January 2005 - Inkscape Users

My impressions on Inkscape
by Jozsef Mak 28 Jan '05

28 Jan '05

As a long time Macromedia Freehand user I was curious about the latest release of Inkscape, which I have been testing for about a week. These are my observations. Inkscape's interface is so unintuitive that it almost hurts. The layout and the look and feel of the various panels and dialog boxes are awful. They lack coherence, functionality and are badly implemented. Examples: the Object properties palette is a puzzle; I expected that this would be one of the most important panels where the essential parameters of the selected object can be found and edited. I've found nothing to edit there. The font palette looks like it was borrowed from an office suite. The implementation of gradients are so weird that hard to describe. The Export Bitmap dialog box is poorly designed, the window wouldn't even close after saving files. The program lacks the tool to group panels into different panel groups. In addition, most of the features are incomplete. The new text on path is nice but, if you design a circular logo, most of the time, you would want to put text on the top and on the bottom of the circle. Can you do this in Inkscape? I couldn't figure out. Also when export text on path, it exports the path as well, which is unacceptable. Another example: the implementation of patterns. It is nice to have it but it is basic to have the tool to edit it after applied to a shape (moving, scaling and so on). Without this the feature has limited use. I also couldn't rename pattens but stuck with the generic names. I missed the preset zoom settings at the left bottom corner, as well. A word on priorities. In my view adding features should proceed from the most essential toward the less important. At the hart of a vector drawing program one expect to find tools, such as swatches, gradients, tints and pattern palettes and the capacity to to export and import them from one document to the other. Symbols are also essential to work efficiently. Until they are implemented pointless adding less commonly used ones like bitmap tracing, for instance. Any graphic artist can tell that this is a relatively seldom used tool in the actual work environment. By the way, I liked the Tracing Bitmap tool. What impressed me in Inkscape is the ingenious and interactive ways it allows to edit shapes. Also the fact that I could stroke path with gradient without first expanding it. I found great that I could export a selection rather than the entire ardboard; this feature dearly missed even in adobe illustrator. I also liked the options on the upper menu bar. This helps setting parameters effortlessly and it eliminates the need of dealing with additional dialog boxes which are always nuisances. I liked the layers and the fact that they are collapsible�-one more thing less cluttering the work environment. Would be nice if I could move object from one layer to the other with a click of a mouse. My conclusion: before adding additional features polish up and complete the existing ones. Also before go on adding more tools implement the fundamentals (swatches, tints, gradients, patterns, symbols and so on) and redo the interface from scratch. jozsefmak

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loading large files
by MenTaLguY 28 Jan '05

28 Jan '05

I've finally had an opportunity to spend some time analyzing the problem you had loading that large SVG. Your file did eventually load, although I think it may have taken as much as half an hour to do so on my machine. In Inkscape, sibling XML nodes are currently kept in singly-linked lists, which are not an efficient data structure when dealing with large numbers of siblings (in this case, more than 87000). It is possible to use faster data structures, but they would come at the cost of using extra memory. As it was, once the document loaded my machine ran out of memory when the renderer kicked in. So, I'm not really sure what the best course of action would be. I do think we have a problem dealing with large documents in general. I am CCing the development list for their suggestions. -mental

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Re: [Inkscape-devel] Re: [Inkscape-user] loading large files
by unknown＠example.com 28 Jan '05

28 Jan '05

Hi, Thanks very much for looking into this further. I re-emerged inkscape and tried loading the file again but, I'm afraid, gave up after 12 minutes or so. <snip> > > Your file did eventually load, although I think it may have taken as > > > much as half an hour to do so on my machine. > > > > Wow, it was under 2 minutes on mine :) (I'm speaking about > > 1236745up.svg, is this what you tried?) > > Yep. I was also starting to swap a bit towards the end, which may have > contributed. > > Mine didn't get to the point of swapping, instead (watching top) I see that it rapidly uses up 55.5% or so of memory and then stops using any more (at least until I killed it). What machines you are running on? Mine is a 1700MHz Pentium M, 512Mb ram. <snip> > > Just FYI, Batik ran out of memory on that document, and Adobe never > > loaded it either (maybe it would if I waited long enough, but I doubt > > that). So Inkscape was the only software capable of loading and even > > editing it. > > Yes, Batik failed for me as well. I didn't have Adobe handy. > > w.r.t singly-linked-lists, does Sodipodi store these structures differently? Sodipodi opens this file in about 30 seconds on my machine. However, both sodipodi and my colleague's copy of Adobe, which also loads the file, seem to chop off the image (which is very wide) at its left and right extents - so perhaps they don't really load the whole file. Perhaps I'm just asking too much & should make my files smaller? Thanks again, gav. P.S. Incidentally, Adobe has a nice feature - a progress bar while it's loading... ___________________________________________________________ Book yourself something to look forward to in 2005. Cheap flights - http://www.tiscali.co.uk/travel/flights/ Bargain holidays - http://www.tiscali.co.uk/travel/holidays/

