Big Thanks - redux

[jiho]

## Sorry for the earlier stub of an email, here is the full thing:

Dear everyone,

I have not been very active for the last few months regarding Inkscape  
matters, less than I would have wanted to anyway. The reason why is  
posted there:
        http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/#publications
        Low resolution version - 3.8Mb : http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/papers/these_irisson-web.pdf
        High quality version - 24Mb : http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/papers/these_irisson.pdf
I was preparing, defending, and correcting my PhD dissertation.

While of little interest to most of you (I guess no one here is  
currently dying to know where fish larvae go after they are spawned),  
I wanted to take advantage of this occasion to thank everyone who was  
ever involved in the development of Inkscape. Every single graphic  
(scientific or not for that matter!) that I have dealt with in the  
last 4-5 years have gone through Inkscape and the experience has been  
delightful (most of the time ;) ). For all of the 60+ graphics of my  
manuscript, the excellent PDF import and export of the current  
version, as well as the notorious ease of use of Inkscape's GUI, on  
canvas tools, and shortcuts were invaluable. The illustrations in my  
dissertation are probably not very impressive for full-fledged graphic  
designers; by scientific standards however, they are (hopefully) not  
too bad, even quite good for some (most of you would be horrified to  
see what ends up on presentations slides in the average life sciences  
conference!). I really think that the quality of the tools I used made  
me upgrade my personal quality standards and, at the same time,  
allowed me to meet these standards.

I am recommending Inkscape often in the scientific community,  
especially now that it integrates so well file-format wise with the  
rest of the workflow. Except for X11 issues on Mac OS X (which are  
mine to fix) people are usually very happy with it, and sometimes  
surprised that such quality software could be free. I encourage them  
to think about what they could bring to the software and the community  
in return, in terms of quality bug reports, well thought suggestions  
and the like. Hopefully this will pay in the long term.

Anyhow, I really wanted to thank you all for such a fine piece of  
software and for the great community that revolves around it. Working  
with (and, on too rare occasions, for) Inkscape is an enjoyable and  
gratifying experience.

JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/



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[Adib taraben-4]

JiHO,

thanks for your interesting email and gratulation to your dissertation!

I also use Inkscape to illustrate my documents. I use OpenOffice and Winword.
I started using the .eps export but I could not see the imported file
in my document.
Then I tried the .emf export but had problems on transparency, gradients, etc.
Currently I only use .png that I export as 300 or 600 dpi. Also there
will be strage resamplings when there is a need to somehow "zoom" the
embedded picture.
As those pictures become large quite quickly I wonder how you deal
with those issues.

I read you are using pdf-export. The given .pdf states itself as Latex document.
So you import .pdf into the Latex source ?

Thx,

Adib.
---

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 4:33 AM, jiho <jo.irisson@...> wrote:

> ## Sorry for the earlier stub of an email, here is the full thing:
>
> Dear everyone,
>
> I have not been very active for the last few months regarding Inkscape
> matters, less than I would have wanted to anyway. The reason why is
> posted there:
>        http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/#publications
>        Low resolution version - 3.8Mb : http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/papers/these_irisson-web.pdf
>        High quality version - 24Mb : http://jo.irisson.free.fr/work/papers/these_irisson.pdf
> I was preparing, defending, and correcting my PhD dissertation.
>
> While of little interest to most of you (I guess no one here is
> currently dying to know where fish larvae go after they are spawned),
> I wanted to take advantage of this occasion to thank everyone who was
> ever involved in the development of Inkscape. Every single graphic
> (scientific or not for that matter!) that I have dealt with in the
> last 4-5 years have gone through Inkscape and the experience has been
> delightful (most of the time ;) ). For all of the 60+ graphics of my
> manuscript, the excellent PDF import and export of the current
> version, as well as the notorious ease of use of Inkscape's GUI, on
> canvas tools, and shortcuts were invaluable. The illustrations in my
> dissertation are probably not very impressive for full-fledged graphic
> designers; by scientific standards however, they are (hopefully) not
> too bad, even quite good for some (most of you would be horrified to
> see what ends up on presentations slides in the average life sciences
> conference!). I really think that the quality of the tools I used made
> me upgrade my personal quality standards and, at the same time,
> allowed me to meet these standards.
>
> I am recommending Inkscape often in the scientific community,
> especially now that it integrates so well file-format wise with the
> rest of the workflow. Except for X11 issues on Mac OS X (which are
> mine to fix) people are usually very happy with it, and sometimes
> surprised that such quality software could be free. I encourage them
> to think about what they could bring to the software and the community
> in return, in terms of quality bug reports, well thought suggestions
> and the like. Hopefully this will pay in the long term.
>
> Anyhow, I really wanted to thank you all for such a fine piece of
> software and for the great community that revolves around it. Working
> with (and, on too rare occasions, for) Inkscape is an enjoyable and
> gratifying experience.
>
> JiHO
> ---
> http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
> Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
> Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
> http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
> _______________________________________________
> Inkscape-devel mailing list
> Inkscape-devel@...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
>

