Inkscape 0.47 Released 225
Posted
by
kdawson
from the drawing-not-quartering dept.
from the drawing-not-quartering dept.
derrida writes "After over a year of intensive development and refactoring, Inkscape 0.47 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, including: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more. Additionally, it would be wrong to not mention the hundreds of bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, enjoy the screenshots, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X." We've been following the progress of Inkscape for years (2006, 2005, 2004).
A "must-have" package (Score:1, Interesting)
Brilliant piece of software (Score:5, Interesting)
As a person who uses vector drawing programs from time to time, this program was a great find. Having pirated Corel Draw installed, mostly for rubbish reasons, was also bad - for bloat reasons, law reasons - and sanity reasons. I remember that Corel then (>5 years ago) had so much bugs, slow and unresponsible, bad support for local fonts, unstable. For all my purposes Inkscape is by far better program - compact, standards compliant, fully functional, and frankly I enjoy using it much better than Corel Draw. Couple bugs yes, but brilliantly reliable compared to horrible nightmare that is (was?) Corel Draw.
Does it actually make standard SVGs yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Everytime I've looked at Inkscape in the past its idea of 'standard' SVGs is about like Word's idea of 'standard' HTML, even when you switch to the standard svg format rather than its extended version.
I'm grabbing it now, but I see nothing in the release notes about this particular issue. I see things about adding more extensions which is great and all, but I use SVG because its a documented standard that I can work with in my own software, I'd love to suggest Inkscape to others, but until its capable of producing version 1.2 SVGs with text flows that work with Apache Batik is useless. The font improvements look promising, as long as it isn't retarded and storing all text as curves.
Heres to hoping ...
Re:Snow Leopard, finally. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want to do any serious graphics work, I'd recommend using Windows instead, the majority of graphics applications "just work" on it and there is not as many backwards compatibility issues forcing you to upgrade constantly in Windows as there is in OS X. There isn't even a 64bit version of most graphics applications for OS X (this includes Photoshop) due to Apple's policies on what APIs and languages you can use to make 64bit GUIs.
Re:how it is different from.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Saving SVGs from GIMP is like saving PDFs from Photoshop.
Sure, it outputs a SVG file, but the editor is focused on editing bitmap images. Most people will get a PNG or JPG embedded in an SVG when saving an SVG from GIMP.
In the past (Its been a while since I've used GIMP so this could be completely different now), saving an SVG from GIMP would first render most everything too a raster image format, then just embed a single or multiple raster images in the SVG, turning the SVG into basically a wrapper around the layers of rasterized images.
Inkscape is intended to work on shapes and not rasterized images. Text doesn't get rasterized before saving, it gets written to the file as texts using a specific font or as curves. A rectangle is stored as a rectangle object with which a border style, fill style, and maybe a filter. Circles, and other polygons are the same.
Later when you want to resize an object stored as a shape rather than a rasterized image, you just scale the shape, there is 0 quality loss. Resize a rasterized image in GIMP to something larger and you'll start seeing artifacts rather quickly. Changing the border color on a rectangle in GIMP would require you to select the area around the rectangle with manually, with a magic wand tool, or maybe a script, then change the color of the individual pixels, overlaying the existing pixels. With antialiasing turned on this can quickly turn into a mess as it blends in with the existing colors or the background. Changing the border color in Inkscape will result in a final image without the mixing of colors associated with rasterized images as the file is really a set of instructions for drawing shapes. Instead of changing the individual pixels directly, you change the command that creates those pixels in the first place.
Inkscape is to GIMP what Flash is to Photoshop or GIMP.
SVGs also allow for animation and scripting in the file itself. Not scripting like you normally use with GIMP, but scripting like producing animation, allowing for interactivity kind of like a web page. With SVGs you can create user interfaces and applications and use them in an SVG viewer with proper support. At one point I was working on (just for fun) a clone of the Evony Flash game written in SVG and javascript. You could open it with Apache Batik or Webkit and 'play' the game. Clicking on various 'buttons' would call javascript functions to do the backend work, talk to the server, ect.
SVG is comparable to Flash in most ways except the lack of sound and video support, which are handled by other standards. Flash uses ActionScript, SVG uses Javascript.
Theres a lot of other differences and a lot of commonality between the two from an outside perspective, but you'll find that if you're editing a photo, you want to do it in GIMP. If you're drawing shapes, flowcharts, and the like, you'll want to do it with an SVG.
I read somewhere, although I can't verify it, that Southpark (The TV show, if you live under a rock) is done using SVG. Even if it isn't, Southpark would be something SVG is perfectly suited to doing, where as doing it in GIMP would surely suck ass for the guys doing the drawing and animation. It'd be relatively simple to do with SVG.
Inkscape is great (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone with a need to create simple vector-based drawings should check out Inkscape. I use it for figures in presentations and for box diagrams in academic documents and have found nothing better. The finished product looks great.
It's also handy for editing PDFs after they are exported from R (Statistical Package). Often something you can't easily tweak in R can be fixed very quickly in Inkscape.
The best thing about it is the interface: very easy to pick-up, yet extremely flexible. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the UI design.
RS
Re:0.47 (Score:3, Interesting)
The step from 0.46 to 0.47 has taken them over a year. They have some major architectural refactoring efforts still in the pipeline ("Separate sections of code into various libraries for use by other programs" for 0.52 -> 0.53). While it's an impressive program that I use daily (with little complaints, apart from stability issues on Windows at work), I get the impression that their roadmap is such that if they follow it, they will never get to 1.0.
Re:The closed circle (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no artist, but I do like to create things, so I use many tools to do just about anything. But I don't want to spend many hours learning a tool, as I just want to create something quick and easy.
