Anyone used or tried Inkscape?

[Paul Grothouse]

It's an opensource vector graphics program that reads Coreldraw and Adobe Illistrator files.

Here's a link:
http://www.inkscape.org/

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

You can find several recent discussions (3 pages worth) on Inkscape if you perform a SEARCH on this forum.

[Dan Hintz]

A few of us even have it listed on our sigs... ;)

[Paul Grothouse]

OK, OK, I'll take the newbie ribbing. All that aside, I searched the forum, and most of the posts are about specific issues or questions about Inkscape. None that I found take about the overall features. I am very familiar with CAD & CAM programs and own several. I notice most people on the site use Coreldraw. I was considering buying a copy but since I know absolutely nothing about working with it, and found out about Inkscape.

Feature to feature for laser engraving, what's the real difference between Corel and Inkscape? Is it worth even bothering with Inkscape or should I just get a copy of Corel.

[Andrea Weissenseel]

Hi Paul,

I can't tell you much about the features of inkscape 'cause I only got it to open and change some .svg files. I found it very slow and it takes up a lot of ressources - MHO. I'm still working with CorelDraw 11 - it does all I need for my laser business.

Like you said Inkscape is opensource, also you can get a trial version of CorelDraw - why don't you just try out both and see what suits best for your needs.

Andrea

[Dan Hintz]

I find InkScape to run just as fast as any other program, but its UI could use some tweaking. If I had to pick one problem with InkScape and lasers (at least ULS systems), it would be fonts... for whatever reason, I'm forced to convert to curves before printing. If I don't, the kerning is hosed... the higher the resolution I print at, the more the letters overlap. I never ran any extensive experiments, but it appeared to be the kerning would be fine if the document resolution matched that of the printing resolution.

I haven't used InkScape for around 6 months to do any printing as I send files to the laser from Corel now... I'm curious to know if they have resolved the issue.

[andrew zen]

I just sent some jobs to my Epilog Legend 24EX using Inkscape and they got transferred as jiberish using the Epilog printer driver.

Back to Corel.

[Larry Bratton]

Tried it, didn't like it (may just be me) but Corel is #1 for laser work.

[Robert Walters]

There's been an issue in InkScape for years where if you drew something is in/mm (as opposed to it's native px), say 4 inches. Then looked at the raw SVG (which is really just an XML file renamed) in a text editor the dimension
would be something like 4.0412345821 instead of 4.000

I spoke to a couple of the developers about it a ways back and recently too, there are still known issues when it comes to absolute values. Most of which are coming more from the WC3 SVG 1.1 Specification than from InkScape itself as I understand it.

Still a great program, just be aware that there might be some "gotchas" involved when using it as a CAD/CorelDRAW substitute.

Here are some of the nitty gritty details if you really care (WARNING: geek stuff ahead)...
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/+spec/real-units

[Dan Hintz]

Thanks, Robert...