| jlinkels |
12-31-2011 08:30 AM |
That is right, those are not comparable. Especially GIMP cannot be compared to Inkscape, since they are as different as a spreadsheet and a word processor. So preferring GIMP over Inkscape is a nonsense statement.
Talking about vector editors, I think Inkscape is growing towards an extremely versatile and useful tool. But a typical Unix tool: it provides a powerful set of no-too-advanced tools with little pre-programmed actions. With those primitives you can do almost anything if you know how to use them properly. Compare mallet and chisel with a dovetail jig for a router. Given enough workmanship with a mallet and chisel any dovetail can be cut and much more. With the jig anyone can cut dovertails effortlessly, but just those standard dovetails.
An important feature of Inscape is that it writes human-readable SVG text files. You can edit them outside Inkscape if you like. Great for program-generated graphics. Inkscape has an XML editor so objects can be edited by their properties. None of this breaks the normal GUI interaction, they play in concert.
Little-known is the Inkscape's command-line interface which can be used to query or export objects to PNG or other formats without starting the GUI. This option is great to export batches of objects using a bash script. Much faster than export objects one by one from the GUI.
This year I have been creating a number of presentations of which half of the slides consisted of graphics, diagrams etc. Without Inkscape I would not have been able to create them.
jlinkels
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