Mike Salsbury’s Blog

As part of my ongoing research into how easy it would be for an
artist to move from the Mac OS X platform to Linux, I decided to take a
look at the open source Inkscape
application and compare it to a popular Macintosh drawing program,
Macromedia FreeHand.  In a prior job, and as a side business some
years ago, I used FreeHand pretty regularly to create graphics. 
With FreeHand as my standard (I had tried Adobe Illustrator back in
those days and found it very non-intuitive to use), I determined to find
out if I could find any serious deficiencies in Inkscape that would make it unsuitable
for a former FreeHand user to work with.

File Import Formats
Supported

FreeHand supports importing PNG, GIF, DXF, EPS,
DCS EPS, PDF, PICT files (on the Mac only), JPEG, PSD, CGM (on Windows
only), CorelDraw 7 and 8, and Targa.  Inkscape
supports importing SVG, SVGZ, AI, TXT, WMF, ANI, BMP, GIF, ICO, CUR,
JPEG, PCX, PNG, PNM, PBRN, PGRN, PGM, PPM, RAS, Targa, TIFF, WBMP, XBM,
and XPM.  In terms of sheer numbers, Inkscape supports more
formats – 24 versus 12 for FreeHand.  Both support PNG,
GIF, JPEG, and Targa.  FreeHand supports EPS and PDF files, which
are more of a graphic arts standard in the Macintosh world than some of
those supported by Inkscape.  It should be noted
that Inkscape can export its files to EPS, it just
can’t import EPS files.  The EPS files created by
Inkscape can be imported into FreeHand but instead of a
preview, they appear on-screen as a placeholder (rectangle with diagonal
lines “X’ed” through it).  This is not typical for what
Mac users see when they import an EPS file.  Overall,
Inkscape is probably the winner here, but only if
you’re not a former FreeHand/Illustrator user with a lot of legacy
files.  In that case, you’ll likely be disappointed.

File Export Formats
Supported

Inkscape can save documents as
SVG, SVGZ, PostScript, EPS, POV, TEX, and an Inkscape-specific SVG or
compressed SVG (SVGZ) file format.  Inkscape can
also export images or specific selections as PNG bitmap files. 
FreeHand is considerably more flexible in this regard,
supporting save/export to Adobe Illustrator 1.1, Adobe Illustrator 88,
Adobe Illustrator 3, Adobe Illustrator 5.5, Adobe Illustrator 7.x, ASCII
Text, BMP, DCS2 EPS, FreeHand 8/9/10 documents, Generic EPS, GIF, JPEG,
Macintosh EPS, Macromedia Flash (SWF), MS-DOS EPS, PDF, PhotoShop 3 and
4/5 EPS, PhotoShop 5, PICT, PNG, QuarkXPress EPS, RTF text, Targa, and
TIFF.  This makes FreeHand the clear winner here,
supporting something like 27 formats and/or variants while
InkScape supports about 9. How important this
“win” is depends entirely on whether you need the formats
FreeHand offers that Inkscape does not.

User Interface – Toolbars

In terms
of functionality, the basic Inkscape toolbars support
the automatic creation of rectangular, oval, star, spiral, freehand,
Bezier curves, straight lines, text, gradients, and color
averaging.  FreeHand’s basic toolbar supports the addition of pages
to the file, lassoing, eyedropper, pen, text, freehand lines, ovals,
rectangles, scale, freeform, erase, knife, perspective, extrude, trace,
blend, action tool, connector tool, pan, zoom, color changes, and
snapping.  Additional toolbars in Inkscape support
the usual “new file”, print, save, open, etc., functionality
as well as creating object clones, duplicating objects, breaking the
link between an object and its clone, grouping and ungrouping objects,
changing the fill/stroke of an object, changing the object’s font,
alignment and distribution, changing preferences, rotating and flipping
objects, altering an object’s position in the layering, viewing and
changing an object’s horizontal/vertical position, changing an object’s
width, and changing behaviors for scaling and transforming gradients or
textures.  An on-screen ruler, capable of measuring in percentage,
pixels, points, millimeters, centimeters, meters, and inches is provided
in Inkscape.  Additional toolbars in FreeHand provide many of the
same things found in Inkscape’s toolbars, a few not found in
Inkscape, and lack a few of those in
Inkscape.  Which application is the winner here
would depend largely on what features/tools you tend to use most
often.  For my use, Inkscape’s toolbars are probably closer to what
I need when I work with it.

