Finally got around to playing with Inkscape. The current release has a few bugs, so it's not rock stable. I was checking the site frequently for the promised patch, but none yet, as of now. However, I clicked the screenshots and user examples links in the Inkscape site and was rewarded with pictures of nifty things you can do with it. I tried the Tile clone with trace option. Could get it to tile in various ways, but the trace tab eluded me until I discovered you have to set the fill type to undefined (?) first. After that, it just worked perfectly. Corel Draw can read Inkscape svg alright, so I added some dropshadow in Draw. Inkscape has several pretty advanced options. I'll be exploring them and probably post results if I can.
The pic below is the result of the Tile Clone with the trace option on. Placed on top of a large star with a gradient filled square below, it resulted in the tile with individual stars colored according to the part directly below each. You might think the same thing could be done with clipview or powerclip, but that would place bitmaps inside each star which would bloat up the file size. It's more like using the eyedropper to sample colors below each star, except that Inkscape does this automatically for you...
http://home.pchome.com.tw/art/grafix...clonetrace.gif
Funny thing. Just after I posted this topic, I scrolled down and found Jens' reply to the Inkscape topic at the Xara Forum... True, Inkscape still has a lot of growing up to do before it would be able to play with the big guys, and stability has always been a problem, at least for those versions that I tried...But a lot of clever features are being added to it. I'd keep it as a supplementary program in my toolbox...
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