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Head's up on 0.41 release
by Bryce Harrington 27 Jan '05

27 Jan '05

Hi guys, This is just an fyi that we're entering the run-up to the 0.41 release today, and have entered feature-freeze mode. I guestimate we'll have the official 0.41 release out in about 10 days. Meantime, this would be an opportune time to be downloading and testing the nightly snapshots. We'll probably be announcing release candidates starting in a week or so. At this point we're looking for crash bugs, data loss, and build failures, that have not yet been reported. 0.41 is primarily a bug fix release; there's a few new features but no major changes. The main motivation for this release is that 0.42 is going to have major changes going in, and want to get a good stable release out before we delve into this work. Bryce

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Re: German Tutorials
by Robin Pfeifer 26 Jan '05

26 Jan '05

Ted Gould: > I don't know what you schedule looks like, but we're probably going to > have a release in the next week or two, so if you hurry we could > probably get a few into this release. Bryce Harrington: > Yes, that'd be a great addition. Translation of the tutorials should be > straightforward, but please ask questions if you run into any trouble. Thanks for the welcome. I doubt that I can be *that* fast, though. Especially as I keep running into a strange problem I haven't yet found a solution for (and it appears not to be in the list of known bugs either). I have started out by taking the basic tutorial, copying it, and replacing the English paragraphs one at a time with German ones. In order to keep the formatting (bold face for keys to be pressed) I have tried to write my text around the bold parts so I could simply re-use them, but in some cases I have had to do that formatting myself in the XML editor, and that's my first encounter with direct XML formatting ever (there's a really loud and pleading, almost whining FEATURE REQUEST coming up here: decent text formatting!). Anyway, here's the problem: maybe I have done something wrong during my dabbling with the editor, but now whenever I write or delete something in those paragraphs, the amount of used RAM is stepped up by as much as 2 MB per keystroke. Add a letter, +2MB. Delete it again, +2 MB. That goes un until most free RAM is used (some 205 MB of 218 MB free RAM), then the same goes on in swap, 2 MB at a time, until both RAM and swap are full. After which the hard disk unsurprisingly begins to work like hell, the system becomes unresponsive and after a quarter of an hour or so, during which the system only staggeringly accepts mouse movement and the clock only counts every ten seconds or even more rarely, Inkscape disappears. I can work around this problem by saving and closing before RAM and swap are full, then closing Inkscape and opening it again. RAM won't be freed unless I close the program. That way I'm unable to edit more than a paragraph, most of the time even less, before I have to restart the program. I haven't been able to get the same error in a fresh file, even with using the XML editor and entering substantially more text than I've already translated. It doesn't appear in a Tutorial file I start editing anew, at least not immediately (though I haven't tried to get as far as I got with my first file), but it does get inherited if I copy the paragraphs I've already done over into a new file. If anyone is interested in taking a look at that file I can send out the unfinished translation file by e-mail. And then there's one other thing I've found out so far: using ` to cycle through zoom views does not work with a German keyboard layout, as you need the Shift key to even get this symbol (the Shift-less symbol on the same key is '). These symbols are used to make accented letters (é, è) unless the so-called 'dead keys' are disabled, but even then it seems you can't use them for cycling through zoom settings; at least I can't. Robin

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German Tutorials
by Robin Pfeifer 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

