Inkscape for everybody
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00:00
Slide rulePublic domainGoodness of fitLibrary (computing)Arithmetic meanWordForm (programming)Series (mathematics)SoftwareBitChainFreewareFeedbackFlickrObservational studyProduct (business)Digital photographyOpen setSinc functionComputer fontLecture/Conference
01:49
Projective planeData conversionSoftware developerSlide ruleRuby on Rails
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BitProduct (business)Computer fileSoftwareFreewareMedical imagingQuicksortUniverse (mathematics)Incidence algebraFile formatVector potentialEscape characterLattice (order)
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Goodness of fitProjective planeCircleComputer animation
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NumberYouTubeElectric generatorNumbering scheme
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YouTubeHypermediaTwitterGroup actionACIDReal-time operating systemXML
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EmailAddress spaceGroup actionEscape characterMultiplication signElectronic mailing listDependent and independent variablesFile archiverGoodness of fitXML
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Goodness of fitWeb 2.0Open setHypermediaAxiom of choiceSource code
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Open setVector spaceFile formatGoodness of fitForm (programming)Attribute grammarDisk read-and-write headXML
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Multiplication signValidity (statistics)AreaTerm (mathematics)Sound effectWeb 2.0Arithmetic meanXML
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DistanceCodeDescriptive statisticsInclined planePerfect groupGoodness of fitTraffic reportingSoftware bugSoftwareSoftware developerMultiplication signFunctional (mathematics)Point (geometry)Computer animationSource codeXML
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Multiplication signXMLUML
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CodeGoodness of fitGraphics softwareProjective planeSoftwareXMLUML
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Message passingQuicksortGroup actionUniform resource locatorMultiplication signNumberSoftware developerRight angleFrustrationGoodness of fitOcean current
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Message passingMultiplication signEscape characterProcess (computing)NamespaceShape (magazine)Point (geometry)BitRevision controlImplementationProjective planeNumberGradientWeb 2.0Group actionQuicksortMereologyExecution unitOpen sourceSelectivity (electronic)Integrated development environmentCodeSoftware developerSkewnessComputer fileVolume (thermodynamics)ProgrammschleifeFeedbackFlash memoryPersonal digital assistantState of matterObject (grammar)Cellular automatonFerry CorstenObservational studySemantics (computer science)Simple groupCASE <Informatik>MathematicsMachine codeRight angleSummierbarkeitCircleElement (mathematics)Software development kitCuboidDefault (computer science)PlanningWeb-DesignerBuildingGame controllerLecture/Conference
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Scaling (geometry)Forcing (mathematics)Right angleMereologyStudent's t-testWebsiteBitNormal (geometry)Computer programmingDemonProcess (computing)Variable (mathematics)Metropolitan area networkSoftware developer1 (number)Standard deviationMaxima and minimaOnline helpMultiplication signSchweizerische Physikalische GesellschaftUniverse (mathematics)QuicksortRule of inferenceForm (programming)Disk read-and-write headBuildingProjective planePublic key certificateWindowProgramming paradigmNumberSoftwareSelectivity (electronic)Associative propertyInsertion lossShape (magazine)NeuroinformatikSystem callFreewareMenu (computing)Execution unitOnlinecommunityInternetworkingStrategy gameShared memoryGame controllerData miningBlogDivisorLocal ringInternet forumComputing platformPeer-to-peerPoint (geometry)State of matterLink (knot theory)Stress (mechanics)Lecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Hey, g'day. Actually, I've got a disclaim. This isn't my talk, although I've made the slides and presented it and organized it. This is actually a really good idea by a good colleague, free software colleague, meaning we don't work together, but we do work together, Donna Benjamin, and she could make it to the LibreGrafx meeting, but
00:21
she really wanted this feedback from you guys. So if we could raise the lights and I could see everybody, this will eventually be an open discussion. And it's hopefully going to be a bit of fun. So a bit of introduction to people who have not met me yet. Please meet me. I'm Andy. I'm an Aussie guy,
00:42
but through, well, I'm a designer, geek, and hopefully a friend. I've done open clip arts with John over there. We finally got the website looking kind of okay. Inkscape, since about the the fork from Saudi Party, and also Publican, which is a publishing toolchain, and
01:02
that's, I think I've spoken at that about two LGMs ago. Okay, so I did also three really ugly fonts. They're on Open Font Library. They're not so good, and also many, many bad photos now on Flickr, and all of these are declared as public domain, although Flickr does not let you actually declare public domain.