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[jiho]

On 2008-September-22  , at 15:33 , the Adib wrote:

> I also use Inkscape to illustrate my documents. I use OpenOffice and  
> Winword.
> I started using the .eps export but I could not see the imported file
> in my document.

Yes, that used to be a problem, and it may have been Inkscape's fault.  
OpenOffice and Word are supposed to support EPS but indeed EPS  
documents from Inkscape would not load. My understanding (which may  
well be wrong) is that those two programs use the bitmap preview in  
the EPS file to display the graphics within the text (but still use  
the vector information when printing to printer or PDF). So I suspect  
that Inkscape's EPS did not have the required preview embedded.
But notice that all this is in the past tense. Because I just tried it  
again now and with a recent devel version of Inkscape and NeoOffice  
(the mac version of OpenOffice, which even lags a bit being the real  
OO in terms of releases) and it works. So I would go retry now if I  
were you.

> Then I tried the .emf export but had problems on transparency,  
> gradients, etc.
> Currently I only use .png that I export as 300 or 600 dpi. Also there
> will be strage resamplings when there is a need to somehow "zoom" the
> embedded picture.

Word and OO do not deal well with scaling images up or down indeed.  
But that may also just be a display issue, because the method used for  
live resizing should be fast. Is the resampling problem still present  
when printing into a PDF file?

> As those pictures become large quite quickly I wonder how you deal
> with those issues.

I don't use Word or OO ;). When I absolutely have to use a desktop  
based word processor, I use Apple Pages (which deals with PDFs), or  
embed low resolution, low quality PNGs (90-100dpi with a reduced  
number of colors, converted from Inkscape's output with an ImageMagick  
script) in OO/Word and keep PDFs/EPSs for the final layout.

> I read you are using pdf-export. The given .pdf states itself as  
> Latex document.
> So you import .pdf into the Latex source ?

Yes pdfTeX obviously deals with PDF images, and very well in addition.  
So I just:
        \includegraphics{whatever.pdf}
and that's it. Inkscape's (well Cairo's actually) PDFs give a warning  
in LaTeX (pdfTeX warning: pdflatex (file whatever.pdf): PDF inclusion:  
Page Group detected which pdfTeX can't handle. Ignoring it.) but which  
is harmless, as the warning message suggests. The document ends up  
having a decent size (25Mb for >200 pages) and printed fine on most  
printers I used (only 5 figures came out bad on the first batch on one  
specific printer. This had to do with strange transparency settings  
and clipped images. After some fiddling, the file printed fine.).

For such a document as a dissertation, I find LaTeX to be immensely  
superior to word processors (so much that I think it is worth learning  
only for that). For smaller documents, what I deal with are scientific  
articles or grant proposals. Both are within 10-30 pages, require  
collaboration between authors, and their final layout is usually not  
done by the authors. Therefore I just need to produce a sloppy draft  
which is what word processors are good at. Even though I still like to  
use LaTeX for those (particularly when there's math involved), I used  
the word processor component of Google Docs twice, for works with  
plenty of authors, and found the instant collaboration it allows to be  
very beneficial to the document (and to my personal sanity: have you  
ever tried to merge 5 versions of the same document edited with "track  
changes" in Word? If yes, you know what I mean ;) ).

I ope this helps and thanks for the kind words.

JiHO
---
http://jo.irisson.free.fr/



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