I just wanted to chime in to let people know of my use case that might be atypical.

I have been volunteering for a non-profit martial arts organisation, the Canadian Iaido Association, for the past 18 years and I use and have used inkscape for a large variety of print & digital graphics for the association.

I think I started using Inkscape around 2005 or so - mostly for my own personal pet project images and graphics, but around 2010 or so I started to use Inkscape heavily for the Canadian Iaido Association.

Here is a small list of what I've made with Inkscape:

1) Certificates (something to give to students who pass grading as a memento for yearly seminars). This involves Japanese kanji, hiragana, and katakana - along with some raster graphics which were unavoidable. I have used a plugin to add print marks which I then send off to a printer to print - my workflow for this has been working flawlessly for about 3-4 years.  I export to PDF with some set values and I get really high quality printed certificates from a local print-shop.  I use a unicode Japanese hiragana font I found online and vertical text.  I have gotten many comments on how nice the certificates are.

2) Banners: one of which is ~15 feet long with Japanese text, English text, and our Canadian Iaido Association Mon (crest).  Each of these was sent to another local printer who printed the graphics directly onto vinyl.  We installed some grommets in the banner and we hang it and use it year after year for the seminar.

3) Graphics for our website: http://www.iaido.ca. All graphics on there beyond photos are created with inkscape - please don't judge the website! It was made in 2002! (It should be getting a new redesign in the near-ish future)

4) Tracing and converting an old raster image of the Canadian Iaido Association mon into a vector graphic (Worked great, converted the text to the proper fonts and was able to modify some Japanese kanji when our status in Japan changed)

Overall, I highly recommend Inkscape for vector graphics - it has been an utter lifesaver that has allowed us to have professional quality results with zero cost beyond my volunteer time.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who is involved in this project. In my opinion it's clearly a shining example of what the open source community can accomplish.

Sincerely,

Chris Tooley, 6Dan ZNIR (全日本居合道連盟)

Secretary Treasurer,

Canadian Iaido Association