first impressions of inkscape

**colin_e** · 17 March 2007, 12:59 PM

Good post Tremendous. I just downloaded Inkscape last night and had a quick play.

Inkscape does seem to have some nice features. Strokes seem more flexible than Xara, and connectors are really handy (although at first glance Inkscape doesn't seem to have the control over connectors that OpenOffice Draw does in thing like orthogonal (horizontal/vertical constrained) connector styles.

On the other hand Inkscape is far from having the fast and intuitive UI that is Xaras best feature.

Redraw is slow, and Inkscape has some of the same "dialogue box-itis" that afflicts CorelDraw (and Illustrator I believe). Lots of things like putting multiple colour stations on a linear fill use complex popup dialogs with percentage positions rather than Xaras drag-and-drop-a-colour immediacy. Inkscape's handling of Arrow heads and tails on lines also seems absolutely ghastly, unless I was using the wrong function.

The ideal of course would be a merge of the best features of both. If Xara, in terms of UI, rendering speed and quality, could somehow be merged with the new Inkscape features (and maybe one say SVG file format as a native option) you would have a formidable tool indeed.

Oh well, it's nice to dream :-)

**wall** · 17 March 2007, 01:46 PM

I tried it in Xara too with the result below. Like handrawn said, it's not easy to get a precise control...

**remi** · 17 March 2007, 04:31 PM

Hi rbonelli,

I'm not sure, what kind of fill mode you're are searching for, but Xara Xtreme supports more fill modes than Illustrator and Inkscape (that's one of the problem, why a export routine needs to simulate some of Xara Xtreme's enhanced fill types while exporting into a PDF or AI file). The only feature, Xara Xtreme doesn't offer are Gradient Mesh Fills.

Regards,
Remi

**handrawn** · 17 March 2007, 05:06 PM

Remi
Is there a way in xara to change the transparency of one specific color in a muticolor object, without affecting any of the other colors?
In inkscape which defines colors as RGBA this is straightforward, but xara's color editor does not have a transparency option?
Or am I missing something?
Thanks

**jbus** · 11 April 2007, 05:35 PM

Nice posting, but I have to disagree with tremendous about the stability of Inkscape vs. stability of Xara.

In my experience Xara has many more stability issues than Inkcape does. Even when comparing the recommended (stable) version of Xara against the development (unstable) versions of Inkscape.

Also add this to the list:

Pro for Inkscape:
Works well with a compositing manager e.g., Compiz, Beryl, etc...

Con for Xara:
Color tool doesn't work properly when used with a compositing manager e.g., Compiz, Beryl, etc... As of yet Xara is the only desktop application that I have noticed has a problem like this when using a composting manager.

**Gez** · 25 April 2007, 04:52 AM

The "mask" feature in Inkscape allows to do that.
Steps to reproduce it:
1) Create a rectangle.
2) Apply gradient fill (in this case, blending from solid color to transparent and mirrored)
3)CTRL+D to duplicate the rectangle
4)Apply a new gradient fill, blending from black to white
5)Select the two rectangles and use the "Apply Mask" function. The gradient of the rectangle on top will act as alpha channel for the bottom one.

That's it.
Easy. Fully controllable.

**handrawn** · 25 April 2007, 07:41 AM

Hi Gez - Welcome to TG.

Thanks for that.

I think it is a shame that, unlike inkscape, xara does not define individual colors as RGBA [RGB+alpha] - which in practice means that you cannot make a gradient from color to alpha [ie transparent], only color to color [white by default].
Xara does allow you to apply transparency to the whole object, but this is a fiddle to get the effect that I was interested in.

**posterart** · 26 April 2007, 03:13 PM

Inkscape crashes with a mouseclik anytime. I don't know what inkscape is trying to do, Xara, a creative powerhouse, runs perfect on XP, I see no reason to use Inkscape for studio work or anything at all. We run XP on AMD 64 and Mepis 6.5 64 bit. Beryl and Emerald on, both are too much fun to remove! Xara on linix? not the XP version yet!

**masque** · 26 April 2007, 03:42 PM

I've tried Inkscape; for a short time admittedly, but it crashed on me a number of times where as Xara has only lost me work on a very few occasions over the ten years + I’ve been using it, so Inkscape, though interesting for free, has gone the way of other has-beens I’m afraid.
I’ve never liked having several programmes all trying to do the same thing on my PC and Inkscape has had its moment for the time being, I’m not keeping it on the off chance I can make use of one feature at some point, any more than I’d keep CoreDraw because it has an interesting lens effect tool which is useful if I draw a bottle with something behind it.
Derek