FWIW, I am doing a small project - as a means of learning both Inkscape and Illustrator - on both in parallel and I am already listing comments on what I am doing in each program - that is, I have got my own comparison chart building up.

I am not a great believer in these comparisons as they are very personal, depending on each person's background experience, whether they are a keyboard" or "mouse" person, how and in what order they like to do things and so on. As illustration, I worked for 40 + years in the construction industry and it was never possible to say that that project was better than the other one, there are so many different parameters in the contexts. I suspect there will be no "better" program, just "different".

Regards

Adam

-------Original Message-------

From: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Date: 06/08/04 10:59:16 To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] new illustrator screenshots

On Sat, 5 Jun 2004, Trent Buck wrote:

<snip>

FWIW, I think inkscape's UI is already better than AI's.

I'm going to be devils advocate here, "FWIW" if you dont back it up with examples it is not worth anything. It is important to manage expectations, it is all to easy to get carried away with enthusiasm but it can backfire badly if (when) users are dissappointed by an interface or are not as impressed by "massive" improvements as we are (particularly improvements to the underlying technology that users wont necessarily appreciate). I think it is important that we make Inkscape look good by keeping the standard of discussion to a high level.

But I can see some of Inkscapes stengths. The wealth of keybindings is a big plus, although I'm not sure about the logic of some of them and there is a risk that having a keybing for almost everything will be confusing and potentially cause problems if users misclick but that is a whole other story but this is a big deal and Bulia has done great work.

That the User Inteface is in GTK and fits in with my Gnome Desktop is a also bonus. I'll try and list some more of Inkscapes strengths later.

Even if we talk only about the User Inteface of Adobe Illustator it still has many tools (to be topical lets say Layers for example) that Inkscape doesnt have (yet ;). You can achieve similar end results without them but Adobe has provide a tool, a better inteface to manage large numbers of objects.

You said Inkscape is better so I make it a challenge to you to list more ways, and maybe we can start a comparision chart in the Wiki which would be useful for promoting Inkscape.

My point is that I would urge caution when claiming Inkscape is better than anything because there is nothing stopping people from using both. Inkscape can complement and become part of a graphic designers toolset, think of the users, comparisons dont really benifit them.

Hopefully I've adequately expressed what I'm trying to say, so ping me back and lets see if we can count the ways we love Inkscape.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/