Preface: I killed my previous post about why I wouldn’t buy LineForms or VectorDesigner. It was poorly written and after some serious re-evaluation I ended up buying LineForms.

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A weekend without net, and a desire to draw left me desperately trying to find a vector based drawing package that worked they way I wanted. I re-evaluated VectorDesigner, LineForm, and InkScape, and tried out Zeus Draw and Drawit Lite.

There was one criteria for serious reconsideration. Any app that could do it would be given a real chance: draw a line, with the tablet that gets fatter when I press harder and thinner when I let up. Freehand and Illustrator have both done this for years and years but I’m not considering them because I’m not willing to shell out $600+ dollars for a drawing app or put pirated software on my computer.

InkScape wold probably do everything I need and more, but on my Ubuntu Box it won’t recognize that there’s a tablet attached so you can’t enable the pressure sensitive support which is off by default. The X11 server on OS X doesn’t seem to pass it the info that there’s a tablet attached, so again, no pressure sensitive support. It’ll get a second chance once they have a truly native version for OS X.

VectorDesigner probably lost points in this re-eval. I find it more useless every time I try it.

Drawit Lite (almost the same thing as the pay version) only got a couple seconds of my time because it didn’t meet the single criteria and really didn’t look like it could handle the type of things I wanted to do with it.

ZeusDraw was a dark horse that did meet the criteria but it feels like a one trick pony. It draws great variable width lines, but editing the points is clunky at best and there’s no way to edit the width of the line. If you don’t get it right the first time you have to undo and try again. The palettes feel like quick first drafts and the $90 price tag hardly seems worth it. I think it’s a good first iteration of an app but it’s got a long way to go.

Lineform: I came back to this app at least three times, hoping I could find a way to make it meet my criteria. Finally I figured it out. The “Artistic” strokes you can apply to drawn lines typically just look like fancy special effects; the kind you use maybe once a month. But it turns out that if you use some of the simpler “Artistic” strokes you actually get something that looks very close to a stroke whose shape is purely based on the pressure applied on the tablet. In Lineform it’s changing the width of the “Artistic” shape based on pressure. There’s a way to alter the width of the stroke at various places along the line, and if you really want precise control you can convert it to an outline and edit the handles and points directly. Like I said though, it’s only 90%. If you want a line that starts thin and ends with a fat blob you’ll like a paint brush and tapers off to a point you’ll probably need to make a custom “Artistic” stroke. There are slots for these, but you have to read the forums to figure out how to use them. I think they decided to release it with that functionality a little rough around the edges instead of not including it, which was probably the right call.
“Artistic” strokes give you some very nice possibilities once you learn how to use them as something other than a random effect. The “Watercolor” stroke, for example, does a really nice job of simulating how watercolor gets darker where strokes overlap. This isn’t a big deal in a pixel based app like Photoshop or Painter (nothing beats painter’s natural media emulation) but it’s quite impressive in a vector based app.

I’m still not totally thrilled with Lineform, but it gets me most of the way there, and is over $500 cheaper than Illustrator. I’ve still got some complaints. It’s still got some minor bugs, and it ate one of my drawings (frustrating to say the least). But, it’s easy to use, the interface is intuitive it allows for some really expressive illustrations. And it’s only $79 So that’s what I went with.