Just started trying to figure out Inkscape. Looks very nice so far. Never have really been able to get comfortable with Illustrator. Photoshop I'm ok with, but Illustrator just always seemed ... weird to me. But Inkscape feels pretty natural right from the start.
Love the python scripting too. Can't wait to start tinkering with it. I have done a bit of research on manipulating drawings and have plans for more things. (http://www.cavie-x.net/doodle/) It might be nice to implement future things as Inkscape Python scripts or perhaps more full-fledged plugins.
Stroke patterns seem to be limited to axis-aligned textures? Is there any way to transform the pattern applied to the stroke, at least in global coordinates? It would also be nice to be able to apply a texture in a curvilinear coordinate system relative to the stroke itself, with x being the direction tangent to the stroke, and y perpendicular to it. Being able to do curve-relative mappings opens the door to lots of possibilities. Like Hsu's "Skeletal Strokes" (which I see someone has already noted on the wiki: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Expression)
Why are spirals and stars top level tools? Seems very odd to have two such niche items on the main toolbar. Are they actually used that often? Why not gears or block arrows or speech bubbles or ... etc.
I'm curious about the choice of usage for Tab and Space keys. Space as select tool toggle is reasonable, since that is pretty frequently used. Still, seems to me like Photoshop's hold-toggle for canvas panning is a better option (i.e. needed more frequently), but easy access to the selection tool is also nice. But Tab as "select next" seems like a waste of prime keyboard real estate. I don't see how this is useful once you have more than a dozen or so elements in your drawing. Some kind of hide/reveal function might be good for this.
Is there a way to hide everything but the current selection? Or to use outline rendering for everything but the current selection? I was playing around with editing the about.svg splash screen and with all the blurring going on rendering was very slow when zoomed in. Outline mode fixed the speed, but then it's hard to tell what the current thing I'm editing really looks like. Anyway more flexible control over the rendering quality seems like it would be useful. An intermediate between outline and full would be nice too. It would basically turn off expensive effects like blur and just do a simple color rendering.
Finally seems like there's no way to customize key bindings right now?
That's all for now.
Thanks!
--bb