![]() Here in my inbox, unsolicited and totally unexpected, was the answer. Even though it was an important feature for us, we regretfully postponed development of it into the distant future on our roadmap and proceeded with other work. There’s little more frustrating than having a solution in hand, only to be hamstrung by legal problems. Once before, someone had contributed a patch to add boolean operations, but that patch relied on a polygon clipping library provided under an incompatible license. It’s an absolute requirement for creating any artistically sophisticated drawing, and its lack had held the tool back. The four basic operations are Union, Difference, Intersection, and Exclusion. Users of Adobe Illustrator might recognize them in the “Pathfinder”. Boolean operations are a way of taking two shapes and combining them together in various ways to create a single resultant shape. It’s been uploaded to the patch tracker.” - Bulia, November 2003 “I’ve been sent a new patch that implements boolean operations… The Contribution of Boolean Operations to Inkscape However, there was one glaring omission for which we and scores of users had been seeking a remedy… Node editing, alpha blended gradients, object alignment, text handling, localization and more had augmented the basic underlying drawing capabilities to make the tool potentially useful for real drawing work. In the five years since Raph Levien began work on Gill, a huge range of features and capabilities had been added to the codebase. Inkscape (by way of Lauris Kaplinski’s popular Sodipodi project) is derived from Gill, one of the first Open Source SVG editors, and so follows a long history of serving the SVG needs of the community. The Open Source community is now adopting the SVG format for everything from desktop icons and company logos to web page animation and artistic Illustration. SVG, an acronym for “Scalable Vector Graphics”, is a W3C standard that is gaining support worldwide, in proprietary and public software alike. There have been a number of popular Open Source vector graphics tools such as tgif, idraw, Sketch, and xfig, but one of Inkscape’s distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format - SVG. Vector drawing is what you’d be doing in Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, Dia, Visio or even PowerPoint. You can easily go back and resize it, change its color, or move it around without disturbing the rest of the drawing. By “vector” drawing I mean that when you create a shape like a rectangle, it retains its identity. ![]() ![]() In those tools you’re essentially just “painting” destructively on a canvas. This is different from “raster” drawing, as in MS Paint, Photoshop, or The GIMP. Inkscape is a program for viewing, making, and editing two-dimensional vector drawings. Scalable Vector Graphics and the Open Source Community Yet, amazingly, here it was, and I knew Fred’s patch would instantly double Inkscape‘s utility. It was one of those nigh-mythical events that you read happens in Open Source projects, but never see in person. I had to reread Bulia’s email three times. ![]()
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