Documentation and support
How much useful information do you get or find if you search online?
Finding answers to your questions is very important and often the reason why you’re likely to stick with certain piece of software. Let’s see how well documented our vector graphics editors are.
Inkscape has a great online manual, a wiki at http://wiki.inkscape.org and a clutch of both official and third-party tutorials. Even if you’ve never used Inkscape before, you can fall in love with its gorgeous sample graphics and learn how to recreate them step by step. Searching the web for particular answers also turns up a good range of forums and threads dedicated to this premier graphics editor.
LibreOfficeDraw has a nice but small section in the main LibreOffice portal at http://help.libreoffice.org. There are guides and tutorials for basic drawing tools and for working with objects, some of which reside at thirdparty tutorial portals. The amount of documentation is adequate for the software’s modest feature set.
Karbon has only a small page inside the general documentation for KOffice (the former name of CalligraSuite). There’s one tutorial on working with artistic text shapes in Karbon and that’s it. Searching the web for anything more largely led us to completely unrelated sites about fuel and heating...
SK1 hasn’t shown much activity in recent years, but there is a nice support forum for both sK1 and UniConvertor ( http://sk1project.org/forum), with answers to common questions. A quick search also reveals a fair number of community reviews and introductory posts about installation and features, which can be very helpful. Considering sK1’ s modest feature set, we’d say that no major issues remain unanswered.
Searching for XaraXtreme materials results in plenty of links related to Xara’s commercial tools. But if you look at the http://xaraxtreme.org website, you’ll find tons of carefully selected documentation. The site hosts very detailed and helpful FAQs and links to the program’s archived forum page ( http://bit.ly/XaraForum). Although the editor itself has been left in an unfinished state, its documentation is mature and looks professional. Again, it’s appropriate for the feature set.