tool experimentation

[egypturnash]

So I'm pondering tools. Looking for something with the comfortable vector nature of AI but with different visual strengths and weaknesses. Very very rough quick impressions.


Studio Artist - turns out to be designed entirely around painting from photographs, feh.

Inkscape - (0.44) It kinda loses me at the 'Please install X11 and restart Inkscape' dialogue I get when I try and launch it. It's already 68M, I don't want to install bloody XWindows, not when the screengrabs on the website include monstrosities like a dropdown for the layer list instead of a palette. Maybe later. Maybe not.

Lineform just won an Apple Design Award, but it's not doing it for me - it created friction pretty quickly when I tried to change the page size, and got a dialogue with nothing but dropdowns - I don't want to have to make a custom page size and put it in this giant list for every eccentrically-sized image! No global color swatches, and no promised features cool enough to make me abandon that major feature of my workflow.

Xara Xtreme - open-sourcing of a previously Windows-only vector tool with lots of effects; Mac version is just a vague hope at this point. I suspect it, too, will depend on installing XWindows.

Mostly, I'm just surveying what's out there that might fill the hole left by Microsoft eating up Expression, and turning it into a Win-only package called "Acrylic". I have the 3.3 release of Expression that MS made available for free download, but I worry about a future OS upgrade breaking it. Amazingly enough there's actually an update to the Mac version that fixes something 10.3.5 broke in it, though! And how well will it work once I get an Intel machine?

Expression is still the tool most likely to be used for a lot of work on Drowning City.

Comments

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

A vague hope? Hardly. They use the wxWidgets toolkit which, as far as I can tell, doesn't require X11; and they even offer build instructions for OS X. The real gotcha here is that you need to install a few libraries from Fink, but I imagine things could be set up so that a precompiled Mac version would come with the needed libraries embedded.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

When I saw that it only had binaries up for Linux, I decided to stop right there without exploring the current state of the OSX port. I've butted my head against installing stuff from Unixy source in the past, and it's not really something I'm willing to wrestle with any more.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

I can understand that. It didn't take me long, personally, to straight up refuse to use any programs that require X11, but I haven't quite outgrown tinkering with Unixy things (hence Perl) yet.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to port a few things in the past. Mostly toys. Oh well. Maybe this can be my next thing to give up on!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Ok, I'll bite; why not AI? And what has Expression got that makes you want to use it instead? (I'd download it, but I don't feel like giving MS any info.) I hadn't heard of it before.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Expression was to Illustrator as Painter is to Photoshop.

It's a natural media-oriented vector program. It's got a really rich set of art brushes that ship with it, and some cool features like faux-watercolor fills, the ability to edit the pressure curve on a path (something AI sorely lacks!) and a clever tool just for making organically-irregular sets of radiating lines. I did this with the demo a good while back.

It also has this wonderful ability to "freeze" a layer, locking it and rendering a bitmap copy of it for much faster redraws while you work on other layers. All the transparency involved in attempts at doing this sort of thing in AI tends to bring it to its knees.

The interface is a little weird, it doesn't really do CMYK very well - but it's a great way to get an organic look without having to deal with pixels or paint.