The thing is, Serif’s Affinity Designer is what I usually recommend, and either noting the dimensions of the art, or drawing in the box of known geometry has worked well for me — having to open a file up in a third program to adjust it just doesn’t seem a big deal to me in comparison to some of the workflows I’ve used:
- use a proprietary package to scan a file
- open the scan in Photoshop and adjust / edit / fix as necessary
- open a CAD file in a proprietary package and save as a .ai file
- open the .ai file, import the scan, draw up the design for a box or point of presence display
- save the file as a .eps
- open a Quark file, place the .eps on two different pages, export two files, one for customer proofing, the other for production
- distill the customer .eps and production .eps to .pdfs
- load the customer .pdf into a proprietary system for approval
- load the production .pdf into a proprietary program for trapping to send to an imagesetter
That was one of the workflows from my first job out of college — spent 40+ hours a week drawing in AI and FH.
Inkscape does work well for importing into Carbide Create, and Adobe Illustrator does as well, if one can coerce it to make good files. You can just fix thing w/ the pen tool — newer versions might have a close path checkbox (which Adobe would have copied from Freehand). You’d also need to expand the strokes and use Pathfinder to union them into closed paths.
I’d’ve drawn this up in Freehand — I pretty much draw everything in Freehand 'cause I’ve been using it since before it was Altsys Virtuoso 1 — the pen tool is derived from Freehand v1–3, which got it from Altsys Fontographer (I used to design typefaces). I’ll probably switch over to hand-coding everything in METAPOST rather than use Illustrator or anything other then Freehand.