Now I dont need to do vector graphics every week, not even every month. But for those couple of times a year it's good to have a tool in your box. Inkscape is there for me, no need to buy a (subscription) license. No need to boot into another OS. No need to relearn it. More than complete feature set for my needs.
Being able rapidly and precisely build an item in 2D CAD, then do the graphic design component on Inkscape is amazing.
More recently I’m moving to do the graphic design part in Affinity Designer due to a couple of irritating bugs in Inkscape... but it doesn’t have export to DXF... But Inkscape is what taught me vector graphics, and I’m still using it as my default vector graphics app in my day job as a laser cutter operator-extraordinaire.
IInkscape is just there for us when we need it; it's one of those staple FOSS applications that just is. I've been using it since the Sodipodi days; that's more than fifteen years ago!
Inkscape is pretty extensible as well. It's not too hard to write plugins for it (in Python). I've did it myself, and love how a handful of people seem to find it of use¹.
Adobe's video editing suite of latest versions is actually well known to be buggy in terms of regular crashes and hangings. It took me many months to realize that the problem was not inferior CPU or drivers or other software or virtual machines or little memory, but that their software is straight up buggy. That's a company that charges hundreds of dollars for their suite and also a company that had a perfectly good software before and have also basically owned the market before. Now it is buggy and crashes. What other software even crashes these days? I have to think back several years when I remember office suites crashing or other complicated software. It is really a disgrace on Adobe's part. This is not a single user experience either, there is a general consensus now among video editors that this is the case with Premiere and After Effects.
My crashes were definitely due to Adobe. It was latest updated Windows, Nvidia card with latest drivers, latest adobe, plenty of free space and RAM, etc. It crashed even without any plugins.
Also as an additional thought, is it really that good that they make such a big software that can be crashed because of a plugin? They know there will be a plugin Zoo out there, they know the plugins sometimes have to use GPU on their own, which brings many troubles with drivers etc, - they still can't manage to just isolate in in their own processes? Plugins are used all the time, it's an industry of itself. Company of the size of Adobe can't foresee that some plugins will be unstable and they need to take care of it? The dreaded chrome can isolate websites in their own processes, Adobe can't do the same with a mere plugin??
I've had projects where literally just opening the project and scrolling through it (moving the cursor) crashed the program reliably within 20 seconds/10-20 scrollings. This made me think their QA is a joke at this point.
The DirectShow filters adobe installs with Premiere makes other programs crash, for me. I've had to disable them.
Now, it's possible that this was technically the other programs' fault, but on the other hand you can't blame them for not testing their video playback with all different filters installed. Why does Adobe add these filters globally with a high ranking if they're not drop-in-replacements for the 'normal' ones?
By the way, if anyone is looking for an alternative right now, the industry (well at least the amateur community) seems to be moving towards Davinci Resolve (as Premiere replacement) which has a free version (very functional, can export up to 4k videos), has a linux version (!) (with some limitations) and has been much more stable for me so far.
I am actually already using resolve for grading, I wouldn’t really recommend it for full time editors yet, but for ambitioned amateurs it might be the best deal om the market right now
Unfortunately, this 'not completely changing interface' has a side effect: it fails to evolve and become better.
I am a long-time user of Inkscape (since 2007 at least), and it is sad how poor it looks now next to Sketch/Figma. Their vector tools are better, their layer tools are better. It's a million little things that make drawing a similar shape in Sketch 50x faster than in Inkscape.
This is what stops me of using it as a professional user: you can get things done, but the processes are more convoluted and less intuitive.
The way Blender does it is near optimum in my eyes: not shying away from a major overhaul once in 5 years and aleays making sure it is really making things better.
I would think Blender does a good job too, but inkscape has no paid contributors. If it had people employed to work on it, I think you would see more attention being paid to UI.
Blender is one of the most successful projects out there, and assuming other projects could just 'do what Blender does' is ignoring some of the fundamental differences between Blender and smaller projects.
It isn't so much the paid contributors (though they help) as it is that Blender Foundation was making commercial quality projects for years using Blender with artists and programmers at the same place so they were able to provide immediate feedback to each other.
