Comparison with Sodipodi?

Posted Dec 9, 2004 15:08 UTC (Thu) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link]

> and i would like to learn the reasons for the fork - are there
> different design approaches and goals, or just personal differences?

Massively different interface design approach. Sodipodi at the time wished to take a gimp-like approach (all operations found either via right-click context menu or floating toolbars), while Inkscape wanted an integrated, discoverable traditional menu system (also with plenty of floating toolbars and palettes). My impresssion is that Inkscape wants to appeal to artists who long for Adobe Illustrator on Linux.

Overall, Inkscape has been quicker to build up a devlopment community, and is moving along at a somewhat faster pace than Sodipodi. Both are excellent SVG editors (and also good vector illustration tools for folks who don't care to know what SVG is).

I now do all of my SVG prototyping in Inkscape, before decomposing its output into formatting objects for my server graphing and mapping code.

The only significant area where it is inferior to Illustrator at this point (as an SVG composer) is in support for SMIL animation and javascript interactivity. Illustrator's support for both of these in its latest version isn't great, but it does exist.

--kirby

Posted Dec 10, 2004 7:45 UTC (Fri) by bryce (subscriber, #16388) [Link]

See the Inkscape FAQ for the official answer. Essentially, the reasons
were in project organization approaches rather than personal differences.

We all got along fairly well, but Sodipodi development was a bit too
constrained and unpredictable for some of us, and there was a little
contention over how design differences were resolved (e.g. which patches
would be accepted, the GUI layout, etc.) Several of us felt that a more
open development process, with more of a "patch first, discuss later"
approach, and a more willing acceptance of radical ideas would produce a
more effective project. For about a month we worked to try to infuse
these ideas into Sodipodi but it quickly became clear that these changes
were not a good fit for Sodipodi, so we figured we'd give them a shot in
the form of a new project.

Here's the text of the original announcement:
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AnnouncementToSodipodi

Bryce