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.
Speaking of Vector Graphics program (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program (Score:2)
If they can integrate this project within Quanta, we're talking about something killer :)
Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Speaking of Vector Graphics program (Score:5, Informative)
Reasons to fork (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I think the main motivations were to change the code to C++, to rely on third-party libraries if these were actively maintained and (I think) were available on different platforms, to get an interface more HIG-compliant and to make emphasis on a small core with extension capabilities.
But you could read it better in this [inkscape.org] pages [inkscape.org] of Inkscape's wiki.
Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
integrating (Score:2)
An integrated enviornment would be nice but with all of the other features to be added to gimp is it practical to add this to the list.
Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
A vector drawing package on a par with commercial offerings would be a huge addition to the free software world, and UI is very important in that area. Sodipodi is pretty good, IIRC.
Re:Cool: Canvas handles vector and raster (Score:2)
Canvas [deneba.com] from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba) handles Vector and Raster/bitmaps within the same application beautifully. Canvas is primarily a technical drawing/illustration package with image/raster graphics and page layout support. In terms of functionality, Canvas is sort of a technical/precise version of Illustrator with 60-80% of Photoshop functionality and light InDesign/Pagemaker layout capabilities added in.
Canvas is a commercial application, but it's a must have tool for me as an interface desig
Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi, with a more open approach and an emphasis on using C++. The result is a program that builds upon Sodipodi's good points by adding a better user interface, handsome new features (like boolean operations), as well as being a lot more stable.
My impression is that Lauris Kaplinski (the Sodipodi maintainer) was doing a David Dawes impression and holding Sodipodi development back in one way or another, and Inkscape is the result of all the frustration that built up. Now the momentum is with Inkscape which has a bright future with a lot of active developers.
Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair. Inkscape is a very well organised project and Bryce in particular is very diligent about keeping the future well mapped out [inkscape.org]. The "unorganised" jibe is really because Bryce and Co let people hack on features they want to hack on, and readily accept them if they meet a decent standard. But isn't that what open source is all about? And isn't the reason for many forks and/or project stagnation due to this being prevented? I'd say "open minded" is a more appropriate term.
Re:Cool (Score:2)
Good UI? I thought you were talking about GIMP! =P
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
While I keep reading that the Gimp's interface was greatly improved with 2.0, when I've tried it, it felt as kludgy as ever. The Gimp does a lot of cool things, but create a smooth workflow it does not. For that reason alone, I feel it's better that this be a stand alone project. It allows them to build a much lighter system aimed at doing one thing and one thing well.
In general, if you're working with vector graphics, you're not really going to care about immediately working with raster. That said, I do think it'd be cool if someone could take the Gimp and strip it down to a very focused UI like Inkscape seems to be doing, creating a set of interlocking common programs like Adobe currently does with their Creative Suite. However, for this type of work, the plug-in-replacing-an-app mentallity is exactly what needs to be avoided because while it may work, an artist will usually be much happier with a lighter program aimed at doing what they want it to do, not ten thousand features they'll never need creating a cluttered and confusing menu system and obscure keyboard shortcuts.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
No, vector graphics are a different enough beast, that you need a completely different set of tools for dealing with them. What you really want is for gimp to be able to import external SVG things and convert them to an arbitrarily scaled bitmap representation in a layer. From what I've seen, gimp 2.0 can already do that.
Though, It would be nice if gimp could regenerate the layer automatically when the source SVG file changes. I don't think it can do that yet.
ooooh (Score:2)
Free Toys (Score:2)
I'm all about the "free" as in "speech" idealism, but since I can't read a line of programming it's a little less important to me than "free" as in "beer".
I haven't gotten to play with Sodipodi yet, but I'm glad that there are free alternatives to Illustrator. Now that I'm not in junior high anymore, the coolness of using cracked programs has lost much of its appeal and I'm grateful for the chance to use legitimate apps that, at least pretty well, approximate "the real thing".
The Dalai LLama
... broke-as
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.
Re:Trivial? (Score:5, Informative)
(Yes I know that PSD is a published format...)
Re:Trivial? (Score:4, Informative)
Come on, you only needed to read just a sentence or two more of the article to get the explanation.
Re:Trivial? (Score:3, Funny)
Unlike a certain OS video editor that the name of escapes me, which had -THAT- as its very first Feature element. Yeah, that makes me leap into inspirational fury.