01:21
So let this be my public. If it's on my Flickr, it's yours, and you can see it's yours. So, okay. If that makes any sense. All right, also, I'm a foam ad through a series of coincidences in the past four years I've been living in for Asian countries,
01:41
and Australia is an Asian country. That's why I include it, and and now I'll be moving to Prague. So I currently work for this guy. I told him I would put this slide up. At a Ruby on Rails development lab based in Guangzhou, China, a very cool place, very cool projects.
02:02
If you want to chat about the insanities of living in that region and the immense possibilities that that opens up, I would love to have those conversations. In a month, I'll be working for this guy, and this is Novell, and I'll be making the SUSE studio product hopefully a little bit friendlier and a little bit easier to use. So
02:22
this is an Inkscape talk, and it's easy to say that Inkscape loves everybody. Inkscape is not one of the tools that was made with an agenda. It just happens to have picked up so many things from the free software community. So Inkscape loves you. That's an easy
02:41
Inkscape, too. So you love Inkscape, too, right? People here actually know about Inkscape. Last LibreGrafx meeting, although I wasn't here, a lot of people said, look, the talks are too technical. I really just need an introduction to these tools. I want to be able to find out more. I want to know where to go. this is going to be a sort of brief overview of the universe of the Inkscape community learning artist ecosystem.
03:09
Okay, so Inkscape uses SVG as its base format, and SVG is good for your health. Files don't get corrupted. It's
03:20
completely standardized. You can compose really detailed and really compelling images with a small file footprint, with a lot of creative potential, and you have the ability to use intermediary software, as we've seen by a lot of the pieces of software at the conference, and you're not locked into
03:40
Inkscape. You can obviously, if something better comes along, you can use it, or better yet, you can use other things while you're using Inkscape as well, so that's really kind of cool. But if you're first coming in counter to the Inkscape project, you have maybe a few more questions than, oh,
04:03
it's good because it's based on SVG, but how do I get from not knowing how to create a circle to making something really shiny and pretty? And I've got to say, as a designer myself, my abilities have grown pretty much from ridiculously terrible
04:20
to mediocre at best, but that journey has been with Inkscape the whole way, and I've learned and grown with the tool, and I would like every everybody here to have that opportunity to, which you do, and I'm going to hopefully make it easier. So first shout out. Where do we go to learn Inkscape? heathenix.org. This is the screencasts. This is on YouTube or anywhere else,
04:42
and this is a great way to passively learn Inkscape. Just, you know, go home, turn one on. You don't have to actually read anything. You don't even have to switch your brain on. You can just see stuff happen, and it's pretty, and then you know how. So this is, this is, so this is my number one recommendation for the YouTube generation. Just go to this channel. Easiest way to get it done.
05:04
Also, how do you get help from actual people? Making a YouTube comment may not get you the answer you need, although it sometimes does. You can use the real-time media. Crowdsource, like, straight away. Ask your question out into the rest of the world, and you don't have to know IRC. You can ask on Twitter.
05:21
You can go on Identica. You can actually find a human being who's using Inkscape and ask them a question. That's me. Please do. You can also do less real-time, but still very important pools of knowledge, and that's the social groups. Mailing lists, while they may not be the friendliest thing to somebody who's never joined a mailing list before, especially when
05:42
they enter their email address, and the next day they have 400 complaints about why external CSS doesn't work, but it is really good to be able to read archives, and it is really good to be able to ask a question to a group of people, and you'll get empathetic responses because the Inkscape community is that good.
06:01
Also Flickr, you see something pretty. The comment says it was made in Inkscape. Make sure you ask. So the idea is that Inkscape is not trying to create the Inkscape community. It's actually distributed throughout the web. All of these resources are all over the place, and that's the way people want to find things, and hopefully we can help. Our books.
06:24
There are too many good Inkscape books to mention. I will URL bomb you at the end over what the good books are. We have an official book, and it is the best. So that's how you learn, but learning Inkscape isn't enough. I mean nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. I don't expect everybody to
06:45
want to become the next Rembrandt or anything like that. I'm actually a really bad drawer, and there are so many ways that you can leverage this new technology and new media and create some really compelling artistic pieces or some really creative design and some really
07:00
effective things with just using stuff on the open web, and thanks to SVG and thanks to Inkscape being the democratized tool of choice for creating so many things, we can actually do that. First one of course is props to Open Clip Art. If you are sick of drawing a guy carrying a briefcase,
07:20
just search guy carrying a briefcase. I think there's one. But if you mention flower, there's like thousands, so we're good. Also, Wikipedia, you've got the contributor's requirement. You have to make sure that if it is going to be best represented in a vector format,
07:42
it has to be an open format like SVG, and not just an open format like SVG, but SVG. So, which is, yeah, it looks so much like SVG. It's not funny. So this is fantastic. I don't think that's trademarked, but I just pulled it off and put it on there. I think all of Wikipedia is, what license is Wikipedia?
