While having my first play with Inkscape yesterday i noticed that while its possible to save to an .ai Illustrator file, and an .eps, this can only be effectively used for print really.
In Illustrator, all text and objects appear selected and grouped when the item is open, and then when ungrouped, text is not editable on the path - you can pull the text all over the place in single letters but its not possible to re-word it.
Once I'd saved in Illustrator I couldnt re-open the file in Inkscape at all.
I'd be more than happy to test these problems as I've got both apps at the ready.
best,
mC~
In Illustrator, all text and objects appear selected and grouped when the item is open, and then when ungrouped, text is not editable on the path - you can pull the text all over the place in single letters but its not possible to re-word it.
True. That was just the simplest way to implement it. As you know placement of each letter in SVG is affected by kerning (both horizontal and vertical) and letterspacing, plus the text can be put on path. This all can be done in Postscript, but we just don't have a spare Postscript expert for implementing this. Showing each letter separately is much simpler to implement, and it's legal Postscript. Until recently the only way was to convert text to shapes; now you don't need to, but the text is broken into glyphs instead.
In fact, if you have a font change in the middle of the line, Postscript will have this line broken into separate objects anyway - that's just a limitation of the language. So I don't think that our "overdoing" it and breaking it at each chanracter is really that bad.
Once I'd saved in Illustrator I couldnt re-open the file in Inkscape at all.
Saved as SVG? That's a bug. Please submit the bad file to the bug tracker.
bulia byak wrote:
In Illustrator, all text and objects appear selected and grouped when the item is open, and then when ungrouped, text is not editable on the path - you can pull the text all over the place in single letters but its not possible to re-word it.
True. That was just the simplest way to implement it. As you know placement of each letter in SVG is affected by kerning (both horizontal and vertical) and letterspacing, plus the text can be put on path. This all can be done in Postscript, but we just don't have a spare Postscript expert for implementing this. Showing each letter separately is much simpler to implement, and it's legal Postscript. Until recently the only way was to convert text to shapes; now you don't need to, but the text is broken into glyphs instead.
In fact, if you have a font change in the middle of the line, Postscript will have this line broken into separate objects anyway - that's just a limitation of the language. So I don't think that our "overdoing" it and breaking it at each chanracter is really that bad.
How difficult is postscript? at present i'm a tourist in the US and have a lot of time on my hands..... if its something a designer can learn it might work... as in, is it as simple as LaTeX?
I think this is an absolute essential, either to train someone up or bring someone in....
I'm not much of a programmer but if someone can cooperate/hold my hand i might be able to do it...
Is there any other way around, other than Postscript? Vector/rasterised text? Illustrator uses this a lot...
Once I'd saved in Illustrator I couldnt re-open the file in Inkscape at all.
Saved as SVG? That's a bug. Please submit the bad file to the bug tracker.
Not yet tried that one but I will... at present its saving to .ai or .eps and then re-opening in Inkscape.
Best,
mC~
How difficult is postscript? at present i'm a tourist in the US and have a lot of time on my hands..... if its something a designer can learn it might work... as in, is it as simple as LaTeX?
I'd say it's simpler than LaTeX overall - much less primitives and the primitives are more limited. You can certainly try. Get a good book on Postscript (I have one but it's old, so I won't recommend it), fire up Ghostscript and see how it renders simple examples. It's also very useful to study the PS output of various programs and see the tricks they use.
But in general, I don't think PS output is worth so much effort. PS was initially designed as output format, not intended to be editable. If you look into PS output of e.g. dvips you'll see that it breaks the text on each kern as well as on each font change, which would also make such PS barely editable. Same for most other programs. As you know even PDF (based on PS) is not freely editable in Adobe's own tools; you can as much as fix a typo but not e.g. reflow a paragraph. Postscript is just a too low level format for that.
Now you might ask, what about Illustrator. The AI format is indeed based on PS (in recent versions, PDF), and this is in my opinion the worst design decision Adobe ever made. The too low-level nature of PS forced them to invent an ungodly amount of hacks to reliably save all information that is needed for a vector drawing, and as a result, the format is very different across Illustrator versions and very convoluted. I won't be surprised if a future version of Illustrator switches format once again to something SVG-based. Looking at the examples of SVG exported from Illustrator, I see that they put a huge number of extensions there to hold all their AI-specific stuff, which may be an indication that they're preparing a complete move to this format in the future.
So, my honest opinion is that we don't need to spend resources trying to chase AI, but instead concentrate on a good SVG support, because this is where things are going. AI format is an evolutionary dead end, and PS/PDF are going to be limited to output niche only. So I think we are OK so long as our Postscript output is valid and matches the SVG, but trying to attach more semantics to it is not worth the trouble.
Just an IMHO, of course, feel free to disagree :)
bulia byak wrote
So, my honest opinion is that we don't need to spend resources trying to chase AI, but instead concentrate on a good SVG support, because this is where things are going. AI format is an evolutionary dead end, and PS/PDF are going to be limited to output niche only. So I think we are OK so long as our Postscript output is valid and matches the SVG, but trying to attach more semantics to it is not worth the trouble.
Just an IMHO, of course, feel free to disagree :)
I am no programmer - and perhaps its better to focus on unique features rather than chasing AI - but /all/ programs of this type - Freehand, Fireworks etc, have the ability to wrap text in a box - even Dreamweaver (web GUI design).
It'll leave you a long way behind the rest if you can't text wrap within a box.
best,
mC~
I am no programmer - and perhaps its better to focus on unique features rather than chasing AI - but /all/ programs of this type - Freehand, Fireworks etc, have the ability to wrap text in a box - even Dreamweaver (web GUI design).
Sorry I don't follow you. We can wrap text in a box as per SVG 1.2, as I wrote in another thread. This has absolutely no relation to the PS/AI export discussed here.
bulia byak wrote:
I am no programmer - and perhaps its better to focus on unique features rather than chasing AI - but /all/ programs of this type - Freehand, Fireworks etc, have the ability to wrap text in a box - even Dreamweaver (web GUI design).
Sorry I don't follow you. We can wrap text in a box as per SVG 1.2, as I wrote in another thread. This has absolutely no relation to the PS/AI export discussed here.
Looks like a bit of the infamous 'thread drift'....
In any case - could you please explain to me how one wraps text within a box in Inkscape? It doesnt seem to be intuitively clear from the interface (another designer essential) - a designer will 'pick up' an interface and just run with it- they wont read manuals, and quite often not even read the menu until later. What a designer expects is to, say, draw a box or path and have text wrap /within/ the area defined (not text mapped onto the shape of the box, as in a different subject). Or alternately, most designers are used to dragging a box area with the Text tool in which they can type into - its only Quark that requires text boxes to be defined.
best,
mC~
In any case - could you please explain to me how one wraps text within a box in Inkscape?
As I wrote, currently there's no UI. We can render files with wrapped text but we cannot yet generate them. That's planned for 0.41. But the rendering part is of course the most difficult. You can play with the share/examples/flow-sample.svg file.
not even read the menu until later. What a designer expects is to, say, draw a box or path and have text wrap /within/ the area defined (not text mapped onto the shape of the box, as in a different subject). Or alternately, most designers are used to dragging a box area with the Text tool in which they can type into - its only Quark that requires text boxes to be defined.
Yes. Dragging with the text tool will create a rect and put text cursor into it. Just need to code that :)
participants (2)
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bulia byak -
miriam clinton (iriXx)