Craft Edge

Papasue, Aviary is a web-based vector drawing program so anything you create in it is ready to go cut as if you had designed it in Inkscape. You can't autotrace in it, though, so she'd have had to start from scratch. In some cases, like a simple template, this is going to be easier for someone than downloading and installing inkscape and going through the learning curve of figuring out how to autotrace and clean up nodes. That template only needed circles and hexagons so I thought it was a good candidate.

Laura, thanks for helping me get some more info on svgfactory. I am going to continue recommending it for batch conversions of clip art, and maybe for Printshop/Printmaster users (thanks for that tip), but it's not going to help many folks avoid Inkscape.

For those of you following this thread, I've been on the lookout for Inkscape alternatives (I'm past the learning curve, but think this is a big stumbling block for many who could be enjoying SCAL). Here's another web-based tool that has promise http://www.magnigraph.com.

This is interesting-I can't wait to try a few things out. Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a nasty work stretch and won't be able to experiment until Thurs or Friday. Would Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw be better than Inkscape-it looked to me that they do basically the same things, just in different degrees.

If SVGfactory works on clip art, isn't clipart usually .png files? I could save some basic shapes as .png files. I'm not trying to get around learning Inkscape, I just like to know the whys and wheretos . . .
Thaks for all your help!

If you already have/know illustrator then use that because it integrates with Photoshop and saves as SVG. It is also a commercial grade program whereas Inkscape is, shall we say, quirky. (but, hey, it's free)
png is also a bitmap format so that isn't going to work in svgfactory either. If you play around with filters in Photoshop first, you might be able to get good results from magnigraph.com. It doesn't have any controls of its own so it is very limited. I'd love to know if you have success with this. Good luck and by the way, welcome!

In Inkscape I've imported a .png file and even though it says at the bottom, "Image with bad reference" it has allowed me to autotrace and create a usable .svg file. I think the autotrace and other features of Inkscape are far more user friendly than CorelDraw so I prefer it for these applications.

Laura

firstcut wrote:If you already have/know illustrator then use that because it integrates with Photoshop and saves as SVG. It is also a commercial grade program whereas Inkscape is, shall we say, quirky. (but, hey, it's free)
png is also a bitmap format so that isn't going to work in svgfactory either. If you play around with filters in Photoshop first, you might be able to get good results from magnigraph.com. It doesn't have any controls of its own so it is very limited. I'd love to know if you have success with this. Good luck and by the way, welcome!

No, I don't know Illustrator. I've always been intrigued by it but didn't want to spend the money-I think it's more expensive than even Photosop and could never justify buying it.

I'll figure it all out eventually, I just need some tiome to sit down anf go through some tutorials.
Thanks!
Deb