Xara, a company known for making a commercial-grade vector graphics program for Windows, has now released a version of their software, Xara Xtreme, for Linux and Mac OS X. You’re probably thinking, “Yeah, so what? Another commercial company trying to cash-in on Linux?” Perhaps, but this company is doing it the right way. They’ve released their source code under the GPL It’s free as in freedom, and (at least for now), they’ve released binaries free of charge on their web site.
I strongly recommend trying it. It has a long way to go to be a competitively commercial-grade vector editing program, on the Adobe Illustrator level, but it certainly has the potential. Some of the nice features that I noticed immediately are the ease in which you can make and manipulate drop shadows, text, and gradients.
I’ve always preferred object-oriented graphics editing but never found a good Linux program that could do it. Inkscape is great, but the user interface could use a little work. Nevertheless, it has a multitude of features not yet available in Xara Xtreme. It would appear, from the Xara FAQ, that the developers from both projects have agreed to work cooperatively. Even if they do not, the source code from Xara could definitely benefit the Inkscape project, which does not have the corporate funding of Xara.
The future for GNU/Linux graphics looks very bright. Let’s hope the success of Xara will bring other companies to the free software arena.
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