Lineart on Linux

Hi. I'm forced to use Linux. I'm beginning to bitterly regret this as I'm failing to find a program anywhere that seems to be capable of the task I want to do.

The task is that I want to use my scanned-in pencil sketch and have it in the background so I can then draw over it with a pressure-sensitive pencil/caligraphy tool that produces a vector line.

GIMP doesn't cut it anymore. It's barely capable of vectors. Vectors seem like a necessity if I'm going to resize stuff or even produce work that will look decent after being printed out in a professional copyshop. I suppose there's always the option of simply doing things at a high resolution, but GIMP at least has a tendency to make lineart look crap when downsized, and either way, the edges of any lines I draw will be pixelated and will make it unnecessarily hard to do things like add shading or anything like that.

I tried some program called Inkscape because, hey, sounds just like what I need. It produced wonderful vector lines and everything, too, no problem. But it just seems to be completely incapable of dealing with bitmaps. If I open the sketch right away, it's embedded in the background, but doesn't count as any sort of background layer or anything. I don't know how to select it. I can only select it by pressing some "select EVERYTHING" option. If I can't select it, I can't get rid of it afterwards or in the progress of inking to see how things look. I can import the image into a new image, but I cannot adjust the size of a new image, and importing the sketch will place it somewhere outside the picture and I cannot select it individually, and if I select it by selecting everything, I cannot move it.

There's probably ways to do this. Possibly. I cannot imagine that the program is as dumb as it seems to me. But I just cannot figure it out, the manual seems unhelpful and seems to require me to read everything in detail so I can simply move a single darn object, and because I'm under such extreme time pressure, I'm really, honestly starting to lose my mind here. I'm afraid of picking up this program again because of how physically painful it's been before.

I've tried many other programs, and they all seem to have a variety of problems and all of them seem like even if I read up on them, they wouldn't serve me well at all for what I'm trying to do.

Does anyone know how I can produce nice and clean lineart? Please?

So... you want to draw vectors over a raster image, is that right? Here's some stuff...

I appreciate your help, but I don't see anything new there that suggests to me that there exist options that work better than what I've seen.

I guess I'll try to just keep working with GIMP at a high resolution... maybe for downscaling, I could use something to vectorize the bitmap... Or I could just take a screenshot, I dunno.

Of course, it would still be great if anyone could point me towards a more ideal solution...

I'm confused about what you're saying about Inkscape. I'm not very familiar with it, but usually when I do File->Import and it will open up the raster image as a new object in a layer called "Layer 1" (that's not part of the background thing). I'm not sure what you mean about not being able to move the image or change its size; when I do that the raster is just treated as a regular object that I can resize/move/rotate/etc.

• Krita looks promising ("both bitmap and vector") but I had problems getting to run on GNOME.
• What were you using on Windows? Try running it with Wine.
  • If you were using Mac, I have no idea.

I guess I'm too stupid to figure out how to move an object, then. I suppose I'll have to invest the time to carefully read through the basics... Maybe it'll work out after all. Maybe.

I've tried Krita. I think it lacked a pressure-sensitive brush, or at least one that produces vectors. It's been many years, actually, since I've used Windows, so I don't really have a program on that OS.

I remember having similar problems with Inkscape — I don't really know how to select the background, ether. One of the reasons I haven't opened the program more than twice.

Hmmm... there's no way around it, though. I'll have to figure it out with Inkscape somehow. I'm inking something in GIMP right now, and... well, other problems with vectorless inking (at a low resolution) aside, it's just far too hard to ink a straight line, or a spiral or anything like that. Inkscape had this great function called, uh, "mass" or something, which makes you have to pull the line after the cursor... At higher levels, that makes you have to wait around for the line far too much, but what it accomplishes is that all those lines will be beautiful, beautiful curves.

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So apparently neither my tablet nor my mouse were recognized as input tools.

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Although I could draw.

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I am not going to question this.

edited 15th Feb '11 8:55:38 AM by Fawriel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vector_graphics_editors

Just go through the list until you find something for linux.

Sure that's what it means? Most likely, you have no *extended* input devices (meaning that either the tablet is configured to pretend it's a mouse — which will be the default behaviour if you haven't configured X to recognize it, usually — or, the version of GTK installed is built without extended input device support)

Vectorspam is not necessary to get nice lines, btw, Try using MyPaint's "slow position tracking" brush parameter. The tooltip says "Slowdown pointer tracking speed. 0 disables it, higher values remove more jitter in cursor movements. Useful for drawing smooth, comic-like outlines. " I use My Paint for all painting/drawing myself, cause it's both effective and loads of fun!

Also, if you draw at a reasonable resolution (doesn't have to be huge, just fairly crisp), Inkscape will be able to vectorize the result accurately + nicely (see the 'Path->Trace bitmap' menu item. also see this tutorial).