Hi, I'm Robin, new on the list as of today. I'm German, and I really like Inkscape. In a German Linux forum I saw a post this morning asking for German versions of the Inkscape tutorials, and it appears there are none - at least none that I could find. So if there are no objections, I'd like to do those translations myself, and of course make them available to the public, as a way of repaying the inkscape community for providing such a valuable program. Robin >From MAILER-DAEMON Mon Jan 24 13:20:10 2005 Message-ID: <1106601585.41f566719bc05@...32...> Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:19:45 -0500 From: mental@...438... To: inkscape-user(a)lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Hi, I'm a beginner References: <200501222208.01955.valc@...389...> <200501242145.08964.valc@...389...> <41F40914.50107@...355...> <200501251421.22668.valc@...389...> In-Reply-To: <200501251421.22668.valc@...389...> MIME-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.2.6 X-Originating-IP: 208.20.220.69 X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-20030616-p7 at rydia.net X-Spam-Score: 0.2 (/) X-Spam-Report: Spam Filtering performed by sourceforge.net. See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. Report problems to http://sf.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=1&atid=200001 0.2 NO_REAL_NAME From: does not include a real name Sender: inkscape-user-admin(a)lists.sourceforge.net Errors-To: inkscape-user-admin(a)lists.sourceforge.net X-BeenThere: inkscape-user(a)lists.sourceforge.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9-sf.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: inkscape-user(a)lists.sourceforge.net List-Unsubscribe: <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user>, <mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=unsubscribe> List-Id: Inkscape User Community <inkscape-user.lists.sourceforge.net> List-Post: <mailto:inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net> List-Help: <mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=help> List-Subscribe: <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user>, <mailto:inkscape-user-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=subscribe> List-Archive: <http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=inkscape-user> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Quoting Valentin Cristescu <valc@...389...>: > Thank you, it's ok now. The XML Editor still doesn't work, but I don't kn= ow > if I need him. It's to technical for me. What is the problem with the XML editor? > So, the tab advise it's working. Right now I have one question: where can= I > find the wireframe view? It's not been implemented yet. -mental

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OSDL Desktop Linux Capabilities
by Bryce Harrington 25 Jan '05

25 Jan '05

For those interested in desktop linux in general, OSDL put out a first public draft (v0.9)of its DTL Capabilities document, for community review and comment. http://osdl.org/lab_activities/desktop_linux/DTL09/ Please feel free to send comment through myself or the mailing list on that page. (List subscription info is at lists.osdl.org.) Bryce

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converting svg to eps via commandline
by Steffen Glückselig 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

Hello, I'd like to convert a bunch of my svgs to eps-format automatically via the commandline. I noticed that there is no option like the one for exporting png but I found ------ -p PRINTER, --print=PRINTER Print document(s) to the specified printer using `lpr -P PRINTER'. Alternatively, use `| COMMAND' to specify a different command to pipe to, or use `> FILENAME' to write the PostScript output to a file instead of printing. Remember to do appropriate quoting for your shell, e.g. inkscape --print='| ps2pdf - mydoc.pdf' mydoc.svg ------ in the man-page which seems to come close. What do I have to do to get eps on a windows-system? thanks and best regards, Steffen

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Re: [Inkscape-user] Hi, I'm a beginner
by bulia byak 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:19:45 -0500, mental@...439... <mental@...439...> wrote: > Quoting Valentin Cristescu <valc@...389...>: > > > Thank you, it's ok now. The XML Editor still doesn't work, but I don't know > > if I need him. It's to technical for me. > > What is the problem with the XML editor? Probably http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1107866&group_id=9…

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Re: [Inkscape-user] Opening large files
by unknown＠example.com 24 Jan '05

24 Jan '05

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 18:53 -0500, MenTaLguY wrote: On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 gavinband@...418... wrote: > > > Hi, > > Sorry if this has already been dealt with but: > > I have a large svg file which I cannot open in Inkscape (v.0.40). > > My file is a large graph produced with graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/), > > but inkscape seems to hang using 99% of the cpu when I try to open it. > > The same file opens in sodipodi 0.34, though admittedly it takes about 10s > > to open. After opening sodipodi is using about 68% of memory, on my 512Mb > > machine. Inkscape seems to stop using more memory after 55%, but it never > > opens. The svg file is about 5.1Mb. > > What platform are you on? > > -mental > Oh - sorry - Gentoo Linux, kernel 2.6.3, Gnome 2.8. gav. ___________________________________________________________ Book yourself something to look forward to in 2005. Cheap flights - http://www.tiscali.co.uk/travel/flights/ Bargain holidays - http://www.tiscali.co.uk/travel/holidays/

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