Inkscape Vs. Xara

[handrawn]

Availor asked 'which is best xara or inkscape' - as a user of both I shall reply: 'which is best a flat bladed screwdriver or a cross headed one' - the answer to both questions is the same

[steve.ledger]

Are you saying that you can 'screw things up' with both??

[handrawn]

ho ho ho

though if I am really desperate I will admit to occasionally trying to undo a cross head screw with flat bladed driver - despite having the scars to prove it is not a good idea.

they have different tools these two programs - they work in some ways quite differently as well as in some other ways quite close

[Egg Bramhill]

Taking your thread completely off topic (but this is the off-topic forum):

which is best a flat bladed screwdriver or a cross headed one

On a serious note (apart from the obvious 'robot' location) is there an advantage between the two. i.e. like surface area etc?

[handrawn]

for me the advantages are in the tools that work differently - hence my 'screwy' analogy I suppose

xara has transparency that can be built up in many stages [ by making the single object a group and applying another transparency as many times as you want within reason]
inskscape gives each color in the palette an A [alpha] attribute as well as RGB
so for each color you can adjust the opacity, completely independently of everything else in the object, because color is defined RGBA not RGB

xara has tools that inkscape does not - eg customisable [to an extent] brushes
inkscape has a 'vector flood fill' tool - strictly speaking fill bounded areas - but these areas do not need to be fully closed - a big advantage to a cartoonist

this is not to say these issues cannot be worked round so that only one program need be used - but I am not and never have been a one tool fits all kind of guy

[Availor]

Taking your thread completely off topic

Please remember this next time I do the same

[handrawn]

nice to see irony is alive and well Egg

[GeoBen]

me too... but the others have caught on most of these things. Xara still has the fastest rendering on the block, so far as I know. but InkScape has grown fast. still a tad kludgy and nowhere near as fast as Xara, but dollar for dollar (ahem) Inkscape can't be beat or matched. it transparency controls are damn good and its tracer, as I have mentioned before, slays XaraTrace.

i have both. use xara for much the same reasons... that InkScape is catching doesn't equate to my changing my primary app, yet. BUT... Xara is getting slooooowwww in making REAL advances in drawing (as opposed to stuff like page layout) while Inkscape improves regularly.

Why for instance does Xara NOT have hierachical layers like every other major illustration/DigArt app? just insane... i often use 30 or more layers. sure would be nice if i could have only those i am working on taking up screen space.

anyway....
back to work
geo.

[geminiguy]

Just wondering if anyone else grabbed the new 0.46 release yet. And, if so... did you experience any bugs involving the lxml wrapper for libxml2? (even though it was properly installed....

[a4hire]

Im using .45 for windows. I do use both Inkscape ans Xtreme. I like Inkscape because it is free!