The closest other projects have to this are vague forum/bugtracker posts that more often than not give little (or misleading) idea to the programmers what is needed.
Having an artist sit next to you and giving them the mouse and keyboard to show you directly in the software what they are doing, how they are doing it and what they want to do is much faster and gives you way more information and you can bounce forth and back alternative ideas, perhaps make minor quick modifications on the spot as a prototype or lead to an idea, etc.
(the next best thing is you being both the artist and the programmer - which is how many of FLOSS art oriented programs are made really - but there is a great danger of you getting used to your software's drawbacks and being unwilling to address them)
Much more importantly, Blender doesn't shy away from getting inspired by their proprietary counterparts. AFAIK they're even working on a 'industry keybinds' setting which makes changing over from Maya a breeze.
Programs like GIMP (or even entire OS UIs like Gnome and KDE) often shy away from 'aping' respectively Photoshop or Apple. But those proprietary vendors have spent millions of dollars on focus groups and man hours to optimize their UI and UX. Benefiting from that seems like a no-brainer, but alas.. NIH and proprietary hate reigns supreme.
Eh, Photoshop hasn't really optimized their UI/UX, their UI goes back to the original MacPaint by Bill Atkinson (Photoshop started as a more powerful MacPaint) and has evolved over the years starting from that. It is just that it became a very common UI for similar applications and the reason to make something similar isn't because Adobe has spent millions optimizing it, but because a lot of people are already familiar with it. However the same can be said for GIMP's UI nowadays.
And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).
Gimp is garbage bro. A window for each tool? That your WM manages? Okay where is that tools window or layers window or what if I’m editing 20 icons and one of my icons was covered by a browser window. At least old photoshop would remember z order and bring them to the surface and keep tools on top. Gimp May have fixed this one issue but it’s an example of why paid UX design wins 99 times out of 10
I agree with the spirit of jorvi's comment but your specific point points are notable.
Last time I checked ps still defaulted to require control-shift-something-non-standard for redo, unless you customize the key mappings. there are much more standard bindings and they even admit the only reason for this default is legacy users .
If you refer to Ctrl+Shift+Z, it is very common for redo and also very convenient since you switch between undo/redo by pressing Shift (which is also consistent with many other shortcuts that use Shift as a way to reverse their effect - see Tab/Shift+Tab, Alt+Tab/Shift+Alt+Tab, etc). Many programs provide both shortcuts for redo (including by OS vendors, e.g. Microsoft) though they're not always shown in the Edit menu (f.e. Notepad++ shows both whereas Visual Studio only shows Ctrl+Y but also supports Ctrl+Shift+Z)
Having said that i think Photoshop's non-standard Undo/Redo use is that it uses Ctrl+Z as a "last step undo" in that Ctrl+Z flips between undo/redo so that if you do some operation, press Ctrl+Z, it undoes that operation and if you press Ctrl+Z again it redoes it (and Ctrl+Z again undoes it, etc). This is because Photoshop at the past, like many other programs, had only a single step undo where Ctrl+Z would undo the last operation - including undo itself (so if you painted, undo would undo the paint and the next undo would undo the undo itself thus restoring the paint). Many artists used to this as a way to quickly compare the result of operations like crops, filters, etc so it became part of their workflow and was mentioned in articles, books, etc so Adobe most likely decided to use a different key when they introduced an undo stack. That was at a time that many other programs still had a single undo step so using a different key wouldn't really be non-standard. But again that became part of workflow, documented, etc so both remained as they were to avoid alienating users.
Though TBH that is based on my very brief use of Photoshop many many years ago, things may have changed since then.
Note that some simple programs still work like that, e.g. Notepad only has a single level of undo and pressing undo again undoes the undo itself.
I think we're agreeing after the fog clears of remembering the details.
To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it:
In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z.
from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier
There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.
Inkscape vector tools are way more sophisticated than Sketch’s. For simple vector editing tasks Sketch might be ok, and for creating whole responsive screen designs Sketch is awesome. But vector editing is really one of Sketch’s weakest points (eg. creation of combined paths). The look of the UI is of course not comparable, but i’d prefer functionality over looks.
It doesn’t need to be any better to satisfy this user. I also pull it out 2-4 times a year and am happy that everything has more or less stayed the same for 8+ years.
