though I'm sure inkscape devs wouldn't refuse some funding, they aren't necessarily pimping their services for custom work on the project. It seems to be slowly evolving, so who knows how long it would take to get somebody who could code what he's after.

Inkscape seems to have some pretty active devs who've worked on quite a few projects including others in the libregraphics group (eg Scribus).

Their Launchpad page says

>"Inkscape has 122 active branches owned by 62 people and 6 teams. There were 188 commits by 16 people in the last month."

Just because there's no price tag on it doesn't mean it's not for sale?!?

I think the most glaring omission stopping many people considering Inkscape a serious contender is colour support. Inkscape lacking CMYK support (& while we're at it, spot colour support) pretty much excludes it from a lot of print work. And this is coming from an Inkscape lover.

Correct.

I have seen Affinity Designer put forward as a page layout competitor also, but this is naive. Just regarding color alone, it would need to be able to support multiple colorspaces in a single document and retain them in the resulting PDF. In the world of modern RIPs and digital printing, the RIP often handles colorspace conversion. Thus it is common to leave your source material in its original colorspace and tag the individual objects in a PDF with profiles.

And don't even get me started on how bad type is in the open source world (No, TeX is not an option in print).