08:03
By SA? My apologies. I guess that's attribution, so that's cool. Also, there's the Creative Commons web, which is loose assets that are pushed all around, but with people declaring that they are Creative Commons license. If you see it, and you're cool with the terms, you can use other people's work, and you should use other people's work because
08:25
it's a big shout out to them. It's a validation of other people's abilities, and it's also a time saver for you, so it's a really nice way to do things. So that's all about how you help you, and people always ask, especially when I live in China and try and pitch Inkscape, what's in it for you?
08:43
What do you get out of this? And I mean, me as in a developer, even though I'm pretty distant lately. So, bug reports. With enough things frustrating you, enough time, a motivated user spending enough thought and consideration of what is going wrong,
09:01
we'll write the perfect bug report. Jakub is such a person. It's fantastic to have such a really active community, creating such really, really, really good really, really good descriptive bug reports, mentioning expected functionality, desired functionality, what exactly happened, even going so far as to trace the problem
09:22
with good software. Some people even do hot-swap code fixes because they're so, so inclined. It's the kind of, it's the kind of insight to your users that many other development channels wouldn't have, and I mean, it's just, it's pervasive to us in open source, but to somebody new to the technology, it's actually quite amazing that you can do that.
09:46
Feature requests. So, everybody wants a pony, but thought-out ideas work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pitching a feature request, and you can find out how on the Inkscape website, but I encourage everybody too, because it's not like
10:02
you just use Inkscape. You can use Inkscape, and then you can say, well, how about this? And that might be the idea. That saves everybody else a whole lot of time. Massive props to Google Summer of Code. If you really, really, really, really, really want to make Inkscape better, you can nominate or even write a request proposal for Google Summer of Code project.
10:23
I love that company because they have made so many good features in LibreGrafx software. It is possibly the single biggest fiscal contribution to our industry, and it is totally appreciated. That is very cool. The sad reality is Inkscape is relatively unknown to the population at large. We don't have a marketing agenda. We don't necessarily
10:48
do the right kind of stuff when it comes to getting a message out there. We're just very lucky for what we have got, because it happens to be a free tool, but we can't ride that horse all the time. We want to
11:00
have this tool used by the largest number of people and make this tool a very good tool. It's pretty up for discussion. So what I'd like to do now is open up the floor about people's experiences, how you started learning Inkscape, what was the most valuable resource to you, what your current frustrations are, interacting with Inkscape as a community, and
11:23
we want to sort of like group think. So if you have a laptop, go to this etherpad URL. Delete stuff, add stuff. It's actually got the notes for this talk written down there, and there's a few URL bombs in there. So that's for the journal keeping,
11:41
but I just want to like open it up to comments, not just questions from everybody here, because I'm not meant to be... Yeah, okay. Can we also have lights if there is such thing? So I do love Inkscape, but
12:04
one thing that really annoys me is the way that Inkscape mutates things. I'm a developer and a designer. Well, not actually a designer. I'm a developer, but I like to draw things in Inkscape, and when I've drawn something or if we've done something via code,
12:20
bring it into Inkscape, it doesn't preserve. And that's a serious, serious problem for me. And also, whenever I'm downloading a file, because I manipulate things a lot by a text pad, right, and so when I download a file from Wikipedia or from, you know, any number of, I mean, there's all sorts.
12:40
Actually, there's all sorts of SVG popping up as clipart. Popping up open clipart is just one of many now, which is awesome, but it's got the SodiPodi namespace. It's got all this other stuff, and it's not usually set to 100%, 100% with a viewbox. It's usually set to a fixed size,
13:03
which is, I have to manually bring all that stuff out, and just the defaults should, in my opinion, the defaults should be make it as webby as possible, make it as reusable as possible, and Inkscape needs to work on that. It also needs to be friendlier to tool, other things in the toolchain, like when I'm gonna be taking this thing, this thing I draw and putting it into
13:24
something to animate it, I need to keep the semantics of a circle or semantics of things like that. First of all, all 30 points that you just mentioned, I agree with, and I totally agree.
13:43
This isn't an Inkscape feedback session. This is how I learned Inkscape, how I want to encounter Inkscape, but just to quickly answer the question, because that is a personal pain point, I care about the fidelity of the SVG files more than anybody else, I'm sure. I have begged, stolen, and killed to get libcrico and rsvg rendering
14:05
external starsheets, and it's still, we still haven't done enough to be able to pull in external CSS, to be able to get rid of the ID, you know, volume. I call it ID vomit, you know, when we kind of like chuck this stuff everywhere.