That was my point. Sure it could be better, but at a cost (design+dev'p, and alienation of users). It seems big/commercial softwares love to take that cost.
Because they have paying and active customers who want improvements even if it means that one has to relearn some things here and there.
Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ ). What about all the people you don't get on board because the UX is terrible compared to all the other tools?
> they have paying and active customers who want improvements
My experience is that when software reaches a certain level of maturity, major 'improvements' to the UI are driven very much not by the users.
> Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted
Perhaps. It depends proportion of 'some'. 1%..99%, it depends doesn't it. You're pushing for change with no quantification of the value of it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so first find out if it's broke.
This is the message I hear very consistently about Inkscape. The people who love it most are the occasional users. It's good enough for small, infrequent work.
They seem to keep pushing it as a professional alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but no matter how many individual features they add, it just doesn't seem designed for that kind of user.
I do agree with you. There's an advantage to having an interface remain predictable. At the same time I wish you had the ability to dynamically re-arrange the UI with plugins. It'd be very cool to have a Sketch-emulating layout for Inkscape, as a plugin.
Inkscape is my go to image editor. The UI is reminiscent of the old Macromedia Fireworks, with a paradigm that feels much nicer (to me) than Photoshop et al.
I downloaded the beta pessimistically thinking that they still wouldn't have native OSX Menu support (I've been using the non-updated 0.91+devel+osmenu fork/branch forever), but was pleasantly surprised to see full OSX integration in this beta. Great job guys!
Thanks for this comment. I will probably download for that reason alone. That said, my goto vector editor is InkPad on an iPad Pro. It's everything I need and nothing I don't.
I'm not on MacOS but find Inkscape pretty snappy in general, even with big projects.
Perhaps it's not the Layers but the effects? Blur in particular is pretty slow. Have you tried reducing the displayed filter quality? This doesn't effect the image itself, only the display in Inkscape. It's in the render tab in Inkscape preferences.
At View -> Display Mode you can also toggle between full display, display without filters and only outlines. If Inkscape is significantly faster without displayed filters, setting down the display quality will definitely help.
I'm using plain symbols and pen drawing when testing and CPU shoots up to 70% instantly, moving objects are sluggish and every move makes the CPU spike again.
The more curves I have, the more sluggish it becomes.
The very first item on Affinity Designer's feature list [1] is "Pan and zoom at 60fps". You don't generally accomplish this by accident. They apparently wrote the engine from scratch to use hardware acceleration, and be usable on an iPad with a very small amount of available RAM [2].
There's no reason blur, in particular, must necessarily be slow. Everybody (and their phone) has a GPU that's more than fast enough to do that in real-time. I wonder if the (cross-platform) interfaces that Inkscape are using on macOS aren't hardware accelerated. Or if it's using some syscall which is cheap on some platforms and expensive on others.
I haven't done any testing but I agree that Inkscape feels much slower than Affinity Designer.
I use Affinity Designer and Photo and they are very fast even at huge sizes (I do art). But they don't listen to user feedback or suggestions much if at all. AD/P can use OpenGL Vulcan or Metal (I use Metal) and it's amazingly fast for most operations. I also use Artrage 5 and it's abysmally slow probably not optimized for any platform either, probably not much different from Inkscape (though mostly bitmap drawing).
I love Affinity Designer! I used to use Inkscape, but it has a horrible user interface (typical FOSS software). Paying $50 to buy Affinity Designer with a decent UI is ok for me.
If you liked Fireworks, try Sketch. It looks like Fireworks, but with those little annoying bits done right. I wish Inkscape copied these interface tricks.
In our startup we do all our website and web app mock up in inkscape. Even artwork for our physical banner and posters we do using inkscape, krita [1] and then use scribus [2] to generate print quality pdf's.
We are overall very pleased with it.
We were eagerly waiting for 1.0 to have a HiDPI support and native Mac application. They both are there besides a lot of other features.
Kudos to team to keep it alive and continuously improve it. Even though Adobe XD,sketch and figma are preferred tools for UI and UX design, we build our assets using inkscape. We got this inspiration from Taiga [3] project which has an open source design repository in svg and a completed single page app using angularjs based on those designs. It gave our team confidence we can do it.
