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.