hey folks.

i installed inkscape 0.45 a few weeks ago after hearing about it but didn't give it a try until tonight. thought i'd share my first impressions.

superior to xara:
  • rounded corners for rectangles. this is much better done in inkscape -- when resizing the rectangle the rounded corners retain their radius (something which xara gets on my nerves by failing to do). it's also possible to set two radii for the corners (an effect akin to setting a radius in xara and then stretching the whole shape)
  • graduated strokes as well as graduated fills. this is something i've done in the past in xara by separating the fill and stroke, turning the stroke into a shape and then applying a fill. however, it's then a pain if i want to edit the shape.
  • alpha is part of the colour, instead of transparency being a totally separate attribute. i've always found having a separate transparency tool in xara unintuitive.
  • the "make selected nodes symmetric" tool for the path editor -- this forces both a point's bezier handles to have the same length. a nice feature.
  • skewing -- something i've often had to do by hand with xara's path editor is very easy in inkscape.
  • arcs and spirals -- i've rarely wanted to draw an arc or spiral but it's been difficult to get perfect when the situation came up.
  • pattern fill. i haven't actually figured out how to work this yet, but it's something i really missed when i first got xara x -- i had a plugin (called "hatch", i believe) for artworks (xara's predecessor) on risc os which could produce a hatched (stiped), checked, diamond etc fill. it came in very useful, especially for drawing for black and white media.
  • alignment options -- it's obvious in inkscape what you're aligning relative to. a dropdown box lets you choose from last/first selected, biggest/smallest item, page drawing and selection. you can also align the baselines of text, which is a feature xara sorely needs -- i frequently find myself adding descenders and ascenders (g etc, h etc) into lines of text which lack them in xara so that they'll align properly. there's also a position randomiser and spacing maximiser in the align dialog -- these could come in very handy.
  • connectors -- little objects which are made to connect two other objects, allowing you to build up a network. moving those other objects automatically updates the connectors. they can be set to avoid crossing objects which are part of the network. i've wished xara could do networks like this for quite some time.
  • path simplifier and other path effects like straighten and jitter -- could be very handy.
  • text flowing. you can make text flow from one text frame to another.
  • attribute inheritance. this is realised to some extent in xara in that you can have colours based on others and use named colours.
  • the extrude feature is very nice -- generates other faces to a 3d prism, of which the selected object is the cross section.
  • obviously, the SVG support far outperforms xara's.


inferior to xara:
  • stability. i've had two crashes since firing it up for the first time.
  • redraw speed. a big one -- drawing speed is far worse than in xara.
  • fill with bitmaps. i try to avoid this, but sometimes it has to be done. maybe i haven't looked hard enough, but i couldn't find a way yet in inkscape. perhaps it's part of "fill with pattern".
  • i'm sure there must be a way to define named colours and have others based on that colour, but i haven't been able to find how.
  • can't, as far as i'm aware, remap the right mouse button to shift-click, which is something i've been used to since artworks on risc os and find much more useful than context menus
  • no shadow tool. it'd be possible to use the "generate outset/inset halo" tool with a lot of steps to make a vector shadow but it would take longer than it should have to. while i'm on the subject, it'd be nice if xara could generate a series of transparent vector shapes in place of a shadow on request -- i've done this manually a few times when making content for flash.
  • i'm sure there are many other things i take for granted in xara now which i'd suddenly find myself lacking in inkscape if i chose to switch over, but that's all i can see for now. well, i can see more features xara has (stroke brushes for example) which i haven't found in inkscape, but which i personally never use and so wouldn't miss.

these disadvantages/features i'd miss are easily enough to make me stick to xara for now, but some of those features in inkscape are very nice indeed. if only interchange of files from xara to inkscape and back was up to scratch, i'd probably use inkscape as a secondary tool. or if the packages were to merge, bringing together the best parts of both tools -- that would be ideal.

does anyone else use both packages, and if so what do you use each for? i've read that some use inkscape to trace images they've scanned -- why? i found nothing in inkscape's path drawing tools (except maybe the filters such as simplify and straighten) which render xara's path drawing tools obsolete. i'm always impressed with xara's flexibility when tracing bitmaps.

in addition, is there anyone who has converted to using inkscape as a primary drawing tool? why?

i'd really like to hear how you all compare the two packages, too.

cheers
--bart