The added advantage is the artwork developed using inkscape can directly be used as svg images in website and single page app and are responsive by default.
Once again thanks to inkscape team to keep it alive and improve continuously.
This is probably the biggest news for Inkscape for a while. I can't count the number of times I've not been able to recommend it to mac-using colleagues who don't have an adobe license.
Me too. I only recently came across TikZ which is an even more epic way to TeX up fancy diagrams (you "program" them). Still use inkscape for most stuff though.
> I only recently came across TikZ which is an even more epic way to TeX up fancy diagrams (you "program" them). Still use inkscape for most stuff though.
The Latex plugins really make things interesting. The LaTeXText package [1] allows formula rendering and editing from within the Inkscape canvas.
For tidy circuit diagrams the CircuitSymbols plugin [2] produces exquisite results by hooking into Latex's circuitTikz package and dumping the rendered result on the canvas. Typically I generate a bunch of circuit promitives and then connect them afterwards using snaps and the line tool.
Slight aside, I don't see anything in the release notes about OCAL (Open ClipArt Library): is it still integrated?
Reason I'm asking is because there are links between the projects and OCAL has been offline since April [1].
OCAL doesn't seem to be coming back, their official line is they are handling a DDoS ... if it's no longer included I'd conclude that OCAL probably expired.
There was a death, of an associated dev, I believe.
It looks like there is currently only one person in charge of OCAL and he works on it for free, which would explain why it takes so long to bring it back.
It's also sad to see that Pixabay has basically copied all assets from OpenClipart and republished them under a more restrictive license rather than try to cooperate and support them.
Which would be no problem if that was publicly given as a reason. There have been 2 promises for "we're just about done" to my recollection too. Moreover the people running it aren't responding to requests to put up the torrent files of the current library.
Inkscape is just totally awesome and very much needed. Without it the only serious option left for vector graphics is the overly expensive Illustrator, entering Adobe's sucking subscription model where you can only edit your own files when a subscription is paid.
Inkscape is another great example of why we should try to support open source if we can.
Why does Inkscape's UI feel so... sloppy? I mean, Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI. So how does Inkscape's UI still contrive to look like the first Java AWT application I wrote in the 90s?
I know it's just a surface thing, and there's a lot of great functionality there. But it's still not exactly a sight that helps inspire you to create beautiful content using it.
> Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI
Well let's remember that there was HEAVY criticism of Blender's UI up until the 2.5/2.6 releases, with some people even criticizing it now that 2.8 is released. There was an extreme amount of work done since 2.5 to clean up the UI.
It also has a lot more functionality than Inkscape, and so I think there is incentive as more people start using it to make sure that all those functions are filed away neatly and accessible without cluttering the interface too much.
Also, just going on users subscribed to their respective subreddits, Inkscape has around 6000 and Blender 151,000. So the size of the user base might have a direct impact.
Personally I don't find the Inkscape UI to be all that bad, although I agree it could do with some tightening up. I still prefer to use Adobe Illustrator if I have it to hand, but Inkscape will always work in a pinch.
Being able to use it to create SVG that can be directly imported into Blender as curves is something I've used it a lot for, for that kind of task they complement each other very well.
If you're just looking at the surface of the UI, the v1 release appears to include theming. There's a lot more to UI than that, but it might help it feel a bit fresher
Maybe it's your GTK theme? I would certainly call its UI tight and professional-looking in Kubuntu (even a bit too "nice-looking", as there's not much colour with which to identify icons at a glance; Blender looks like it has the same problem). The default theme on Windows does look kind of clunky, but it's never bothered me.
I hate programs that re-invent toolbars and menus just to look "good" on the surface.
My main problem, as a non-expert user, is that the different "groups" on the toolbars are not obvious to me, and so I don't understand all of the icons. They should have had a couple of more labels in there, or somethime.
It's fun how fashions change - for over a decade I listened to people decry how "unintuitive" and "cryptic" blender's interface and approach was (and I do realize that blender's interface has changed over the years, but not that much) and praised tools like Inkscape for following the "user friendly" approach and straightforward paradigms.
