Adobe Illustrator CS screenshots and comments.
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.
On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 18:00, Alan Horkan wrote:
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.
This is definitely a good candidate for GNOME Office integration. With regards to bonobo, afaik isn't bonobo being phased out of GNOME in general (or am I mishearing things)? There definitely needs to be an alternative approach that is cross platform.
Are you suggesting 'Gnumeric provides the SVG, Inkscape draws it'? That seems to be the logical way forward, making the Inkscape SVG canvas embeddeble in Gnumeric and AbiWord. Anyway, I digress. ;)
Great write up Alan.
Are you suggesting 'Gnumeric provides the SVG, Inkscape draws it'?
I wasn't so much think about 'Gnumeric provides...'
I was thinking/hoping that the because the graphing functionality of Inkscape has been seperated out into a library and that inkscape could reuse that only that part of Gnumeric and do so relatively easily without the need to do things by embedding.
However I haven't given much thought as to how an interface to the graphing functionality could be constructed. One of the ways would be to embed Gnumeric using Bonobo but I hope that there is some other more generic portable way.
Not sure I'm explaining it very well but unless a developer is interested there is not point in my talking about it. I should probably just file an RFE and hope it gets included in the long term plans.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Hi, these are my proposal, they come from my everyday use of dtp sofware: Another use is text editing. Is much confortable to write and edit text within Abiword. Place the text frames and everything is done in Inkscape. Text could be linked to files. If you edit a text in Abiword, it reflects in Inkscape. Another great advantage would be to make Glabels help Inkscape to prepare the Imposition for labels. You edit one label or bussiness card with Inkscape and a menu option: Impositon makes the card open in Glabels. Imposotion also helps people, bussiness or schools with few money, save some by making double copies in the same paper and cutting it.
I find both: -text editing facilities: Abiword -Cards/labels Imposition: Glabels really really helpful.
yours: Néstor Díaz
El Miércoles 10 Marzo 2004 21:18, Alan Horkan escribió:
Are you suggesting 'Gnumeric provides the SVG, Inkscape draws it'?
I wasn't so much think about 'Gnumeric provides...'
I was thinking/hoping that the because the graphing functionality of Inkscape has been seperated out into a library and that inkscape could reuse that only that part of Gnumeric and do so relatively easily without the need to do things by embedding.
However I haven't given much thought as to how an interface to the graphing functionality could be constructed. One of the ways would be to embed Gnumeric using Bonobo but I hope that there is some other more generic portable way.
Not sure I'm explaining it very well but unless a developer is interested there is not point in my talking about it. I should probably just file an RFE and hope it gets included in the long term plans.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 13:00, Alan Horkan wrote:
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).
Putting on my artist hat for a moment, that is something I'd love to have; file the RFE of course, but I think I have an initial assignment for you or anyone who's interested:
Basically, SVG only supports linear and radial gradients. Same for Postscript <= 1.2, I think.
Our goal of SVG-compliance means that that rendering has to be identical between basic SVG viewers and Inkscape (i.e. for features that SVG doesn't do directly, we at least need the ability to "fake" the appearance using standard SVG features).
Fortunately, Adobe Illustrator can print/export gradient meshes at older versions of Postscript, so apparently they can be simulated with an SVG-like set of facilities.
So, I need somebody to research how Illustrator simulates gradient meshes in "compatable" Postscript, and maybe add notes to the RFE describing it.
-mental
participants (4)
-
Alan Horkan -
Charles Goodwin -
MenTaLguY -
Nestor Diaz Valencia