Igor Novikov, leader of project sK1 (sk1project.org), confirmed presence at Latinoware 2010. He will be speaking about the state of the art in editing vectorized images with open source software, in special in pre-production of graphic material, a market currently dominated by proprietary software, like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.

sK1 is a vectorized image editor capable of opening files generated by Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator and work natively with them. In addition, sK1 works with CMYK color composition standard, essential for communication with print shops having equipment and software that work exclusively with this standard. In developing sK1, Igor and his team were concerned in making all they developed usable by other members of the community.

"As a base for sK1, we developed a command line interface and a program interface, called UniConvertor, that today enables open source software, like Inkscape and Scribus, to import files generated by Corel and Adobe Illustrator", says Igor.

As he prepares his trip to Brazil from the Ukraine and works on the development tree that will give rise to version 1.0 of sK1, to be announced at Latinoware, Igor gave a quick interview to the Latinoware organization team:

LW: When was sK1 officially announced?

IN: sK1 was first introduced to the public in 2007, at the Libre Graphics Meeting, that took place in Montreal, Canada. The sK1 stems from a sketch project, started in 2003, then became a project skencil and, around 2006, it was abandoned. We needed a software that would enable us to work in graphics generated by Corel and, so, we took up the development.

LW: Is sK1 close to being a direct competitor for Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw?

IN: This is a complex and interesting issue. Obviously the project is being developed as the open source competitor for Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. But image pre-processing is, at best, heterogeneous and consists in a large variety of printing methods. For some of these methods, sK1 is ready for use. For others, not yet, even though the development work is progressing rapidly. We understand that the forces within a small team cannot do the work that was created by a huge team at Adobe or Corel. For this reason, we are developing a project compatible with Corel and Adobe applications. We try to make sK1 familiar, in terms of tools, for designers, but we never copy proprietary interfaces. In other words, we endeavor to create an application that enables people who have read books like "Corel for beginners" to use it easily.

LW: Now that Inkscape also opens Corel and Adobe files, what are the main differences between sK1 and Inkscape?

IN: It is important to highlight that Inkscape and other open source programs merely open Corel files without their graphics interfaces and others, because they use the UniConvertor which, bottom line, is sK1 open them for editing. So, Inkscape can only open these files because sK1 also does. The main differences between sK1 and Inkscape are in their main deployment. Inkscape is an SVG editor, meant for web graphics, not for printing, like sK1 can. Because of being tied down to the SVG specification, Inkscape ends up suffering some limitations, not product originated, but stemming from the specification. sK1's primary application is to print out vectorized drawings in format PDF, using advanced printing functions. In this way, sK1 and Inkscape do not compete between them. In addition, the SVG support format is a high priority in our application exactly in order to promote good communication between sK1 and Inkscape.