(I have spent quite a long time using both and appreciate each's merits)
So excited to try out the native mac os support, I use inkscape for everything but I often have to unplug my second monitor to get it to show up thanks to XQuartz!
> On supported hardware (trackpad, touchpad, multi-touch screen), the canvas can be zoomed with the two-finger pinch gesture.
Thank god! As a macOS user, this is really one of my pet peeves because I'm so used to pinch-to-zoom that I almost forget it exists until I use a program that doesn't support it.
I hope a minor annoyance in the UI which has been nagging me has been fixed in the recent versions:
To draw lines with arrows, one needs to draw a line then select the arrow style, where as a the natural flow would be to set the style before drawing the line. Imagine if you have 20 lines of the same style, it is painful to draw 20 standard lines and then go back to change each of their appearance individually. It would be better if one could define a style of line, then create lines of that style as many number of times as required.
Having such stylesheets will for example change the width of all lines of the given style easily later.
This is great news. Really a gem of an open-source/ free SVG editor that can produce high quality images.
Do they have "flatten-layers" and export as a single file (similar to Illustrator) functionality yet?
I checked the release notes, but could not find anything around it.
This can sometimes be an issue, in the way the image is rendered especially by different browsers. You end up with some unintended image output than you developed in the tool because of the interaction between different layers and opacities. Even a .png export did not help in one instance.
One thing I still miss in inkscape is calligraphic strokes, which is very useful for creating a professional looking cartoon style.
EDIT: Calligraphy is available but only hand-drawn. What I meant is calligraphy applied to a path, and the ability to transform the resulting stroke back into a path. These are powerful operations that are available in commercial offerings but not yet in inkscape, afaik.
Huh. My experience differs. I have both Illustrator and Inkscape, and for certain tasks (e.g. stuff I want to be native SVG or making icons), I always go back to Inkscape because I find it faster/easier.
As a Mac user looking to avoid Illustrator, this is a gift from the gods. XQuartz has issues with mouse movement, making it difficult to keep the drawing on the screen. Now it looks and acts like you'd expect.
I don't know if they'll be able to get GTK 3 into 1.0, but that would be awesome. The fact that the new builds don't need a X server kind of make it awesome already!
I wish it would have better color profile support, so that it can be used to send graphics straight to a printer. This seems like a basic thing but I could never get it to work. So now I have to use Scribus which has its own problems.
Non-destructive boolean operations! This it so much easier to reuse shapes. Great for obscured features, surface details, shadows, reflections... Too bad they are hidden away in live effects; I will still (ab)use them to no end.
Inkscape is still in beta? Yes, I know it is, but I can't quite wrap my mind around it. Have been using this awe-inspiring tool for more than a quarter of my life.
And I was born before the first human spaceflight.
This is great news! Will check if they fixed the issues loading files with autoconnectors, which was the only thing preventing me to use it for engineering diagrams.
I just wish that Krita had the same text editing capabilities as Inkscape.
I use Affinity Designer for vector work. However, Designer doesn't support tracing, so for that I'll fire up Inkscape. I'll do the trace, save it, then import into Designer and continue working.
I can't stress enough how happy I'm because Inkscape is finally getting proper macOS support, I've been using the ~suv osxmenu build for years wondering which OS update would render it unusable
Just in case you are looking for a commercial alternative to Inkscape with a more modern UI and Chromium-based rendering engine, check out my project Boxy SVG: https://boxy-svg.com
The next version (to be released in 2-3 weeks) is going to introduce full support for filters and color swatches. In the upcoming 12 months I expect to reach full feature parity with Inkscape.
I'm sad to say that I judged it purely on the fact that it wasn't open source.
Then I went ahead and tried it out... mind blown. It's that good. Feels like a native app in it's UI quality and speed. And $9/month is a very good price point, especially for those that regularly create vector art.
I'm amazed at the quality of your app. It'll be especially incredible once you're at Inkscape parity. How large is the team you got working full time?
I'm working on it alone, which is possible thanks to Electron and Chromium projects which are abstracting away the difficult tasks.
BTW, the widget toolkit used by Boxy SVG is open sourced and can be used by other projects. You can try it out on https://xel-toolkit.org. In near future I'm planning to improve it by adding Windows 10 theme and full support for color schemes and dark mode.
