On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Gillian Densmore <[email protected]>wrote:
> Greetings fellow technomancers, > Yes illustrator may have a place in vector graphics. I should like to > define 'Vector Graphics': as graphics tool set that's bad ass enough for > text to be extremely smooth and crisp from as small as a postal stamp to as > big as a truck. > Personally my quip with illustrator is it's over the top for some stuff. > (like sending certain younglings a reminder note). > Has anyone used the others? Xara has claims about being lite on it's feet. > Corel has roots in drawing. > For those of you into making a better OS. > I just ask that whatever else you come up as a feature for it. That a > feature is not consuming insane amounts of ram, or HD space. > Ah, misread 'Illustrator' as 'Inkscape' and was going to ask you to specify what problems you had with it. Like Marcus, I too recommend Inkscape and find to be fairly light (depending of course on how modern / laptop- or desktop-like the system you are running is), and although I certainly am not testing it's boundaries quality-wise it seems professional vector artists are split between Inkscape and Illustrator (which may be a workflow thing, Adobe-style versus free/open-style, more than anything else) so it seems they are mostly happy with it's power. I have heard of one or two things that AI does that INX does not (but not anything that is not somewhat obscure); I think it goes the other way too, though, and INX certainly is a better value based on how much it costs (nothing). There is a good community for support at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-user. I would define vector graphics as mathematically-encoded rather than bitmap-encoded images. In SVG, VML, and proprietary spinoffs, that usually means just beziers (cubic and quartic? Unless there is support for arbitrary degree) and some primitives like line segments (which are just degenerate beziers anyway) and [portions of] ellipses. Being shapes rather than sets of points (pixels), they are infinitely scalable, as you say. A less emphasized but perhaps even more important result is that they are also more easily semanticized. And as SG says, SVG is a near-universal browser standard now (one of the only [the only?] image formats that you can 'view source' on). I have a small hobby of sending random people well-vectorized versions of their vexel<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexel>-like images, to their (alternately) excitement and consternation. What kind of application did you need a vector graphics editor for? Final note: this trick <http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=280> was useful for me to quickly see SG's pasted SVG: (Note: This demonstration will not be helpful to those with text-only email clients. Sorry.) [image: Inline image 1] -Arlo
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