Adobe Illustrator vs Inkscape.

[Isaac]

Inkscape is better.
I'm a big Adobe Illustrator user and have made more money using it than any other skill I poses. So when I say Inkscape is better, I mean it's a big deal to me. Now Correl Draw is a program I only used for a week and I would say that's the best vertex art program on the planet. But I don't need it if I can do the same jobs on cheaper software.


Adobe Illustrator vs Inkscape.
Price:
Adobe Illusrator CS4: $599
Inkscape 0.46: Free

Inkscape features compared with Illusrator:
[Inkscape pro]There are tools in Inkscape that I don't know how I got along with out. Such as offsetting a shape smaller than its clone. If CS4 has it, then it's a new feature.
Much cleaner UI. Much better Path tools such as “simplify” that tries to lower your vertex count with out changing the shape of your object.
UI for building objects and coloring them makes a lot more scene to me.
Very tiny footprint compared to Illustrator.
Windows, Mac, and Linux (BIG plus: it runs on Linux distros)

[Inkscape con]Inkscape has a weird gradient system that's not very intuitive. After a bit of practice I got it to work but I prefer Illustrator's gradient system.
(THIS IS INCORRECT INFORMATION. IGNORE ALL IN RED)Selecting objects is a pain. I like to have hundreds of objects per page. But there seems to be no good way of organizing these in the layers menu. In fact objects aren't even listed in the layers menu. This will make some projects hard to do unless I plan around this problem, but making sections in different areas of the page. --click xml tree on main toolbar for object list.
It cashes a bit more than Illustrator. If you don't crash Illustrator you're not working hard enough, so this really isn't a big change.
No gradient mesh tool. This might be a deal breaker for some people.
No safety: It will let you run out of memory with no warning. And the esc key won't save you like it will in Illusrator.

Conclusion:
Aside from working with flash you can pretty much do anything in Inkscape that you could do in Illusrator. And the stuff you can't do the open source community has produced alternatives that work with flash and other features.


Some stuff I've done already:

[Sirius]

Yeah, I've been impressed with Inkscape for a few things as well. I honestly have to say I use OpenOffice(.org) Draw more often, though - even though it's quite a bit less powerful it's much quicker and easier to use, which makes it ideal for stuff like UI prototyping.

Drawing stuff that's a little less regular... well, Inkscape is a great tool for that, and it certainly replaces Illustrator nicely for non-professionals. For professionals ... can't speak so much for them.

[Isaac]

I'm going to have to try that. Openoffice is also on my system.

[Gekko71]

How do you find Inkskape works with rest of the CS4 package Issac? (InDesign, Photoshop, Flash etc). I'm not a big user of Illustrator (I work mostly with Indesign and Photoshop) - but I find that increasingly I need to do more and more vector work nowadays and Illustrator is not as user friendly as it could be.

What about the auto-trace function (what I use the most on Illustrator) - how does that compare?

[Isaac]

How do you find Inkskape works with rest of the CS4 package Issac? (InDesign, Photoshop, Flash etc). I'm not a big user of Illustrator (I work mostly with Indesign and Photoshop) - but I find that increasingly I need to do more and more vector work nowadays and Illustrator is not as user friendly as it could be.

What about the auto-trace function (what I use the most on Illustrator) - how does that compare?

Autotrace isn't perfect in Inkscape. Correction and "simplify" must be done each time. Corrections are also needed for Illustrator's version.

InDesign, Photoshop, and Flash can't be compared with Inkscape since it's not an alternative.
Gimp is the equivilant to Photoshop. (It's common to come across user's comments saying they prefer this to Photoshop. I have not gotten good enough to make an accurate comparison.)
Scribus is to InDesign. (I have no knowledge of Scribus. It's common to come across user's comments saying they prefer this to Indesgin.)
Synfig, Ktoon, and Blender are alternatives to Adobe Flash (editor).

edit:
As for the learning curve I needed to watch a few video tutorials to get a feel for the UI. But after that I feet confident I could do contract work again. And I literally have only made 5 drawings. I would say it's learning curve equal with Illustrator.

[Gekko71]

Thanks for that Issac.

InDesign, Photoshop, and Flash can't be compared with Inkscape since it's not an alternative.

What I meant here is how interoperable is Inkscape with other Adobe programs?. In the Design CS4 suite, you can you can directly drag and drop some elements from one program to another without saving or converting. I know nothing about Inkscape so I was wondering if this functionality existed. EG: What formats can you save in / create with Inkscape, can you directly import the artwork into Flash (which is also vecor-based) its native format ...that kind of thing.

[Isaac]

So far Gekko71 it's not like moving objects from one adobe application to another. It's not bad, but some stuff wont just drag and drop into another open source art application. The file types seem to be very cross compatible and haven't had any trouble there.

Here's my latest work:


Based on the art of George Lubinski.

[Gekko71]

Thanks Issac - and again, very nice work.

[Isaac]

Thanks dude!