Ever since Aviary took their lovely online tools down, including my beloved Raven, I’ve been searching for a suitable replacement. Inkscape, the best of the open source options doesn’t support some of my transforms or use xlink, while Illustrator, the best of the paid options can’t always handle my tidy nested layers*. What to do?
Today, a really extreme notion occurred to me: I should draw in Notepad++. “That’s madness!” I hear you say, and maybe it is, but I’ve optimised many of my old Raven SVGs using just a text editor and a browser to view, and I think I can do it.
With this crazy announcement, I now present my first concession to convenience, the grid. This will help me to assess coordinates, and draw my characters onto their backgrounds. Isn’t it tidy? Pixel precision in action.
*Also I’m way too cheap to give them over seven hundred euro, just for one program. Feck off, Adobe.