Inkscape 0.42.1
Well, colour me impressed. After a few months of feverish activity, the Inkscape team have released version 0.42.1 of their Open Source illustration program, and it’s quite a decent piece of software. I hear you: “0.42.1, that’s like a really unfinished and buggy product, right?” Well, normally, yes. But in the Open Source world, the motto is “release early, release often” to solicit as much feedback and developer support as possible, and occasionally you’ll find something ready to use — albeit with the occasional bug or instability. The early version number usually gives you an idea of how many features (scheduled for 1.0) haven’t been implemented yet.
For a while now, I’ve been considering releasing a D*I*Y Planner kit for use within OpenOffice.org Draw 2.0. Those of you following OOo2 will no doubt remark that the final 2.0 release is pretty late (it was originally supposed to be released in March, from what I remember), and the latest beta snapshots still seem to be rather buggy to me — especially the Draw application. This is not a complaint; I’m still glad that OOo2 will exist, I’m still impressed with its features, and I’ll certainly make it my office suite of choice, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t look around for another quality drawing program to construct the kit. My criteria: 1) it should be free (so everybody can use it without paying); 2) it should be cross-platform (so everybody can use it, no matter what OS they use); and 3) it should be user-friendly enough for beginners, yet powerful enough for me to use without resorting to my minimal and rarely-used cussing vocabulary.
I’ve only had an hour of playtime, but it looks like the newer versions of Inkscape might actually fit that bill.
It’s still a little clunky, especially on OS X, and the refresh isn’t the speediest, but it’s entirely usable. While it’s no Adobe Illustrator, it certainly has some powerful features, and it’s accompanied by some great tutorials for both beginners and more advanced users. See the screenshots for a taste. Version 0.42.1 can be downloaded at the SourceForge Project Downloads page.
My only concerns:
- The big one: it doesn’t appear that it supports exporting to PDF (at least until version 0.45, according to the roadmap), which is the format most people prefer. While I have a number of geeky or expensive toys to do this, I need an effective and user-friendly way of outputting work into PDF files for the average computer user. That is, no Perl scripts, no nagware/commercial software, no geek-only command line tools, etc. It would help if it was cross platform. Any suggestions, people? Yes, we can import Inkscape’s SVG files into Scribus, but that’s not very easy, nor particularly cross-platform-friendly at the moment — the fewer impediments, the better.
- I much prefer a layers dialog instead of a drop-down chooser. Perhaps there is one (or it’s in development) but I don’t see it.
- There’s no obvious way to do multiple pages. This isn’t a deal-breaker (Illustrator, my usual app, doesn’t have it either), but it would make it easier for newbies. This is one of the reasons why OOo Draw was so attractive: the tabs at the bottom would take you to different pages (à la CorelDRAW), and so you could easily work on multiple designs at once.
For those interested in obtaining more SVG files (an industry standard supported by Inkscape), you can find more than 4000 pieces of vector clip art at the Open Clip Art Library, a community-developed site. Needless to say, some graphics are better than others….
3 comments August 20th, 2005