Only $1080 over the next decade compared to zero for inkscape! You would probably be better off writing a check for $100 to fund improvements to same and put the other grand in your pocket.
Everyone on earth wants to turn a sale into a recurring revenue stream for a reason. Trivial individual costs add up substantially over time.
Boxy SVG desktop app does not and will not require recurring payments. You pay for it once and after that you will be receiving updates for free as long as I'm in charge of the project (i.e. I won't get hit by a bus or something along those lines).
hey, you might wanna change your website a little bit then. it's not obvious right now.
i clicked on the link of your site, and the first box i saw said "9$/month". that's enough to click away (for me).
only after i did some more clicking and followed an external(!) link to the store it was obvious you can do a one-time purchase.
in a normal situation i would never have gotten to that point and would have clicked away immediately after seeing 9/month for a new product that still has to prove itself and doesn't have a big name behind it.
Yes, it's not at all clear. If you switch away from "Web app" by clicking on an OS, you don't get that (or any) pricing info. Going to the stores themselves, Windows and Mac seem to have a one-time payment, and Chrome and Snap don't seem to have a price.
Originally I was assuming that the vast majority of potential desktop app users would discover it throw the app
stores, therefore the website should focus on marketing the web app. I guess this assumption was wrong, I will update the marketing materials per your suggestions.
Probably because not everyone wants to mess with decade old dependency and just start with something fresh?
So it is sad, that it is not open source, but apparently he proved the starting new approach is worth it.
There are already some Inkscape developers who accept donations, for example Tavmjong Bah [1] who has been a long time contributor and still actively works on it.
I'm not sure why you want new developers to donate to when the existing ones clearly didn't reach their goals yet.
Thanks. Now this is an appropriate link asking for money for this thread. The post I was replying to was completely inappropriate and shameless hijacking of an Inkscape thread.
I need a rock solid support for Custom Elements, Shadow DOM and Pointer Events. There is a ton of browser-specific bugs that need special handling and workarounds.
Full feature parity with Inkscape in a year is a bold claim, and I’m rather sceptical of it. You have built an impressive app (and I’m sure that being just one person helped with that), but there is a lot of advanced functionality in Inkscape that you don’t have at present. A few examples that spring to mind: full pressure-sensitive tablet support (and sure, this is the beauty of using the web as your platform—it’s all there in the PointerEvent; well, until you need more fine control, then you’re completely stranded), live path effects, extensions, tracing. I’d also like a much stronger keyboard interface. I’d be interested to see your take on some of Inkscape’s extensions particularly, like JessyInk and font editing.
I did test the app for compatibility with Wacom Intuos. "Blob" tool already supports pressure sensitivity [1], as you said it was relatively easy to implement with the Pointer Events API. I'm not sure how pressure and tilt information could be used by other tools (other than "Spray") as SVG does not support stroke with variable width.
Tracing could be easily implemented using third party libraries [2]. Custom extensions would be initially limited to the "Generators" panel. I haven't thought about the live path effects yet.
The hardest part remaining is full support for filters, but I have this feature mostly sorted out in the dev branch and the UI is going to be much nicer than in Inkscape [3][4].
Inkscape 1.0 adds what’s basically a more powerful version of that, a pressure-sensitive pencil, implemented with the powerstroke live path effect—more powerful, I say, because it’s editable, because it’s not immediately flattening it to what SVG can represent, but is also keeping its own editor information in namespaced attributes. That’s how you can add things like that and mesh gradients before SVG supports the concept.
I’m still intensely sceptical of your claim of full feature parity with Inkscape in a year, but I’ll believe parity for >95% of users and use cases.
My biggest problem with your app at the moment looks to be that path editing is painful compared with Inkscape. I like to show the outline of the path, and its keyboard and mouse operation also feels just all-round superior at present, and I don’t think that that’s just my greater familiarity with Inkscape showing through.
I’d also like more text labels and fewer icons. Iconless labels have no place on something like your filters panel; text labels are objectively superior. I’d say similar for the Defs panel and other such panels.