Feature
Comparisons

Both products have a large number of features
in common.  Just to give you an example of the similarities,
consider the contents of the “File” menu in both applications,
reproduced here side by side:

To list all the common
features between the two products would take too long, so I?m going
to focus on things I see in one that I don?t see in the other.  For
instance, both applications support the following (and more):

• Reverting to the unchanged version of a
  file
• Zooming in and out
• Customizable page
  ruler
• Guides and grids that you can ’snap to?
• Arranging,
  aligning, and distributing objects in a document
• Joining objects
  together to form a new object
• Grouping objects together and
  ungrouping them
• Splitting an object into component
  paths
• Altering an existing object’s path
• Changing text
  size, font, style, etc.
• Flowing text along a
  path
• Turning text into paths
• Online help with
  tutorials
• Saving ?meta information? as part of a
  document

But there are some things in Freehand that I did
not find in Inkscape.  Specifically:

• Publish a document as
  HTML
• Customization of menus and shortcuts
• Document
  reports that display, for example, what colors are used in the document,
  what fonts, how many pages there are, what graphics and text styles are
  used in the document, etc.
• Collection of the files needed to
  output the document at a service bureau
• Keyline view (to be
  honest, I’m not quite sure what value this feature is)
• The
  ability to create movies or animations in Flash format (this isn’t
  something I expect in a drawing or illustration tool, though I can
  imagine it might be of use to someone)
• Automatically draw a
  ?connector? between objects, which works something like the arrows on a
  flowcharting tool (the next version of Inkscape is expected to include
  such a tool)
• A variety of “effects” for manipulating
  objects, like fractalization and various kinds of fills (these are
  actually part of Inkscape and are enabled if you have Python installed,
  which my test system apparently did not have)

Similarly, I
found some Inkscape features that don?t appear to be a
part of FreeHand:

• Click once to
  select an image. Click again to rotate. Click again to skew.  (Very
  handy!)
• Ability to label objects in a drawing with a
  name
• Information window about the application’s memory
  use
• Toolbar buttons for quickly moving objects between
  layers
• Toolbar buttons for quickly flipping or rotating objects
  at right angles
• Python scripting (though FreeHand Xtras are a
  comparable functionality)
• XML editor
• Ability to clone an
  object, such that changes to the original ripple automatically to the
  clones, and the ability to break that link
• Ability to apply
  different styles to different tools (e.g., rectangle tool draws in red
  with blue fill but oval tool draws in green with yellow
  fill)
• Built-in star-drawing tool

These are probably
not the only differences between the two feature sets.  They?re
just the ones that happened to catch my eye and seemed most interesting
or useful (though I tried to be reasonably comprehensive and not miss
anything major).

Something that annoys me about FreeHand (at least
in the MXa version I tested) is that it seems to have lost
its focus.  It’s trying to be a lot more than a drawing
tool.  The fact that it can produce Flash animations, HTML, and
multiple-page documents (which starts to creep into page-layout land)
places it  far outside the realm of a drawing/illustration
tool.  I suspect this is a symptom of being a commercial
product.  In order to sell upgrades, you need to add
features.  Sooner or later, you start running out of new things to
add because the product more or less does everything a user could
reasonably expect it to do.  So you have to start expanding outside
the scope of the product’s initial design  to find new things to
add to it.  That’s why you see drawing tools in InDesign, Microsoft
Word, and the like.  These things don?t necessarily need to be
there, though they can at times be handy.  They’re there mostly, in
my opinion, to sell the latest upgrade.  Since free software like
Inkscape doesn’t need to add non-sequitur features
(since it doesn’t need to sell upgrades), it can focus on being an
effective drawing application.  This, in my mind, gives it an
advantage over FreeHand.

User
Interfaces

I can?t say that I found either product’s user
interface to be significantly better or worse than the other.  Both
are actually pretty intuitive and elegant.  On the other hand, I
very much liked the way Inkscape allowed  you to
scale, rotate, and skew an object without having to go through menus or
key combinations to do it.  The ability to right-click an object
and immediately gain access to the functions that apply to that object
is also an extremely useful feature.  (In fairness to the FreeHand
version I tested, right-clicking has only very recently become part of
the standard Macintosh interface, though some products have supported it
for a while anyway.)

Performance, Stability,
Responsiveness

The test platform for this review was a
933 MHz Apple Macintosh G4 with 1.5GB RAM and plenty of hard drive space
running OS X 10.4.  The FreeHand version labeled ?MXa? was tested
alongside the X11 version of Inkscape labeled 0.42.2.

Installation of Macromedia FreeHand was essentially the same as
any Macintosh application.  It required a small amount of
information to be input here and there but mostly took care of
itself. 

