Inkscape 0.47 and later will support curve editing via Raph Levien’s vastly superior Spiro curves:
I round-tripped through FontForge when I drew the Seal of Rassilon for a recent t-shirt design, just so I could use spiros to do it:
Achieving nearly perfectly tangent and parallel curves using spiros is trivial, compared the the fragile finickiness of Béziers.
Congratulations to Stani, who won the contest to design The Netherlands’ €5 coin with a beautiful design made using Python, PIL, Gimp, Inkscape, and other free software.
I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.
I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.
You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg
Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.