please make Inkscape a little less awesome.

[gurkesaft]

Hello,

Lately I've been a bit disappointed with how flawlessly Inkscape has been importing my pdf/eps figures, how easy the interface is, and how nice my figures have been looking when I export them to eps for publication in scientific journals.

Can you guys please at least *try* to make Inkscape a little more like Illustrator 10? Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer having my fonts all jumbled into the corner when I open a figure. It would also be nice if you removed unicode support so I can once again manually sheer and widen my greek letters, you know, should I want a bold or italicized greek symbol. I am also not losing enough hair when I use your product, and it doesn't cost enough money.

Please, turn the awesome back down to 10.

Thank you,
Jack

[mahfiaz (mahfiaz)]

I am sorry for being non-english, and am not sure if this is higher rank of irony or something else.

Also, this is not really a bug, but rather blueprint or something. I am closing this bug and suggesting reporter to open several others which clearly point out, what has to be done, or what is not working, one improvement/bug per report.

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

I vote for reopening :-)

This is the funniest bug report I've ever read!

[Lester (lester-dev)]

ROTFLMAO!

I'm curious, are the authors of Illustrator reading this bug?

[mahfiaz (mahfiaz)]

I suppose most of inkscape developers read inkscape bugreports, but it is really hard to believe Illustrator developers do.

Anybody else voting? Three votes incl. one developer will do :)

[gurkesaft (pooptastic)]

I certainly don't mind if this feature request closes; I still have my copy of Illustrator 10 for projects requiring a clunky unpredictable interface lacking very basic functionality.

I just thought it was a little unprofessional of the developers to deploy such clean and robust software for free while companies like Adobe struggle every day to sell products of unparalleled obnoxiousness for close to a thousand dollars. I know open source products can never compete with corporate software in this respect, but I thought Inkscape could at least aspire to be a *little* more obnoxious. Sometimes it seems like the developers don't care about anything but making bulletproof software that I enjoy using.

And if you read my first post carefully, I did suggest two specific features I think could help make Inkscape more competitive with Illustrator. I can elaborate on them, though:

1. Remove unicode support. It is currently too easy to make bold and italicized greek symbols. (This should be easy to implement.)

2. Incorporate some random dysfunctional behavior to the eps/pdf importing algorithms. I'm less sure how to go about implementing this as Adobe's dysfunctional algorithms are proprietary. I think using the rand() function with a CPU clock-based seed should at least reproduce the effect qualitatively, though. Certainly jumbling all the letters into a corner should be relatively straightforward, and it might also be nice to randomly make them transparent and/or crash.

I guess if this thread does stay open, I'd like to request a third feature: Please make the loading time longer and add a splash screen that sometimes doesn't render properly. How am I supposed to maximize my unproductivity if Inkscape snaps open right after I click it? I don't even have time to open Firefox.

Thanks for all your help,
Jack

[Lester (lester-dev)]

Well, I guess adding random crashes emitter would move Inkscape much closer to the original Illustrator's behaviour.

[mahfiaz (mahfiaz)]

Now I finally got it :)

Thanks for the thumbs up.

I myself have used Corel DRAW v.10 for long time (still use, as Inkscape is still only vector drawing editor). My personal favourite is their feature to scramble up monotone graphics after opening. I first saw it in version 10, and have checked every version afterwards, in X3 it is still there. To reproduce: import monotone graphics, save, open, enjoy.
As long time Corel user, I can say their product is even less stabile than Adobe's. Maybe just to make you understand how important it is to have crash reporting and recovery built in (you guessed right, they have it).

[prkos (prkos)]

I doubt these requests will ever be fixed :D

[gurkesaft (pooptastic)]

I know prkos, I know... It's sad, but this kind of thing may be why people will always turn back to Adobe in the end. ;)

Mahfiaz, you don't GIMP for the pixel/image side of artwork? GIMP + Inkscape = pretty complete

And with that, I will stop ranting. Thumbs up indeed.

[Igron (igron)]

Excellent trolling.

[Kent Tenney (ktenney)]

Sadly, this is all just symptomatic of the deeper cause, the precious
marketing resources are being drained by actual engineering.

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

@gurkesaft

I think I have another idea. inkscape has too few tools.

1. Node tool should be splitted into several ones (edit node, change node type - separate tool for each type, join/split nodes tool etc.)

2. Engravers's toolbox should be a separate tool.

3. 3D Box Tool could be splitted into three - by one per every dimension.

4. Oh! And we have a whole lot of Tweak tools to separate!

[gurkesaft (pooptastic)]

Hehe yeah, I agree it's been way too easy to manipulate Biezer curves these days.