Hi,

Recently I've been making a concerted effort to switch from Illustrator to Inkscape. I am actually more or less happy with the former, but really want something that just works directly and well on my Linux laptop. So far, the more I learn the happier I am with Inkscape. Just in case there are others out there interested or considering the jump, I thought I'd share some thoughts on how they compare in a blog post here:

http://www.rocketshipgames.com/blogs/tj ... -inkscape/

Obviously it doesn't go into trying to list all the nuts and bolts of every little variance, but it gets at some things beyond the typical free vs expensive, new vs longstanding project, etc., comparisons that are typically made.

Thx

Hi!

Nice article.
One thing I'm not sure, is that you didn't mention the layer's panel (Shift+Ctrl+L). Did you check it?
You can change layer visibility there and create sub-layers too.
Only the compositing modes are lacking options.
(And in that case the complete colour model being used is lacking too.)

Thanks for the note. I have used the Layers panel a bit. If the layers dialog showed all of the objects within each layer, it would be very helpful. As-is, since it doesn't show all the objects, I just don't find it that useful. Without that list of objects in the layers, I find it difficult to track what's where and work really rapidly with the layers. It would also be nice to be able to manipulate the stacking order from a list view, select objects from a list view, and so on. The layer view is of course helpful to turn the visibility of whole layers on and off, but even for that I often want to toggle visibility of particular objects to check something quickly.

For the most part I find the XML Editor to be closer to the kind of hierarchical view I find really important because it does show all objects, you can select them (individually), and you can manipulate the stack order and groups, albeit a little clumsily. Put that together with the current layers dialog for a more readable display and visibility controls and you'd have a huge step forward in usability.

I enjoyed reading the article.

I will concur that it would be nice to have more z-axis controls in a tree, but as noted, that could also be overwhelming to occasional users. (See Corel)

I suppose one could adopt a workflow where a new layer is added (Ctrl+Shift+N) before creating any object, so all objects have visible controls of hide, opacity, lock, etc., but the downside might be larger filesize and some real complications when re-stacking and grouping (no "linking")... but not that different from Photoshop or GIMP.


Thanks for sharing the link!