Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Accidental vector discoveries

While looking for something completely unrelated, I discovered Inkscape, an open-source vector graphics editor (something like Adobe Illustrator). Inkscape is Open Source (and thus free in all senses of the word) and available for many platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac. In contrast with Sodipodi, the only other competing Linux package, Inkscape seems more mature and - most importantly - has great tutorials (really not common in the Open Source world).

My second - quite accidental - discovery was the fact that Firefox 1.0.7 seems to natively support SVG format quite well. For example if you click here, you can see vector penguin right in your browser window!

And while we are talking about vector graphics and Linux, this initiative also looks really promising. I tried Xara several years ago and it certainly looked very... interesting and fresh.
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8 comments:

  1. AnonymousTuesday, November 08, 2005 11:08:00 PM

    Sorry, I think you are wrong; SVG isn't natively in Firefox 1.0.7, it'll be in 1.5.(I don't see penguin:-/)
    Of course there are plugins(Adobe SVG viewer for example), but, we have to look forward to 1.5.

    And by the way, I tried Inscape and it hasn't satisfied me - it generated much of junk code in svg - and when I saved something into .svg and than loaded it and it didn't even reload correctly. (based on one try, and so it probably isn't objective)

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  2. František FukaTuesday, November 08, 2005 11:23:00 PM

    bedna: 1) I swear my Firefox 1.0.7 displays the penguin correctly! Maybe I somehow installed the svg plugin in my Debian but I am not aware of it. AFAIK, I didn't install any plugins except Flash.

    2) There is menu item called "vacuum defs" in Inkscape, which should remove any unreferenced chunks from the file.

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  3. AnonymousWednesday, November 09, 2005 8:40:00 AM

    I got the tux displayed correctly in my "Mozilla 1.7.12" -- but I do have "mozsvg" use flag enabled.

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  4. AnonymousWednesday, November 09, 2005 6:35:00 PM

    count me in (for another penguin free firefox 1.0.7)

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  5. AnonymousWednesday, November 09, 2005 6:41:00 PM

    the penguin thingy is NOT coming up in my FF 1.0.7

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  6. AnonymousWednesday, November 09, 2005 10:22:00 PM

    SVG can be built into Firefox 1.0.7 optionally, it seems that fuxoft's distribution version has it. I'm going to choose it as well when I'm compiling it next time.

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  7. AnonymousWednesday, November 09, 2005 11:44:00 PM

    Did you know that a group of czech developers is working on opensource vector editor? http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/projekty/vrr/

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  8. EsoMonday, November 14, 2005 12:27:00 PM

    Opera displays the penguin correctly too.

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