A friend’s request for information on page layout on the cheap led me by chance to Inkscape, an open source illustration tool. Is it ready to dethrone Illustrator or Freehand? Well, no. But it is good enough to be worth playing around with. Plus it’s cross-platform (no Mac binaries available, but if you’re clever you can use fink to compile it for OSX) and supports SVG as its native file format. Kudos to the development team, this project is shaping up really well.