On second thought, 100% parity might be a bit overoptimistic as some features such as auto-wrapped text and mesh gradients rely on APIs that must be implemented upstream by Chromium (and those features are not the top priority for Google). But 95% seems sensible to me.
There should be an outline shown when you hover a path with the "Edit" tool [1], though it's a bit sloppy and needs more optimization. Most path-related commands are exposed by the "Shape" panel. To convert a node between a smooth and an edge type you must double-click it. The ability to box-transform selected nodes and to move them with arrow keys is missing but should be added soon.
My main problem with text labels is that they take a lot of horizontal space. Text labels could be shown only when the panel is wide enough to fit them, or when user hovers the icon (like it's done in Autodesk Graphic).
You don’t need upstream support for all features; you can often implement them in older SVG techniques with namespaced extra data to help with editing. That’s how text wrapping has worked in Inkscape historically, though 1.0 is introducing support for the actual defined SVG functionality.
Not everything is possible this way; mesh gradients can’t be emulated in vectors, for example—though you could effectively implement a canvas-backed renderer for it to polyfill it; but a lot of functionality can be implemented without upstream support.
One thing I love about Inkscape is its keyboard interface and specifically how it lets you scroll up and down, left and right and in and out. This should be standard in all two-dimensional editing applications but I find it sadly is not. When it comes to editing speed, the keyboard is absolutely essential and shouldn't be an afterthought.
Inkscape is my go-to example of why FLOSS is great:
* Learn how to use it once
* Keeps getting better (some commercial software seems to bloat beyond repair)
* Available on many platforms
* All of the above for FREE
Now I dont need to do vector graphics every week, not even every month. But for those couple of times a year it's good to have a tool in your box. Inkscape is there for me, no need to buy a (subscription) license. No need to boot into another OS. No need to relearn it. More than complete feature set for my needs.
Congrats to the team!
And built in opening and save as DXF!
Being able rapidly and precisely build an item in 2D CAD, then do the graphic design component on Inkscape is amazing.
More recently I’m moving to do the graphic design part in Affinity Designer due to a couple of irritating bugs in Inkscape... but it doesn’t have export to DXF... But Inkscape is what taught me vector graphics, and I’m still using it as my default vector graphics app in my day job as a laser cutter operator-extraordinaire.
IInkscape is just there for us when we need it; it's one of those staple FOSS applications that just is. I've been using it since the Sodipodi days; that's more than fifteen years ago!
Inkscape is pretty extensible as well. It's not too hard to write plugins for it (in Python). I've did it myself, and love how a handful of people seem to find it of use¹.
1: https://inkscape.org/~jdhoek/%E2%98%85isometric-projection-c...
Big ones for me are Firefox, Inkscape, QGIS, Blender
Firefox does tend to reshuffle the interface occasionally though.
Not nearly as significantly as Blender though!
> * Keeps getting better (some commercial software seems to bloat beyond repair)
Adobe's video editing suite of latest versions is actually well known to be buggy in terms of regular crashes and hangings. It took me many months to realize that the problem was not inferior CPU or drivers or other software or virtual machines or little memory, but that their software is straight up buggy. That's a company that charges hundreds of dollars for their suite and also a company that had a perfectly good software before and have also basically owned the market before. Now it is buggy and crashes. What other software even crashes these days? I have to think back several years when I remember office suites crashing or other complicated software. It is really a disgrace on Adobe's part. This is not a single user experience either, there is a general consensus now among video editors that this is the case with Premiere and After Effects.
I am an extensive user of Premiere and After Effects and didn’t experience a single crash that was to blame on Adobe within the last 12 months.
The crashes I had were due to 3rd party plugins. I am slowly replacing AE with Blender now, but for certain stuff I still like it.
My crashes were definitely due to Adobe. It was latest updated Windows, Nvidia card with latest drivers, latest adobe, plenty of free space and RAM, etc. It crashed even without any plugins.
Also as an additional thought, is it really that good that they make such a big software that can be crashed because of a plugin? They know there will be a plugin Zoo out there, they know the plugins sometimes have to use GPU on their own, which brings many troubles with drivers etc, - they still can't manage to just isolate in in their own processes? Plugins are used all the time, it's an industry of itself. Company of the size of Adobe can't foresee that some plugins will be unstable and they need to take care of it? The dreaded chrome can isolate websites in their own processes, Adobe can't do the same with a mere plugin??
