Introduction To Inkscape And Its Future 206
WarriorC writes "Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading (see: Illustrator-killer). Some screenshots of the latest CVS version are included." It's also a nice glimpse into an "unorganized" but nonetheless successful open source process.
Trivial? (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't that a fairly easy change to make to current open-source vector-drawing utilities? Serializing the output to XML instead of a binary format doesn't seem like the first feature you should mention when describing the advantages your program has over others... Then again, it is open source.
This bothers me (Score:3, Interesting)
The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.
At least Linus wants folks signing patches now. But how much damage has been done to the various Free projects we all rely on? How can anyone guarantee the pedigree of any of the code on my linux box with a "go ahead and paste it in!!" attitude?
Anyhow, I call this Kinkscape since I use KDE. You may know it as Ginkscape.
Inkscape Rocks!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
my job right now is creating svg based graphs and data visualizations and inkscape is by far the best product I've used (illustrator, sodipodi, xmlspy and even vi) for creating the base graphic before i have to build all the data driven elements.
now just let me link in a
Re:What makes this a killer? (Score:3, Interesting)
I need it (Score:4, Interesting)
Why SVG? (Score:3, Interesting)
TWW
Autopackage! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export (Score:4, Interesting)
Going the other way is what I'd really like to see. That is, import ps and PDF into Inkscape.
Oy first the GIMP. . . (Score:1, Interesting)
There is a reason Adobe owns the market for graphics applications; despite their best efforts (cf. application bloat and corporate arrogance). Photoshop and Illustrator are still the best combo out there for bitmapped/vector graphics.
Re:This bothers me (Score:3, Interesting)
The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could produce some sort of audit trail, send it to SCO, and say "here's who contributed what, go take it up with the author".
Linus did [groklaw.net] say that.
...
How much more of an audit trail do you want? The SCO-job was gonna happen. One way or another.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:5, Interesting)
The correct solution to your dilemma is to write good import and export filters for EPS into the SVG editor. Naturally, there are times when you would want to edit an EPS file, but such cases should be avoided. You almost always want to go back to the original program which created the EPS and edit in its native format. When this is impossible, you want the ability to convert EPS to SVG. That can currently be done with pstoedit [pstoedit.net], but unfortunately the SVG plugin is not free software.
The Open Source Office is here, and getting better (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:Its called The GIMP 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not that easy (Score:1, Interesting)
color models (Score:4, Interesting)
Inkscape is awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now somebody needs to fork Dia and make it work as well as Visio.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's why PDF was a success - it was basically a codification of a very limited and therefore tractable PS subset. Everyone has moved to PDF, even the AI format in last versions is PDF based. Which is much better than PS, but still rather stupid. Note my words: Adobe itself will be moving AI towards using SVG as a native format, simply because their old format is such a huge mess by now.
Re:color models (Score:4, Interesting)
The other thing is that once we've reached a decent level of SVG-compliance we should be in a pretty good shape to get involved with the development of the SVG spec and help nudge it in appropriate directions.
So we'll see how it works out.
Re:Inkscape is awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)
The item I like about Xfig is I can create template objects quickly and easily and add them to it library of objects. The last time I tried to make an object for Dia I just gave up.
Now if Inkscape could export to the .xfig format and Xfig to the proper .svg format that would be great! Using both tools would save me sometime.