"Help me, I'm a late adopter" followup, for those who are interested.
Since
this post appears to have been quite popular, I'm now implementing what
Grumblebee suggested, and will occasionally write about my terrible experiences with trying to learn new things on
my blog. I'd already described (rather angrily) a run-in with the GIMP image editor before I wrote the Ask MeFi post. And now I've had a similar encounter with Inkscape, reproduced here for your entertainment:
My newest experience along these lines was my attempt last night at creating a logo for my yet-to-be-formed company using
Inkscape. Several people have thoroughly recommended Inkscape to me, and given that I'd already installed it, I thought I'd give it a shot. I also know it produces vector graphics, which makes sense for a logo.
The logo I had in mind is essentially a grid of squares, with some of the lines made thicker to spell out the company name. I managed to get a first version of this working reasonably quickly, with only some fiddling to get the lines into a square grid. I then decided to try some variations. I selected one of the thick lines and told it to become a bit longer by changing its length field in the toolbar. Instantly, it also became thicker and shifted a bit. I tried to correct the shift by setting its x-coordinate, but instead of moving the line to where I told it to, the program settled on moving it exactly halfway between where it had been and where I had told it to go. By repeating this five more times I eventually asymptotically reached the location I wanted. But fixing the changed thinkness was impossible without returning the line to its original length.
I started hunting through the menus, options and preferences of Inkscape for a way to turn off this behaviour. Clearly, the program was trying to be clever and helpful in some way, but this amounted to it essentially "disobeying" me. A long search assisted by friends turned up nothing. The problems multiplied: Inkscape seemed determined not to use round values for its co-ordinates, and determined to link the supposedly independent variables of line length, thickness, and position. I had reached the point described in the article above, the point where I yell at the computer in frustrated rage. All I wanted to do was move one thing somewhere else without setting off a cascade of side-effects, but this seemingly utterly basic operation was more or less impossible. Perhaps I was being a control freak, perhaps Inkscape is directed at drawing more free-hand things, but even free-hand drawings need to join up correctly, and this seemed to be impossible to achieve.
Finally, to demonstrate my point, I started up my trusty old copy of Bryce, a 3D modeller/renderer. I selected the from-top view and quickly created a number of cuboids that, viewed from above, produced the precise image I'd been trying to make on Inkscape for the past half-hour. Bryce is not exactly made for 2D drawing, but it does do one thing right: it does as it's told. You want a cube of width 4, length 80 and height 1 centered on the origin? Just make a cube and enter the numbers.
And this is the story of how I ended up making a 2D logo in a 3D program.
Of course, Inkscape can't actually be this bad. People do use it for serious work. And I'm sure there's a way of achieving precisely what I wanted. But my first encounter with the software left me intensely frustrated, and thinking: If it can't even do something simple, how will I ever make it do something complex?
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posted by jessamyn at 11:08 AM on May 17