One Shot Design

Originally developed for the Apple Macintosh, Adobe Illustrator has remained the undisputed industry-standard editor for vector graphics throughout its 11 years of existence. Available on Mac OSX and Windows, its 13^th built (named CS3), boasts a host of new features. However, being put to use on a regular scale in a critical environment, the heavyweight has let me down on the simplest of tasks: allowing to save my work.

This is a landmark: I have migrated to Inkscape, thus replacing Illustrator as the default 2D drawing editor on my office graphics station.

Performing similar tasks on the same machine and over the same network, Inkscape has shown to be much faster than Illustrator. We’re talking about a tenfold difference while saving multi-layered vectorial drawings, which might be caused by the fact that Adobe’s heavyweight saves its files using a dual path method.

Inkscape 0.45 is fast, incredibly stable and reliable (ie: it ALWAYS allows me to save, and NEVER shuts down without notice). Parametrically editing Bézier polygons, manually editing vector knots or gradients is a child’s play. Furthermore, Inkscape natively saves the work in W3C standard-compliant SVG format, which is properly interpreted by Illustrator and SVG viewers published by Adobe, Opera or Microsoft.

I reviewed Inkscape in May 2006, and althought they were export filters to the ubiquitous PDF format, the output was’nt always perfect.

It is a thing of the past: Inkscape 0.45 now benefits from improved PDF export filters, allowing to save a single multi-layer page as a PDF document. The output is perfectly interpreted by Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, wich means that it is properly formatted.

Linked bitmaps are saved as uncompressed images and kept with their initial resolution, so it is possible to prepare documents for print in this way.

Having failed to find any existing T-shirt template, I quickly made one based on a manufacturer specifications sheet using Inkscape. I hereby publish t-shirt_template.svg in the Public Domain.

Poster for a single event held in Milan, Italy. The title translates to Like father, like son.

Artwork executed in Inkscape.

QCad is a CAD software for 2D design and drafting released as Open Source by Ribbonsoft. Development started in 1998, based on Ribbonsoft‘s CAM Expert code.

The application natively uses Autodesk ubiquitous DXF format. QCad has been ported to Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Solaris.

Having learned CAD on Audocad, I am used to the interface of Autodesk‘s best seller. I must say that the interface of QCad is a little bit different, but then again Autocad‘s interface is infamous for being unfriendly. So it only took me a quarter of an hour to figure out how to use QCad. The interface makes a clever use of the mouse button to move back and forth between commands.

The Linux version comes free of charge, but Ribbonsoft asks a minimum of 24,00€ for the Windows and Mac binaries. There is a demo version available, which has all the features of the full version, except that it will automatically shut down after 10 minutes; prior to what if will give one the possibility to save one’s work. When it will have been opened 100 times, the demo version will refuse to work.

I give it a three star.