Recently the wiki user Kwixson has significantly expanded and rewritten the "Inkscape for AI users" document on our wiki. Some of his edits seemed strange to me, and I proposed my variants. Unfortunately we could not reach a consensus, so after several mutual reverts we decided to post here and ask for the help and judgement from the community.
The latest revision with our extensive comments is here:
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?IllustratorUsers
Below I briefly list the things I disagree with.
0. To begin, I really appreciate the input on this document from the user who obviously knows AI well. This is some kind of expertise which I personally lack, so I would not be able to write such a document all by myself. Obviously it must be written from an AI user's point of view and use AI terminology and concepts.
1. However, Kwixson's approach seems to go further than that. He apparently wants this document to describe _only_ those things which you can do in Illustrator, and describe them exactly _the same way_ as one would do them in Illustrator, even if Inkscape offers more convenient methods. I think this is wrong.
2. With Kwixson's approach, Inkscape would always seem inferior to AI, because you can't win just by copying. You can't be a better Illustrator than Illustrator, you need to be different to be better. And indeed Kwixson's text has a generally condescending tone and phrases like "is much less responsive", "is not as intuitive" etc. We need to be honest about Inkscape's weaknesses, but these judgements were often not based on any real weaknesses.
3. After all, who is this document for? Those who like AI the way it is will never switch, so it seems stupid to target them in such a document. I think we need to target those who are used to AI but are looking for something different and better. And therefore we must stress our strengths and differences, explaining them in a way which is easy to understand for AI users.
Now on to specific examples.
A. Kwixson has removed my mention of keyboard accessibility, in particular keys for screen-pixel-sized transformations, claiming this is not important. I've seen this attitude before from other AI users; they tend to dismiss this because they don't have it. Those who are really using Inkscape (or Xara, where I got the idea from, though by now Inkscape's keyboard is superior even to Xara) will disagree.
B. In the section on shapes, Kwixson has removed my explanation of the difference between a shape and a path and the unique features that shapes offer. Instead he inserted an advice to do Ctrl+Shift+C (convert to path) as soon as you created a shape, to be able to node-edit it! This is because AI does not have shapes as such, treating everything as paths. I think this is plain stupid. Inkscape's shapes are clearly superior to those of any other program I know, and we must present them as such.
C. In the section on Node tool, Kwixson provided some very cumbersome descriptions of how to convert a segment from curve to straight line and how to continue a path. When I proposed much simpler and more straightforward ways to do the same, he insisted that his descriptions closely match the way AI does this and therefore must stay. Once again, I don't see why one should go through all this when there's a much simpler way. Disclaimer on this point: I cannot even claim to completely understand Kwixson's descriptions, so I may have missed something important in them. Please anyone who knows AI's path editing, review these paragraphs and let us know what you think.
Any feedback will be appreciated. I'm crossposting this to the user list too.