Hello Inkscape

My contract at a hyperlocalizend national network of web sites draws to a close, as the lolly pop of time melts in the ambient temperature of infinity, and the G-Olive deadline looms comfortingly.

I did have the opportunity to use a wide range of Free Software, including a variant of the Eclipse IDE. Blimey, ain't it big? It has some very cool features (like being able to trace what's being used where) but it is so slow. Painfully slow. And all for front-end HTML & CSS shenanigans. Not the swiftest of solutions though still a veritable education.

What I did use for a couple of days was the vector drawing program Inkscape. I'm on a pre-release version of 0.47, and it gets ever better every new version I try. It really is a delightful program, and that's coming from somebody who drew every street in West London on Adobe Illustrator. I knew Illustrator well, I loved/hated it but now, it's bloated beyond all recognition, like chancing upon an old friend who's since lived on fizzy beer and eccles cakes and lost their way in the world.

Inkscape, well, Inkscape is a different matter. Svelte. Thoughtful. And just such a pleasure to use. The only weakness, for my purposes, is the relatively poor handling of large amounts of text (as in no paragraph control). Not sure if this will be rectified in later versions, nor even whether such paragraph handling is within the SVG specification.

I had created a bundle of lovely little icons, but when the perm crayon stepped into the breech, we ran into a problem inherent with Free Software. He doesn't know the first thing about Inkscape so he had to convert the drawings into bitmaps and then copy them with the path tool in Photoshop. And he wasn't to be persuaded to take a crash course in Inkscape neither. Shame.