FREE Vector Graphics Software (Inkscape).

Restating My Aims...
The aim of this blog was to introduce free stuff to the community specifically to;

1. Draw attention to "replacements for commonly purchased applications"
2. Draw attention to useful data libraries (audio books, ebooks, graphics libraries etc).

Unfortunately, I've been a bit busy of late and the updates have been slow but hopefully, this will change.

Inkscape
http://www.inkscape.org/
This is an open source replacement for Vector Graphics programs such as Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Visio. At the moment, it seems to be only available on the Windows platform. I'm not sure if this is true though because it says that it's available for Linux and Mac OSX.

The application interface is quite simple to master and I was able to create some decent drawings within about 10 minutes. I've started making this available to people at work and found that an average user can pick it up with minimal instruction and about a day or so of "play-time".

The default save format isn't a common one but it also saves as Enhanced Metafiles (EMF) and Windows Metafiles (WMF). I found the save as functionality to be a bit clunky and I did experience a few crashes but these were fairly predictable and mostly when I was doing things that were "wrong". The error trapping of the application needs tightening up.

There's an impressive image on their site (see below) which makes my own efforts look like Kindergarten stuff in comparison.

I found that this application had a bit of trouble accepting copy and paste (and several export options) from Microsoft Powerpoint but that powerpoint had no problems importing EMF/WMF files from it.

As far as I'm concerned, at work, this program is good enough to include in our standard operating environment.