14:21
And the, you know, duplicated gradients issue is kind of back, like there's a few, there's a few things where, if you're thinking about it as a web object, Inkscape doesn't do it right, because we also have to think about it as a creative canvas, and that canvas has to be fast and unobtrusive, and we don't want to hold up the user every time and say, hey, guess what?
14:40
Actually, you've already got a shape like this, do you want it to be that shape, or do you want to make a new shape? Because you're gonna change that, and you'll be really weirded out when this shape starts changing as well. That kind of thing. That's, that's gonna take a lot of arguing, and that's not what we're here for. I'd like to, I'd like to know, can someone tell me their story of how they encountered Inkscape? Anybody?
15:12
Hi, well my, sorry, my story is quite simple.
15:22
Oops, yeah, it's okay. So, I was just a Linux rebusied user for a long time, and my artistic self started to emerge, and I found Inkscape, it was like 2006, I think, 2005, so it was just being forked from Sody Pody. Not forked, but yeah.
15:48
That was, yeah, that was a bit earlier probably. Yeah, so I did some of my best work with it, using it, and I know it's not how to improve Inkscape, but my only complaint, my only complaint ever.
16:06
Okay, well, for the guys who fix problems, just write a Mac version, because I think it's very important to the point you said that it's not very popular. It's true. It is in the Linux community, open source community,
16:21
but I think there's a huge opportunity in the Mac, in the Mac version, without XORC, a native version, so yeah. But I think the guys behind the projects are doing a great job, and I'm looking forward for future versions.
16:41
So the, there is builds for the Mac, and I know a lot of people are saying a native build. There is actually a native build, but it's slower than running with X, so we didn't plan for that one. Yeah, correct. Yeah, you can't exactly swap out the, I mean, you can't really swap out the toolkit. Like, I mean,
17:06
it's not, yeah, I know, I really wish that was, that was the case, but that's very cool. I have to share my immediate, my, okay, my immediate story, which is, I studied traditional animation 2000, 2001.
17:21
I did 3D and 2D in Cell, and it was really cool time for me. Toon Boom was the king when it came to animation, but everybody knew the web was where all of the creativity had to be. I was using Flash, but I was interested in any tool I could get my hands on. I
17:40
encountered, I encountered an environment where I had to use Linux to do web development. I did not have a choice. And that not only really frustrated me, but that also piqued my aggressive, okay, well, if, if I have to do this, then I make them have to fix the problems. And I saw Soty Poty, and I saw anti-alias shapes rendering quite fast,
18:01
and I thought, oh, that's it. It's only a matter of months before this thing takes off. I was allowed to. It's been too long, and we're now at a very mature point where we do have a good offering for the population at large, and we just like to get like a bit of ethnography happening, like, you know,
18:20
find out exactly why and, and what people are doing. So anybody else have any comments or ideas about how we can get it out there? Yeah, I'd like to share a story on how I started to love Inkscape. It's mainly because of the lack of implementation of my wishes in GIMP.
18:45
I was doing a lot of mock-ups, and for a long time, there was a request to have a really simple grouping of layers in GIMP so you have control of, you know, having
19:01
individual elements separated, but still be able to move the whole thing, as one thing, and Inkscape had simple groups, but with a very elegant, elegant way of working inside the group. You could enter a group, and then you can work with the individual objects, and then exit the group and work with the whole thing as a single object. That thing alone
19:24
just made me redo all my mock-ups inside Inkscape, and I am going to love it. Yeah, that's true. The selection code is godly. I mean, that's awesome. Does anybody else have an idea for how we can really get the message out? This is more of a
19:47
question of why haven't I encountered anybody in China that's heard of Inkscape? You know, that's like my question. Aside from English-speaking people who can use the English internet and a few other things.
20:00
Is it available on Windows? It is. It's available across the platform. I have a search for SVG, a Google alert, whenever an SVG pops up, and something like a, I don't know, a third of the SVG things that pop up are really too cricket, and like, you know, like, and at first I thought, oh, what an abomination, and I thought, no,
20:23
how awesome that people are using SVG to, and using Inkscape. They're specifically using Inkscape to draw these shapes and to share. So maybe finding niche communities where they, where they really want to have control over the workflows might be a way of doing that. A friend of mine came to me and said, hey, what do you know about Inkscape?
20:44
I've been using this free program, and I think it's pretty cool. How do you think it compares to Illustrator? And I thought, I was talking to him about it, and finally it revealed he had no idea it was SVG. He knew I was an SVG guy. He had no idea that Inkscape was SVG. He was just using it because it was a free, cool, open-source way.
