it works properly that would provide us with another way to generate PDF but it is unlikely to be as good as what Scribus produces.
Last I checked, GNOME-Print support worked, but it has no GUI. So that basically means that you can't select anything to make PDF (or SVG for that matter). I think that no one ported the support to a GTK+ 2.x version of GNOME-Print. This would be a good, pretty straightforward project if someone wanted to take it on. I know that Kees has looked into it before.
--Ted
On Tuesday 17 August 2004 16:33, Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 08:23, Alan Horkan wrote:
if some one had time to evaluate the gnome-print support that we carried over from Sodipodi and make sure it works properly that would provide us with another way to generate PDF but it is unlikely to be as good as what Scribus produces.
Correct. Not to brag, but really the PDF engine in Scribus is really remarkable. In my testing with DTP pre-press tools really the quality now matches and in some cases exceeds some DTP apps.
Last I checked, GNOME-Print support worked, but it has no GUI. So that basically means that you can't select anything to make PDF (or SVG for that matter). I think that no one ported the support to a GTK+ 2.x version of GNOME-Print. This would be a good, pretty straightforward project if someone wanted to take it on. I know that Kees has looked into it before.
--Ted
The problem for both gnome print and kprinter for that matter is they are highly dependent on the version of Ghostscript to support certain PS3/PDF features. SVG and Inkscape make it trivial to create these objects, which are difficult to render directly to print.
Most distros ship the ESP version of Ghostscript which is patched to work with CUPS. ESP GS is at 7.07 atm. The default build for CUPS is PS2 postscript. CUPS will only build PS3 support with a ./configure switch.
The latest AFPL GS is 8.14 and 8.30beta1, which will eventually be GS 8.50. There are many many improvements, especially with higher end PS3/PDF1.4 features in GS 8.x, in some cases really impressive.
Even then, both gnome-print and kprinter often still won't support all PDF 1.4 features like true transparency and some kinds of graidents and blends.
AFAIK, no other OSS app really can do this besides Scribus and until distros start shipping more capable CUPS/GS setups, this situation is not likely to improve.
That is not to say it would not be worth adding real support for gnome-print. An alternative is to build direct support for CUPS into Inkscape directly.
Despite the limitations noted above, this does have some advantages to consider:
It eliminates another layer of dependencies and according to Franz, was not really difficult. Adding cups-devel and sometimes open-ssl-devel is much easier than adding all the gnome print library support. I know this from building the RH and Suse rpms :)
When installed, you can directly access the GIMP print driver features with CUPS. GIMP print 5.0 in testing looks really promising. In addition, it might make color matched printing a bit easier. IMO, this would benefit a large number of users with typical inkjets.
CUPS is natively supported on MacOSX and there are alternative ways to handle printing/PDF export on Win32.
Just some thoughts and observations to consider.
Cheers, Peter
On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 08:23, Alan Horkan wrote:
if some one had time to evaluate the gnome-print support that we carried over from Sodipodi and make sure it works properly that would provide us with another way to generate PDF but it is unlikely to be as good as what Scribus produces.
Last I checked, GNOME-Print support worked, but it has no GUI. So that basically means that you can't select anything to make PDF (or SVG for that matter). I think that no one ported the support to a GTK+ 2.x version of GNOME-Print. This would be a good, pretty straightforward project if someone wanted to take it on. I know that Kees has looked into it before.
He looked into it, but found it to not be as straightforward as you might assume...
Bryce
On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:13:47PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
He looked into it, but found it to not be as straightforward as you might assume...
Trouble is that is has a totally separate rendering system. The GUI is trivial. I might still have that code. But what needs to happen is that basically all the PS rendering we do needs to be duplicated with gnome-print functions. And there are a few things that do not translate well where the PS renderer just outputs magic PS phrases that don't have good one-to-one relations with any gnome-print functions.
I tried to short-cut it by feeding gnome-print the already-generated PS output, and while that worked for just _printing_, it didn't work for PDF generation or previewing, which is why I wanted to get gnome-print in there to begin with, so I dropped it.
On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 13:37, Kees Cook wrote:
On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:13:47PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
He looked into it, but found it to not be as straightforward as you might assume...
Trouble is that is has a totally separate rendering system. The GUI is trivial. I might still have that code. But what needs to happen is that basically all the PS rendering we do needs to be duplicated with gnome-print functions. And there are a few things that do not translate well where the PS renderer just outputs magic PS phrases that don't have good one-to-one relations with any gnome-print functions.
I tried to short-cut it by feeding gnome-print the already-generated PS output, and while that worked for just _printing_, it didn't work for PDF generation or previewing, which is why I wanted to get gnome-print in there to begin with, so I dropped it.
So, were you trying to use the Postscript output and put it into GNOME-Print? I thought that the printing stuff was sufficiently abstracted into Inkscape::Extension::Print? Is that getting passed Postscript data?
Hmmm, printing may be in a worse situation than I thought :(
--Ted
On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 08:58:38AM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
So, were you trying to use the Postscript output and put it into GNOME-Print? I thought that the printing stuff was sufficiently abstracted into Inkscape::Extension::Print? Is that getting passed Postscript data?
No, there's a PS module for Extension::Print, and a gnome-print module for Extension::Print. But there are things the PS module does to produce correct output that can't be done with the existing gnome-print functions.
(So, yeah, I was trying to short-circuit it by calling the PS function and handing it to gnome-print, but that only let me _print_ with the gnome-print UI. the PDF and preview stuff didn't work since PDF, PS, and preview are all separate "renderings" of it's internal stroke system.
Hmmm, printing may be in a worse situation than I thought :(
It's very tied to PS.
Actually EPS/PDF support was added in the 0.39 release. They reviewd a rather old (in Inkscape-time) version.
Bryce
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Charles Goodwin wrote:
On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 09:37 +0100, Plinnell wrote:
"The crucial omissions are support for PDF and EPS formats"
Can't that be gotten at rather simply through gnome-print? That's how (at least) AbiWord outputs to PDF.
participants (6)
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Alan Horkan -
Bryce Harrington -
Charles Goodwin -
Kees Cook -
Plinnell -
Ted Gould