The much anticipated Inkscape 0.44 has been released. Well, sort of, it actually hasn't been "officially" released.
You're right, this isn't Blender news. But Inkscape is a vital part of any open source graphics pipeline and as we have seen, it certainly jives with Blender (yes, I said jive).
From the site:
The Release Wardens have blessed the official Inkscape 0.44.0 release tarball. We will be making the official announcement once packagers have had a couple days to build the release packages, but if you're in a compiling mood, please feel free to download the source today! :-)
It seems that the compiling gods are smiling upon Inkscape, because several packages are already available.
And what's new in this version? It turns out, quite a lot.
So what exactly is Inkscape?
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping.
So whether you are an Inkscape user or have never heard of it, 0.44 is out, so give it a try!
23 Comments
I'm an Inkscape addicted, I love this app!
Actually I'm rolling my own package for Ubuntu Dapper amd64 to start testing new features ;-)
The new features look awesome, and I think of adding some inkscape-graphis to my homepage (only visible in Firefox, but that means visible to about 50& of my visitors). Amazing stuff. Hope it becomes available for gentoo quickly.
I have it working in windows for a couple of days, but I didn't install it in Linux yet (I'm waiting the official package or a package in a debian repository). It's AWESOME!
Anyway, there is an autopackage available.
Autopackage is very nice, I don't know it doesn't make it more massively.
Mmmm, I think I'll go with the autopackage.
Ok, as Eugene said, Inkscape is vital in open source design pipeline, and it's excellent for making logos and export them as SVG in Blender. For me, is a very familiar practice.
Inkscape lacks some of the features of Adobe Illustrator, but it certainly have some features Illustrator haven't. Grid duplicates, fast stamping and interactive grow/shrink or outlines, are awesome features present in Inkscape and not in most commercial packages.
It's already a brillant alternative, but its future is even brighter.
I think it's great to see this kind of news here (even when they aren't about blender). Open source software grows and improves when communities of users and developers grow.
Hi,
I have set up a forum site at inkscapeforums.com
Growing slowly, check it out.
Sorry for my ignorance, but what does Inkscape have that the Gimp doesn't?
The Gimp is for raster graphics, Inkscape is for vector graphics. Two different tools
"Autopackage is very nice, I don’t know it doesn’t make it more massively."
Arg. Autopackage is a terrible idea that misses the entire point of distributions and package management. And will quite possibly screw up your system's dependencies.
Robert:
Thanks for your comment. I thought that too, but you can't deny it's very easy and handy for the newbie.
I agree it's better to have a package and the needed dependencies instead of a single package with all, installing "by force" the dependencies.
I really prefer the right binaries for my distro (in my case, .deb files for my Ubuntu) but sometimes is very difficult to find them when a new version of a program just comes out. In those cases you have to wait or compile.
I've compiled some packages, but it's not a very comfortable procedure, and it looks (trough my newbie eyes) pretty difficult to figure it out.
Autopackages, at least, have an uninstall feature if things didn't came out as expected.
So, I think I'll keep installing autopackages untill the official .debs are in repositories or available to download.
Thanks again for your comment (now I know why I shouldn't stay with those autopackages). :-)
Please please please let it be known that the win32 exe is (at the present) infected with a trojan virus. It's in the bug tracker. my virus-eater picked up up thankfully before it even finished downloading.
Another must see 2D vector application is lately added in open source world - Xara LX.
Bmud:
I can't find that in the bug tracker.
Sometimes the win32 version of vlc would be detected as a trojan, even though it's build on a linux machine. Hopefully this is also just a false positive...
You must not have looked very hard at all.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1515674&group_id=93438&atid=604306
To bmud and Filip: My virus scanner ( Symantic Norton) detected a trojan called Trojan.zlob Apparantly this kind of Trojan was detected for the first time at 2005. My virusscanner too was able to get rid of it. But let everybody on windows (2000/xP NTwhatever etc.) be warned; The windows build of inkscape seems to be infected.
Please any body out there: tell us that it turns out to be a flaw in windows
additional: because my virusscanner picked out and disabled the trojan I can't install the program. After cleaning Windows can't open the .exe anymore.
Is it an actual confirmed trojan? I seem to recall something about applications using the NSIS installer being picked up by Norton as a false positive.
AVG didn't pick up anything on the file (though, there's always the possibility of something getting through the cracks).
@Gez: In that case, what you need is Checkinstall. You compile a program normally, but then instead of using "make install" (and having to keep the compile directory around to make uninstall later, provided the devs even gave you that option) you run "checkinstall" and it tracks the files and packages them in whatever package format your distro uses. (.Deb, .rpm, or .tgz) It's then installed via your distro's package manager just like any other package. Easily transferred to another machine, too. Just watch your dependencies -- checkinstall doesn't track them by itself, but you can manually enter names of packages you want to require.
I'm not a huge fan of autopackage, myself, not since it hosed some of my bash settings on my debian box back when I installed Inkscape 0.43.
Thx Mantar! I'll check Checkinstall :-)
Bmud and others (about the virus) I have the win32 version and my AV software didn't find any infection.
I checked with CA eTrust and Clam, and they didn't find anything. It souds as a Symantec False Positive (it woudn't the first time, though)
Thx Mantar! I'll check Checkinstall :-)
Bmud and others (about the virus) I have the win32 version and my AV software didn't find any infection.
I checked with CA eTrust and Clam, and they didn't find anything. It souds as a Symantec False Positive (it woudn't be the first time, though)
One more reason why I prefer working on Linux. Not that I ever had problems with trojans on my windows box, but even the thought is scary.
I'd like to add that I consider it rather unlikely that an executable hosted on sourceforge would be infected. I guess this will prove to be a false positive.
I scanned the windows download I'm using with two different well known scanners and it's clean.
So I wouldn't assume all windows downloads are infected.
I'm with Gez on the false positive call. After checking the bug at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1515674&group_id=93438&atid=604306 and reading here that only Norton is detecting it (btw Avast doesn't detect it either), Norton seems to be causing the problem by falsly detecting a trojan.
Inkspace looks quite interesting.
Not sure whether Inkscape or Norton fixed the problem, but action was taken and IT IS FIXED.