Re:Trivial? (Score:2)
One feature I'd really like to see in these tools is some kind of networked blackboard. I'll often be explaining something to a friend online and damn it if I couldn't expl
What makes this a killer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What makes this a killer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Its called The GIMP 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Inkscape doesn't need to kill, its an alternati (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually market share has a lot to do with price and nothing to do with user base. User base and market share have little to do with each other. Debian has no market share in the OS market but they do have a user base. A market implies commerce and price, which is not necessary for a distro like Debian, in order to have a user base.
Re:What makes this a killer? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What makes this a killer? (Score:2, Insightful)
1) There is no GIMP marketshare because GIMP is free. This might change with the buyable version at WinGimp.com [wingimp.com].
2) This is one tool less missing on a linux desktop. The list of "missing apps" got rather short recently
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.
Re:This bothers me (Score:4, Informative)
Right before your quote, "We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised; it passed on all counts.".
Did ya miss that on your way to bash these folks?
Re:This bothers me (Score:2, Insightful)
Ie; if the SAMBA team wasnt prepared to prove (and no doubt they are, this is for the sake of argument) that the code was indeed their own original work, and none of it was copy/pasted from the leaked Win2k source, then it's a timebomb ticking on all those servers.
The SCO fiasco crap could have easily ended if Linus could pro
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.
Re:This bothers me (Score:2)
Linus does not need to do this, because the authorship of every piece of Linux is trivially easy for anyone to look up for themselves.
Every file in the Linux kernel has a copyright notice. This provides both an identification of the author(s), and a legal claim that the author(s) own the code.
In addition, the version control sy
Re:This bothers me (Score:2)
So...your point was something completely unrelated to the article you posted to?
Okay
( And for future reference, not all of us understand PHB-ese. You might not want to use acronyms unless they are more well known than the words you are replacing. ie: dns, www... )
Re:This bothers me (Score:5, Informative)
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
Re:This bothers me (Score:5, Informative)
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
And also note that before this there had been another patch that implemented booleans that we had to reject on licensing problems with a General Polygon Clipping library it used. We'd contacted the GPC author to see if he would let us use it under the GPL, but his license was firm (it allowed for educational, non-commercial use only IIRC), so we ended up not being able to use it.
"Check licensing, then patch, and ask other questions later" doesn't quite have the same ring though. ;-)
Re:This bothers me (Score:3, Insightful)
You have completely misunderstood what the author of the article was saying. The questions he was referring to are the developer questions - "should we include this feature?
Not that easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Good luck and success nevertheless, Bryce!!
Re:Not that easy (Score:4, Insightful)
A usable alternative is okay. Both project can coexist you know...
Offtopic rant: Why is every software company deemed NOT successfull if it doesn't kill its competitor? You don't have to be Microsoft to be successful...
Re:Not that easy (Score:2)
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:Inkscape Rocks!!! (Score:2)
and no "dia" doesn't qualify
Re:Inkscape Rocks!!! (Score:3, Funny)
ANYTHING IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR VISIO.
Thank you. That is all.
Re:Inkscape Rocks!!! (Score:2)
I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export (Score:5, Informative)
Scribus is kind of a sister project, and we've been working closely with them to get perfect import of Inkscape SVGs.
That's not to say that Inkscape shouldn't have PDF etc support in the future, but it's already not too painful if you have Scribus handy.
Re:I'm waiting for milestone 9, EPS, PDF export (Score:3, Informative)
We on the Scribus Team [scribus.net] have begun over the past few months working closely with the Inkscape devels on improving SVG import export with with both apps. You can take your Inkscape created SVG, import it into Scribus and create a highly compliant "press-ready" CMYK or PDF/X-3 PDF. Thanks to steady efforts and collaboration, support is improving daily. A few notes and comments:
I need it (Score:4, Interesting)
Why SVG? (Score:3, Interesting)
TWW
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2)
Re:Why SVG? (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, dude, it is the standard file format for vector graphics in the print publishing world. Saying it has no inherent value is like saying computers don't need solder.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2)
it is a fantastic final format, ready for printing, but it makes a crap file format, in that it has no declarative value: it is an executable.
This means that in order to be useful you need to have semantically meaningful coments in the file.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2)
Re:Why SVG? (Score:4, Informative)
The EPS format is just a set of comments around a PostScript program. Now, postscript is a complete programming language. People have implemented things like ray tracers and web servers in postscript, and there is nothing to prevent you from putting things as complex as that in your EPS files
Even if your program had a complete postscript interpreter, how would it translate an arbitrary program to something that makes sense in a gui?
