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The Inkscape project, creators of the eponymous open source vector graphics application, have released version 0.91. As version numbers go that one is underwhelming, but the .91 number belies the fact that the release itself is the result of over four years of work and represents a major leap forward for the would-be Adobe Illustrator competitor.
Inkscape is available on Windows, OS X and Linux, but it feels most at home on the latter where it has become the de facto vector graphics app. Graphics professionals working on Linux invariably turn to Inkscape and Gimp depending on whether they're working with vector or raster graphics.
Inkscape takes a backseat to Adobe's Illustrator application when it comes to popularity on Windows and OS X, but with Adobe moving to a subscription software model, budget-minded graphics professionals (and anyone who does not want to deal with the onerous process of installing and licensing Adobe subscriptions) might want to take a look at Inkscape.
The latest release doesn't have full feature parity with Illustrator and, if you work in an environment where the .ai file is ubiquitous, then perhaps Inkscape isn't going to be the best choice, but Inkscape .91 is a massive and very welcome update nonetheless.
The biggest news in Inkscape .91 is speed. While Inkscape has been competitive with Illustrator in the features department for some time, previous versions suffered from two major shortcomings: they were slow and buggy.
Fortunately the current release has been improved on both counts to the point that Inkscape .91 is almost unrecognizable from its predecessors.
Most of the speed improvements come from two significant changes. First, this release is multi-threaded, which means much faster rendering with filters. Second, Inkscape 0.91 includes a new renderer based on the Cairo graphics library. The multi-threading support comes from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMP">OpenMP</a> and, assuming you have a multi-core system, will make working with large filtered SVG objects much faster.
The previous release of Inkscape is almost four years old and was, frankly, pretty buggy. While it rarely actually crashed on me, it was prone to strange graphical glitches. Four years gives you a lot of time to fix bugs and the Inkscape developers have done just that -- over 700 bugs have been fixed in this release. In my testing all the strange behaviors that plagued Inkscape in the past are gone, at least on Linux.
While the bug fixes and performance improvements are welcome news for anyone who's wrestled with Inkscape in the past, there are also plenty of brand new features in this release as well. There's a new Measurements tool that will live update the length of objects and angles as you move the mouse over them. The Text tool has also been significantly improved. The Text tool now defaults to points (pt) though you can change that to pixels, centimeters, inches and others, including the web-centeric em. Even better, the em support actually works in this release, which should be a boon for anyone working with graphics destined for responsive websites.
Inkscape .91 also has another nice new feature for web professionals -- illustrations can now be exported as HTML5 Canvas elements, making them much easier to put online thanks to web standards.
This release also features support for font faces beyond bold/italic and improved support for file formats created by other apps. Inkscape now works pretty well with Corel DRAW, EMF, and WMF files and even has support for Microsoft Visio diagrams.
Another much-requested feature is the new symbols library, which allows designers to create reusable SVG design elements. There are quite a few other improvements in this release, far too many in fact to cover in detail here. Check out the <a href="http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91">Inkscape .91 release notes</a> for a full list.
Is the latest version of Inkscape up to replacing Adobe Illustrator? The answer, naturally, depends on what you're doing, but in most cases I would suggest that yes it is. There will be a learning curve transitioning from Illustrator to Inkscape of course. Luckily the Inkscape project can help with that. In fact the Inkscape wiki has a page devoted to <a href="http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_for_Adobe_Illustrator_users">helping Illustrator refugees</a> get comfortable with Inkscape. Note that that page hasn't been updated to match some of the changes in the latest version of Inkscape or Illustrator. The sections on what Inkscape can do that Illustrator cannot and things that Illustrator can do that Inkscape cannot are out of date, but it should get you up and running.
Of course if you really want off the monthly subscription model Adobe has adopted, Illustrator isn't the only app you'll need to replace. Luckily, these days the open source world stacks up quite well next to the Adobe suite.
Probably the best example of this is the GIMP, which, thanks to a robust plugin library, not only stacks up quite well against Photoshop, it far exceeds its capabilities in some cases.
That doesn't mean dropping Photoshop is as simple as installing Gimp and deleting Photoshop. Having used Photoshop professionally for nearly two decades and recently (two years ago) switched to Gimp full time, I can attest to the fact that the transition can be bumpy. Menu items are in different places, keyboard shortcuts are different (though these can be customized to match Photoshop) and sometimes things work completely differently, but, that said, I've yet to find something I wanted to do that Gimp just could not do.
In fact many of the recent technology advancements Photoshop has become well known for, like the so-called content-aware scaling and content-aware fill -- which allow you to do things like zap all the tourists out of your photos -- have been available in Gimp (via plugins) for far longer than Photoshop.
Another Adobe suite favorite is Premiere, the video editing application, and its post-production counterpart, After Effects. Video editing professionals with an interest in open source will already know what I'm about to say, but the fact is the open source world can't compete here.
There is simply no open source video editing application that can hold a candle to the likes of Final Cut Pro, Avid or even Premiere. To be sure there are non-linear editors available, many of which would be suitable for producing high quality films. Cinellera and Lightworks (open source, but not free as in beer) are the top contenders here. Both are capable of producing great things, though in my experience Cinellera is frustratingly buggy. Cinellera recently released a major update though so hopefully this has been fixed. Lightworks is more stable, but if you want to export to the defacto standard H.264 you'll need to buy a Lightworks license, which, while no more expensive than Adobe Premiere, is still outside the budget of many users.
The major problem with with both of those and any other application in this space is that the community around it -- and more importantly the plugin ecosystem the community builds -- can't hold a candle to what Premiere, After Effects and Final Cut Pro enjoy.
The good news is that five years ago you could have said the same thing about Inkscape vs Illustrator or ten years ago about GIMP vs Photoshop. That doesn't help much if you need to edit a movie right now, but while the open source world may be playing catch up on that front, the news is much better for almost every other graphics app the closed source world had produced.
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