Saturday, July 25, 2009

Inkscape

I wonder if mikey has tried Inkscape. Supposed to be an Illustrator replacement. Not having dealt with Illustrator in depth I dunno, but it may make doing things in Blender easier via an SVG export.

And hey, what's below was wholly unplanned. 3D means you never know what you'll find when you rotate a view.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

My experience with open source replacements for Adobe products (Gimp, etc.) is that for 98% of the market, they work fine, but if you need those corner-case features that makes Adobe products span two 5 gigabyte DVD discs, then you need them.

Probably why they cost so much.

Substance McGravitas said...

Just as a conduit for getting modeled things in and out of Blender it seems absurdly handy. We shall see.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Kids today!

I used spaghetti BASIC back in the 80s, and I don't see why you young-uns got to flaunt your fancypants alla time like this.
~

mikey said...

I haven't. I shall check it out, as they say.

I've been using Open Office Draw to good effect. For vector art, page layout and fine-grained text control it works pretty well.

The ONE steenking thing that none of the other vector graphics programs (with the exception of the lamented and lamentable Corel Draw)can read/write/edit .eps files. .eps is an ass kickingly good file format for print design, and so is ubiquitous, but even with a chaotic chain of ghostscript related interpreters there's just not crap you can do with them without illustrator.

One of the coolest things is you can save to .pdf and select an option to "retain illustrator compatibility" which is nothing more than retaining the .eps formatting inside the .pdf. It means you can just load the .pdf in illustrator and edit it natively, which is as handy as a leatherman when you're doing final prepress tweaks.

But as long as you're starting out from scratch, rather than taking an .eps file as a handoff, just about any vector graphics program ought to work just fine, as long as you can use the available output formats...

mikey

Substance McGravitas said...

Inkscape claims to import and export .eps, which is likely something I'll never worry about.

J— said...

These are all just a bunch of Google front companies, aren't they? You guys are such sell-outs. I bet you all voted Nixon for President three times.

mikey said...

Unless I'm missreading the spec, or they're not being clear, it can export .eps, but not import .eps.

That limits it's usability in a cooperative environment where my client hands off a file to me to handle the production.

If I can't open it and make it production-ready, I'm pretty much fucked....

Substance McGravitas said...

These are all just a bunch of Google front companies, aren't they? You guys are such sell-outs.

Where's the Microsoft usage?

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

hese are all just a bunch of Google front companies, aren't they?

Isn't everything?

Burt Prelutsky is a Google stalking horse.