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2)
But I work across the hall from a Mac user who does this all day every day and has done for at least 15 years. How does a Mac doe it?
TWW
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:2)
EPS is lots and lots more complex than SVG. SVG is XML, which was purposefully designed to be simple, whereas EPS is a full blown programming language.
Re:Why SVG? (Score:4, Informative)
As I see it, SVG is "The Future." As for "real world", I believe SVG will be in the "real world" pretty quickly, and it's already gaining a lot of foothold, which can only be a good thing.
It works fine as an editable format that can be worked on in many different applications without losing any data in between (EPS is just an intermediate format that loses editing-related information) - there's common stuff that specifies the image data and additional, program-specific stuff can be added with additional XML namespaces (sodipodi and inkscape both do this).
Also, you can put any kind of XML metadata inside SVG, for example, Dublin Core elements, Creative Commons tags, you name it. You can do that much hot "semantic web" stuff in it, I suppose.
SVG also interfaces nicely with web browsers, right through the DOM. (At least in theory. Let's wait until Mozilla finally gets SVG out of the alpha, and Microsoft to catch up within a decade or two =) Think Flash, but without a stone wall between the plugin and the browser.
Also, SVG supports graphically stuff that's pretty hard to find in PS world. I still have slight problems getting alpha blending to work beautifully in EPS files (at least in OSS apps!), but I've not had any problems with that in SVG.
SVG is technically easy to work with. It's just XML with some plain-text sublanguages (like path declarations). It is not a Turing-complete language like PS, but it's rather purely just data, so it's probably far easier to work with. Yeah, in this respect, it's perhaps not as "powerful" as PS, but I've mostly seen PS's "power" being used only in gimmicky situations. Algorithms may get you to the stars, but Data gets you pretty damn far in real world.
Autopackage! (Score:4, Interesting)
Mmm... I'd love it for two of my favorite open source projects to come together.
Re:Autopackage! (Score:3, Informative)
Note: there are known issues with certain (rare) setups which have a non standard umask and X security settings. If you are on a stock Red Hat/Fedora install all should go smoothly (let us know if it does not). If you have tweaked your umask or have X security too restrictive (programs run as root must be able to connect) things will break.
If you
Re:Autopackage! (Score:2)
AutoPackage is the coolest thing ever! I am frankly amazed that Linux install could be this easy. I am now off to package my own work with it if I can...
Re:Autopackage! (Score:2)
Check in with #autopackage on freenode, or autopackage-dev before you do that so we can give tips and so you can keep track of what's going on.
What about Sodipodi? (Score:2)
"There have been a number of popular Open Source vector graphics tools such as tgif, idraw, Sketch, and xfig, but one of Inkscape's distinguishing features"
Ahem! What about Sodipodi? I think it's very worthy of recognition. I guess their developers haven't done enough to promote it.
Re:What about Sodipodi? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Inkscape project is (as I understand it) flying past Sodipodi in features partly because it has a more liberal feature inclusion process.
Bryce deserves a good bit of credit for that.
Re:What about Sodipodi? (Score:2)
Re:What about Sodipodi? (Score:2)
Inkscape = Sodipodi fork (Score:2)
The Open Source Office is here, and getting better (Score:2, Interesting)
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How bout we shut up about killing? (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't believe the Inkscape folks
are trying to make an Illustrator Killer anymore
than Linus is trying to make a Windows Killer.
Like most OSS developers, they are just trying
to make good software that is free and does what
they want it to do.
When people start calling them ___ Killers,
then we get all the crap about "But Gimp can't
compete with Photoshop!" and suddenly
they get compared and deemed poor because they are
not as good as the best product in the world
in that particular field. Of course not,
they're younger, less complete, impeded by
patents, and worked on for free.
Judge absolute worth, not relative worth,
and if a free product isn't good enough
for your purposes, buy the one that is.
Let's just avoid characterizing things as
Davids to the commercial Goliaths, k?
from an Inkscape founder... (Score:2)
Inkscape or Sodipodi? (Score:2)
I recently, for the first time, went looking for an SVG editor and found both Inkscape [sourceforge.net] and Sodipodi [sourceforge.net]. They seemed so similar and even seemed to share some of the same code (IANA programmer) and I couldn't figure out which project has the most critical mass. 'twould seem, Inkscape.
Missing important features (Score:4, Informative)
But OK, OK... it may be because my need is for technical drawing tool more than an artistic drawing tool. You may also read the opinions in the The Grumpy Editor's diagram editor followup [lwn.net]
Re:Layers (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe storing each layer as an invisible node that the user can't alter, might do it.
