Hi,
I've been a heavy Xara user until recently. Now I do about half of my design work in Inkscape. It cannot yet do everything that Xara can, but what it can do, it does in a much more usable and flexible way. One example is the complete and precise (pixel-by-pixel) keyboard control for scaling, rotating, and now kerning and letterspacing. I feel pain now when I use Xara and have to constatntly switch from keys to mouse and back. And as for Illustrator, oh, that's much worse in usability department than even Xara.
: In XaraX you can add bevels and shadows to vector objects while the : objects remain fully editable, it's a very nice extra that no one else seems : to have going out there including Illustrator, Canvas or CorelDraw!!
We will eventually have a much more complete support for this kind of features when we implement SVG filters. For example, Xara can only do monochrome shadows that are bound to the parent object (if you separate it, the shadow becomes a bitmap). We will have a gaussian blur of arbitrary object, which is a superset of Xara's shadow and never downgrades to a bitmap.
: bevel types total in XaraX). The ability to use a vector to slice or cut a : bitmap shape,
That's easy to do with our new boolean ops. Hopefully the slice command will be ready for the next version.
: I think it might be worth a look at to maybe glean some ideas for future : implementation to make Inkscape really stand out from the rest of the : Linux/Win based vector/SVG apps.
Don't worry, I will never forget Xara even when I leave it for good :) Many of the stuff I added to Inkscape was inspired by Xara, but I always tried to do it better than Xara instead of just copying it.
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