Now, in my years I've come across many tools. Closed source/open source, free/payed. I've used anything from mspaint to photoshop, from milkshape to 3D studio max. I've tried GIMP, Blender and Inkscape as open source tools. And quickly dumped GIMP and Blender, they are not userfriendly for entry level at all. Blender doesn't allow you to do anything unless you spend a few hours just configuring things and doing tutorials, which is a pain in the ass compared to 3D studio max (yes, you get what you pay for, 3DS Max is not cheap). Milkshape is also much easier to use then Blender, but has much less features, still I think Blender could learn from it.
About the same goes for GIMP vs Photoshop, but in that respect GIMP is much friendlier then Blender. However, photoshop still seems to have an edge in entry level usage.
And then we had Inkscape, installed, started, and go. No problems at all, didn't need to look for any alternatives. Now, I only use 10% of the features of these programs. But for everything I used I think Inkscape is the only that really should get the 1.x version stamp.
Excellent news. (Score:3, Interesting)
As others have said, this is a real gem of an opensource program. I've been using it for years (skencil previously), mostly in designing dials for wrist watches.
Best wishes,
Bob
Re:Does it actually make standard SVGs yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Please compare
http://home.hccnet.nl/th.v.d.gronde/inkscape/ResultViewer.html [hccnet.nl]
to
http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/status.html [apache.org]
My standards actually are based on some standard.
I was excited when I saw 'svg test suite compliance' in the release notes, then I looked at the test results. The omit a large portion of them and fail a massive chunk of them.
A new feature in the release notes is 'Initial SVG font support' ... Inkscape is roughly the same as using Frontpage 2000 to make web pages. Sorry I got your fanboy panties in a bunch, but reality sucks sometimes.
Re:Snow Leopard, finally. (Score:3, Interesting)
STILL NO FREAKING SUPPORT FOR CASE SENSITIVE FILESYSTEMS ON OSX FROM ADOBE. WTF. MIGHT AS WELL JUST TURN ON THE CAPSLOCK KEY.
I refuse to buy another Adobe product until they freaking fix that. Whats worse is that I'm finding that my reasons for paying a small fortune for Creative Suite is rapidly going away. Sure its nice and would make things easier, but I'm just learning alternative, although slower, methods of accomplishing the same thing with less feature rich software.
If CS5 doesn't do it, its unlikely that I'll bother with Adobe in the future, I'll have too much time invested in knowing how to use other software better.
Re:The closed circle (Score:2, Interesting)
Blender doesn't allow you to do anything unless you spend a few hours just configuring things and doing tutorials, which is a pain in the ass compared to 3D studio max (yes, you get what you pay for, 3DS Max is not cheap).
Yes, the money makes the software to be such that it is 100% intuitive and not the UI. We all know that 3D Studio Max is very expensive and thats why it is 100% intuitive so every new users can do same kind effects as we see on the movies when they just pay the license. It is just so awesome that my 80 year old grandmother did better effects to her family movies than what we all have seen on movies like Titanic, Matrix, Final Fantasy and so on. Too bad that the movie studios are so stupid that they do not use 3D Studio Max because it just allows you to create everything so easily without studying and learning first the 3D modeling.
And the blender UI... it really is just so terrible. You see that you can configure it how you want it and how you want it to be on every project. It is just so awful that you need different kind UI with different set of tools for different kind modelings. We really should get a samekind UI what MS copied to Office and started to call them as "Ribbon". Yeah, the Blender would be MUCH easier by that way. No wait... the ribbon is so easy but why does 3D Studio Max have the old 80's looking UI then? Hmm... wonder just why...
But really. When it comes to UI's. The most powerfull UI is not the default. Good defaults just makes the learning easier. But it does not mean that the using the application is easier. The Blender is not designed for new comers, to be a simple tool. It is designed for powerusers who knows what they need and they can get the UI to adapt their demands. Same thing is with GIMP. You can just simply change the UI to such what you like to do. The GIMP has almost everything what any PS user needs to get things done. But problem is that it is not the Adobe Photoshop but GIMP and problem is caused from attitude about it because by default it is not similar with GIMP.
Question is only about do you know the power of GIMP/Blender UI or not. Seems you have never even tried to solve problems. But you just made up your mind and you try to stick with it as long as possible. You believe the problem is on GIMP. But you do not accept to notice the problem is you. For those new users who comes to Linux and have used someway PS. I configure GIMP look more like this http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9131/gimpps.jpg [imageshack.us] That is not a perfect because I use myself different kind UI what fits my needs better. But I know it can be configured pretty close one to PS. And they do not usually miss anything and actually they like GIMP because it teach them the basic thinking how to do manipulate photos and not just using automatic filters getting similar looking results every time.
Re:Brilliant piece of software (Score:3, Interesting)
Congrats to the Inkscape team. I use it all the time for business and pleasure. I did join up with the developers of Inkscape for a month or two, so I could fix some layer-related bugs and get to know the internals a bit better. I drew this anime-fanart image, and made a script to make this video, while 0.47 was in the works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nshUvuOCHtw [youtube.com] - it doesn't show but a tiny fraction of what Inkscape can do, but I found it fun to produce anyway.
Check Blender 2.5 - big redesign (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting you (and those who replied to you) should mention Blender's difficult interface, because that's one of the main things they're working on improving right now. Just yesterday they released the first Alpha of a the new 2.5 series, with an extensively (completely?) redesigned GUI meant to be easier and more logical to beginners, and both the GUI as well as keyboard shortcuts are now completely customizable.
Here is the page with info on it: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/ [blender.org]
The final new version (which will probably be version 2.6) is expected to be released in mid-2010.