There are a lot of features that the developers want to provide (multiple pages, scripting, whiteboard), but just haven't brought into fruition yet.
Be patient. Or better yet, contribute. There is room for all at the table.
Re:Layers (Score:4, Informative)
I expect it'll get done fairly soon since even I'm beginning to feel the pain of not having it implemented all the way yet. ^_-
Re:Missing important features (Score:2)
This *might* be related to the fact that I've been using vectors in PSP7 for a number of years which does support this.
Does anyone know how this kind of thing works in Illustrator? (albeit the Inkscape folks prolly shouldn't duplicate
Illustrator killer (Score:2, Funny)
(Sorry, couldn't stop myself.)
Correction about "brainchild" (Score:5, Informative)
Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading
Quick correction - I was one of several people that founded the Inkscape project, but I definitely can't claim credit for the application itself. As mentioned in the article, it derives from Gill and Sodipodi, so if it is anyone's "brainchild" it would be the developers of those projects. That said, Inkscape as it is today is the amalgam of a number of people's ideas and hard work, so it is most definitely a team effort. :-)
Inkscape is awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now somebody needs to fork Dia and make it work as well as Visio.
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
So, by your rationale, no project should be even mentioned anywhere until it's better than any non-Open Source project that overlaps its space?
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
"Illustrator challenger" maybe.
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:4, Informative)
I'm one of the founding developers. We might joke about being an Illustrator killer occasionally, but really that's not what we're about. That wouldn't be a healthy focus, and the _best_ we could hope for in that case would be becoming a (marginally) better Illustrator clone.
That wouldn't be so great, IMO. Illustrator does a lot of things, but it doesn't always do them well, and the UI is painful at times.
Realistically, we are going to do some things well which Illustrator does poorly, and we will do some things poorly which Illustrator does well.
We just wanna make a good and useful tool and be the best we can be dammit. All this "foo-killer" stuff is silliness. ^^;
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
To be fair, I don't know how close Inkscape is to Illustrator; though from the comments here it sounds like there's quite a way to go.
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
I didn't notice that anybody had called it an 'Illustrator killer'. But, I think calling any software a category killer is a little silly. It has built in monopolistic thinking that won't do anybody any good in the long run.
Re:Oy – first the GIMP. . . (Score:2)
My bad.
Re:Anyway to import Illustrator files??? (Score:2, Informative)
Sad but true (Score:2)
I'd drop $150 on a corel draw for linux in a heartbeat.
Re:In my background (Score:2)
color models (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:color models (Score:2)
It even raises a good question.
Goal of Inkscape? Vector drawing or W3C compliant. Even Sodipodi had a lot of messages on this theme.
Best solution would be two SVG formats, W3C and another that implements features made impossible by SVG specs.
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:In my background: FH, PS, AI, etc... (Score:2)
This leads me to the same quesiton: why doesn't Adobe roll Illustrator into Photoshop? It wouldn't be *that* hard.
And that leads me to the same conclusion: there's no point in cannibalising one app for another. It's why Illustrator never had multiple pages - it would have hurt the Pagemaker (now InDesign)
Re:Not another Photoshop troll. (Score:2)
* This is not a flame on Apple. I like them. I'd like it more if I could afford them!
Re:As a user, I'm disturbed (Score:2, Informative)
You and I must be living in different universes, then. Propeprietary vendors are at least as bad feature whores as Open Sourcerors... those bells'n whistles are THE very first thing sales people get added, well before things that would
Re:As a user, I'm disturbed (Score:2)
That aside, if you don't like the way the project is run you can always fork or find a different one. That's how we started Inkscape after all, and I'm not going to be hypocritical about it. ^_-
Re:Troll? WTF? (Score:2)
Re:Request Features here-Scripting and Plugins (Score:2)
Does Inkscape have a plugin, and scripting capability?
Well, I'm working on it. Currently we can use external scripts that look to the user like they are fully integrated into the program. The scripts basically import/export SVG and then get pulled into Inkscape.
This is only the beginning.
The extensions architecture is designed to allow alot more flexibility than that - but it isn't very mature yet. The Javascript support is getting better, pretty soon plug-ins and scripting will be supported th
You don't get it... (Score:2)
But see, that's an informed decision. People like the person you're replying to have this delusion that in order for anything to work well it must be totally self-contained, i.e. reinventing the wheel at every opportunity.