Installation of Inkscape was
slightly more complicated.  The test system didn?t get built with
Apple X11 by default, so I had to install that and reboot before
installing Inkscape.  Inkscape itself also seemed
to have some problems getting started.  I had to launch and quit it
a couple of times before it finally came up.  To be fair, when the
application seemed to hang on a subsequent launch, it was clear from the
Activity Monitor that X11 was the one having a real problem coming up,
so I don?t think Inkscape was at fault.  After
killing X11 from the command line and rebooting the system,
Inkscape came up in only a couple of seconds.  I
haven’t seen this X11 issue since that first attempted launch, so I’m
pointing a finger at X11 or a previously-opened X11 application on that
machine.

Once up and running, Inkscape was
very nearly as fast as a native Mac OS X application (i.e., I think I
detected a very minuscule delay but it never bothered me).  In
fact, if I regularly used the Macintosh, I?d have no problems at
all working with Inkscape on a regular basis.  It
performed well, was perfectly stable (aside from the X11 issue above
that I don?t think is Inkscape’s fault), and never crashed or generated
an unexpected error during operation.

Similarly, being a native OS
X application, FreeHand launched quickly and performed quite well. 
I didn?t experience any crashes or unexpected errors using
FreeHand.

(Later Update:)  I’ve
also had the opportunity to work with Inkscape on a Windows XP Pro PC
and found that it responds just as quickly and smoothly as any other
Windows application.  This has given me more time to get to know
the product and I’ve actually created several illustrations with
it.
As with the Macintosh testing, I saw no crashes or problems on the
Windows XP side (at least not so far, in many hours of workin with it).

Getting Results

For curiosity’s
sake, I loaded one of the FreeHand sample images and set about seeing if
I could replicate it in Inkscape.  That turned out to be pretty
easy to do for the most part, though I did run into some problems. 
The main problem I ran into (the inability to set a gradiant between one
color and another, as opposed to between a color and
“transparent”) was a result of my not understanding a subtle
point in the interface.  The developers explained that it’s only
the default gradient that goes from opaque to transparent.  You
need to select each of the handles in the gradiant tool individually and
set their color and opaqueness individually.  You can also use the
dropper tool to set the colors at each end of the gradient.  I’ve
since tinkered with this a bit and confirmed that the developers were
correct (not that I expected otherwise).  This isn’t clear from the
interface and isn’t quite as intuitive to work with as it could be – so
this is probably my only criticism of the Inkscape interface.

The other issue I ran into
was also my fault.  The original FreeHand drawing used a shape that
had been modified with a “fractal” effect that I didn’t think
existed in Inkscape.  That effect (and others) do exist in Inkscape
and is accessible if you have Python installed on the system and have
enabled the Effects menu. 

I?m confident that if I had
been using Inkscape regularly for a period of months that I would have
figured these things out eventually.  Here’s a partial list of the
“Xtras” or scripts that ship with FreeHand:

I
should note, for the record, that while it was impossible for me (with
my rusty vector drawing skills) to very accurately reproduce the
original sample from FreeHand in Inkscape without a
couple of the specific object effects used by the original artist (or
without cheating by using the tracing tools to reproduce them), I can
see from the clip art library built using Inkscape that
comparable results are indeed possible.  It’s more
a question of understanding the way to get a desired effect in Inkscape
than an issue that Inkscape can?t reproduce it.

Conclusion

Inkscape offers
a great deal of power and flexibility at a price that’s definitely
right for any budget (i.e., it’s free software).  If
you?ve used a drawing tool like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia
FreeHand, you?ll feel right at home in this tool once you figure out
which menu this item’s under or at keystroke does some particular
function.  It is very stable, very responsive, supports a pretty
wide range of formats for input and output, and works well with other
applications (like Scribus,
reviewed elsewhere on this site).  Since it does include the
capability to create your own scripts in Python to add functionality to
the product or automate mundane design tasks, it’s quite flexible as
well.  (And of course, if you have programming skills and want to
make some radical changes, it’s also open source ? meaning you can
change any part of it you want.)

As for what’s ?missing? in
Inkscape relative to FreeHand, I?m not sure I would
personally have missed it back in my graphic design days.  Even if
I did, I?m confident that somewhere between the scripting capabilities,
available open source scripts, and my own imagination I?d eventually
have gotten it or found a way around it.

All things considered,
I?d have to rank Inkscape very high in the 1-10 rating
system, I?d say easily a 7-8 overall.  It’s fast, has more than
enough features to suit me, supports the major file formats I care about
(and I can probably get to the rest of them ? except the proprietary
ones ? through the use of The Gimp or other tools).  If you are
looking for a capable vector drawing program that will produce
professional results without breaking the bank, you owe it to yourself
to give Inkscape a look.

admin General Computer Topics adobe illustrator, drawing, illustration, inkscape, open source, review