21:00
So I'm really surprised to hear that people aren't hearing you, because I hear about it a lot. Maybe that's my selection bias. Yeah, let me, let me cover up. There is absolutely no quantifiable data that says that people aren't adopting Inkscape. In fact, there's so much data to counter to the opposite. But there's a perception thing where we are not,
21:21
you know, we're not there yet. We'd love to do better. We'd love to absolutely make things, make things work. Is it working? Yes. So a phrase I heard this conference once, but quite a few other times. It's like, well, we started with the tools that we learned at school,
21:42
right? And so often you hear universities and university labs and whatever, and they're trying to use tools. They're trying to outfit the students for the modern world, and so therefore they have to teach them the industry standards, and therefore they have to teach them blah blah blah. Get in with those programs. Find people who are frustrated by that, who have other peers that they can talk to. Get them to trial it in a lab. Say, yeah,
22:05
you can fill out a whole lab with Inkscape and this and that and the other, and it costs you nothing. Guess what? And then get them to do it for a semester, and then get them to tell their other teachers and that sort of thing. If you, it's a basic pyramid thing, right? You get a few active teachers, and you get lots of teachers, then you get thousands of students, and then suddenly it's popular. People use it because they learned it at school.
22:23
I'm sorry to, sorry to cut. I totally, I totally agree, and I'm very optimistic about that particular issue, the early adoption issue of getting people in when they're young, that kind of, you know, camel cigarette strategy. The, the, the thing that's got me really pumped is that I think computing as a paradigm is really changing, and the whole concept of, oh,
22:47
you use Inkscape, or you use, you know, tool number X, it's, it's, it's not going to be that brand association anymore. We've, we've seen so many creative things just today where people have abstracted their workflows into countless tools to create possibilities that they could never do before, and I think that once that becomes
23:05
the consensus, you have an idea, and then you do your idea rather than you open up your tool and see what you can do, we're going to get into a state of, you know, creative consensus that the workflow matters, not necessarily this tool is the industry standard, and
23:21
that, that may make, that may make a hungry population of creative professionals and creative amateurs. So I'm kind of like hoping that's not a problem in the next, you know, three years. We take one last question from Cidro. Actually, it's more of a building on what Chris said. Last year at LGM in Montreal, the woman who taught me first-year design
23:47
and taught me how to use Illustrator, showed up, and she was really pumped about using Inkscape, and she had sat up at home the night before having an impossible time of trying to install it on a Mac, and
24:01
luckily for her, she brought her laptop along, and there were people there able to help her, but not everyone has that opportunity, and I think that we, this sounds awful, but we can't underestimate people's inability to actually do the things that we take for granted. It's harder than it looks to install Inkscape on a Mac if you're just a normal, normal user,
24:20
used to double-clicking the button and then pressing the next button. Wait. So, you want to respond to that?
24:46
It's the last one. Can I just make a quick note about the bits about packaging and building for various platforms? So, there is probably a little misunderstanding between the user community and the developers community. The things about many
25:06
software projects that are primarily written for links is that developers actually don't work on either Windows or Mac. We have perhaps, apart from General Cruise, there is no developer who works on Inkscape
25:25
who uses Mac. So, if anybody is willing to step in and help with that, we'd be very grateful. Actually, either Bryce Harrington or Ted Gould actually wrote a blog post exactly on that, because there was one person who
25:43
tried to create an Inkscape build for Mac. He failed, but he documented all his efforts, and the next person was able to go even further. So, that way, if you can contribute, even if you fail, you can help us to help you. And the very same thing actually is about GIMP, because
26:05
as far as I remember, none of GIMP developers actually work on Windows except probably Tor. So, this is also one of the reasons why GIMP doesn't look so nice on Windows.
26:21
So, that's the point. Thank you. Sure, and I'll just add one other quick comment. There is a bit of a cultural divide between the user and the developer community. We're very lucky to be having conferences like these where we can all get together. But, what I do want to stress is there's a whole lot of contribution that people do make outside of the project, and
26:42
I think it came down to the talk with Free Software in Vietnam, hit it on the head. There is no I am an Inkscape developer, like there is no, we don't want to create certification or anything like that, but it's a title anybody can claim. I mean, you've opened Inkscape, you can now be an Inkscape developer. You win. So, you can help with the website.
27:03
You can be like a go-to person on your local design forum. You can take that claim. No one's going to refute it at all. This is an open community, and we don't hold any brand capital in that title. So, please, you are all Inkscape developers. I deem it so.
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