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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.) Conversely, I find FreeHand’s controls for manipulating Bezier curves to be awkward, while Inkscape’s seemed to be elegant and easy to work with. In fact, I don’t really have any interface gripes about Inkscape now that I think about it. I’d say that’s the mark of a good user interface.
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. Most of the cartoons I've done here have been created with Inkscape and/or The GIMP: http://www.spamtoons.com/ ). 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.
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