Hello folks,
My name's Phil. I'm a 'house-husband' these days, though until June I was a low-temperature physicist, working in the research labs at Lancaster University. My wife and I had this long-term agreement that when she got promoted to Professor, I would 'retire', run the household, look after the kids, etc. And lo and behold, she did, so I did! Best move I ever made!
When I'm not cooking, cleaning, washing or acting as the kids' taxi service, I'm involved in a variety of projects for a variety of people requiring me to produce drawing and lay out pages. Page layout is almost all done in Indesign CS2, but, since switching from PC to Mac I've (thus far) dismally failed to find a drawing package that doesn't try to fight back.
I'm a fairly recent (autumn 05) switcher from PC to Mac (dual 2GHz PowerMac). There's only one thing about my PC which I miss, and that's Xara (I used Xara right from it being called 'Xara Studio' up to the name change to 'Xara Xtreme'). Xara Ltd are (or were?) supposed to be sponsoring an open source version of Xtreme to run on the Mac, but there doesn't seem to be any progress - I suspect that the advent of Macs which can run Windows has removed some/most of the impetus behind this. The only thing I don't like about my Mac is the lack of a decent, usable, drawing package. I don't want to change to an Intel Mac (yet), and even if/when I do, I really don't want to run Windows on it - I started using a Mac to get away from Windows (sorry, to any/all the Windows fans here - I just got fed up with it!)! So I want a drawing package that runs under OS X.
Illustrator is so clunky it's untrue - I *can* use it, but fighting it to get it to do what I want robs me of all my creativity; Canvas X is a bug-fest; Eazydraw doesn't have enough features and is too 'eazy'; etc; etc.
I've just downloaded the X11 version of Inkscape. So far so good but...
The text on things like rulers is so tiny that I can't read it. Is there any way to make it bigger? I've trawled through the document setup and preferences and can't find a way to do it. At the moment it makes using it *almost* impossible. My screen isn't exactly huge, but neither is it tiny - it's an Apple 20" Cinema Display.
The 'tooltips' appear under the Dock (which I usually keep on the LHS of the screen), unless I undock the toolbar, in which case the tooltips appear *under* the toolbar: AARRGGHH!!! Either way, they're unreadable. Probably won't matter once I get the hang of the package, but for a newbie, it's a PITA!
The size of objects seem to change as one changes the thickness of their outline - seems odd to me - it makes aligning things a bit 'hit and miss' if you then go back and edit them later. Admittedly, Xara had a similar (but not identical) issue - it's the one and only area where I think Illustrator is superior.
Thanks, Phil
I used to earn a living, now I have a life!