I've been playing with Inkscape pretty heavily since you guys clued me into it, and I have to say that I am impressed. Very, very impressed.
Currently it has every feature I used in CorelDraw when drawing Help Desk -- incuding a feature CorelDraw *didn't* have (at least, one I couldn't find). The only thing it's missing is the some of the nicer aspects of CorelDraw's UI, and that simply reflects Inkscape's relatively young development stage. And one fairly annoying bug that trips me up every time (when you attempt to edit text it crashes) which is the sole thing that has prevented me from switching over to Linux entirely.
CorelDraw supports the SVG format, so I was able to export everything from my Help Desk and Kernel Panic templates without any difficulty (as soon as I figured out the right export setting -- save styles in the file itself, do not attempt to embed a stylesheet, or it will remove all your color and line weight information).
The UI of Inkscape is at this point more functional than elegant, but they're working on it. One of the nice things about it is that every command is mapped to a keyboard combination (something that was *not* the case in CorelDraw. Not all of the keyboard combinations are convenient to use, but they're configurable.
Inkscape doesn't support many file formats. It uses SVG as it's "native" format, and it exports to some version of PDF and PNG. That's all right for me -- PNG is what I use for Help Desk. The *really* nice thing about Inkscape is that when you export to PNG, any part of an image that crosses the page borders you've defined is automatically cropped. CorelDraw didn't do this, and after creating a comic I often had to open up a raster editing program and crop the damn thing myself. This makes life a lot easier in that respect.
Alas, Inkscape doesn't give you many export options -- I can't, for example, specify that I want to save the graphic as an 8-bit PNG, and I can't specify a cap on the number of colors I want to use in the picture. On the other hand, I do have pngcrush. (Note to self: check to see if there is a front end for pngcrush that allows you to work with multiple files simultaneously)
At the moment, Inkscape's weakest link is text. The tools are awkward -- that said, they aren't nearly as awkward as the tools for Photo>Graphics, which I used for years and years and years before getting tired of the way it handled text, and unlike Photo>Graphics there are people actually trying to *improve* what Inkscape currently has. There is that one "little" problem with the font crash. I need to check to see if it's already logged before I report it.
Anyway. My point is, I'm really impressed with this application. Thanks for pointing it out to me.