Just to check, did you run a full memory check / burn in test on the computer? eg memtest86 or similar
Sometimes this kind of thing turns out to be memory with a problem at some address. :/
Could always be a good think to check, thank you. This thing happen on different hardware for me though, reliably.
LinusTechTips had a weird bug with some Adobe product (I think Premiere) where, IIRC, it crashed if the project was read off the disk too fast
I've had projects where literally just opening the project and scrolling through it (moving the cursor) crashed the program reliably within 20 seconds/10-20 scrollings. This made me think their QA is a joke at this point.
The DirectShow filters adobe installs with Premiere makes other programs crash, for me. I've had to disable them.
Now, it's possible that this was technically the other programs' fault, but on the other hand you can't blame them for not testing their video playback with all different filters installed. Why does Adobe add these filters globally with a high ranking if they're not drop-in-replacements for the 'normal' ones?
By the way, if anyone is looking for an alternative right now, the industry (well at least the amateur community) seems to be moving towards Davinci Resolve (as Premiere replacement) which has a free version (very functional, can export up to 4k videos), has a linux version (!) (with some limitations) and has been much more stable for me so far.
I am actually already using resolve for grading, I wouldn’t really recommend it for full time editors yet, but for ambitioned amateurs it might be the best deal om the market right now
Unfortunately, this 'not completely changing interface' has a side effect: it fails to evolve and become better.
I am a long-time user of Inkscape (since 2007 at least), and it is sad how poor it looks now next to Sketch/Figma. Their vector tools are better, their layer tools are better. It's a million little things that make drawing a similar shape in Sketch 50x faster than in Inkscape.
This is what stops me of using it as a professional user: you can get things done, but the processes are more convoluted and less intuitive.
The way Blender does it is near optimum in my eyes: not shying away from a major overhaul once in 5 years and aleays making sure it is really making things better.
I would think Blender does a good job too, but inkscape has no paid contributors. If it had people employed to work on it, I think you would see more attention being paid to UI.
Blender is one of the most successful projects out there, and assuming other projects could just 'do what Blender does' is ignoring some of the fundamental differences between Blender and smaller projects.
It isn't so much the paid contributors (though they help) as it is that Blender Foundation was making commercial quality projects for years using Blender with artists and programmers at the same place so they were able to provide immediate feedback to each other.
The closest other projects have to this are vague forum/bugtracker posts that more often than not give little (or misleading) idea to the programmers what is needed.
Having an artist sit next to you and giving them the mouse and keyboard to show you directly in the software what they are doing, how they are doing it and what they want to do is much faster and gives you way more information and you can bounce forth and back alternative ideas, perhaps make minor quick modifications on the spot as a prototype or lead to an idea, etc.
(the next best thing is you being both the artist and the programmer - which is how many of FLOSS art oriented programs are made really - but there is a great danger of you getting used to your software's drawbacks and being unwilling to address them)
Much more importantly, Blender doesn't shy away from getting inspired by their proprietary counterparts. AFAIK they're even working on a 'industry keybinds' setting which makes changing over from Maya a breeze.
Programs like GIMP (or even entire OS UIs like Gnome and KDE) often shy away from 'aping' respectively Photoshop or Apple. But those proprietary vendors have spent millions of dollars on focus groups and man hours to optimize their UI and UX. Benefiting from that seems like a no-brainer, but alas.. NIH and proprietary hate reigns supreme.
Eh, Photoshop hasn't really optimized their UI/UX, their UI goes back to the original MacPaint by Bill Atkinson (Photoshop started as a more powerful MacPaint) and has evolved over the years starting from that. It is just that it became a very common UI for similar applications and the reason to make something similar isn't because Adobe has spent millions optimizing it, but because a lot of people are already familiar with it. However the same can be said for GIMP's UI nowadays.
And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).
Gimp is garbage bro. A window for each tool? That your WM manages? Okay where is that tools window or layers window or what if I’m editing 20 icons and one of my icons was covered by a browser window. At least old photoshop would remember z order and bring them to the surface and keep tools on top. Gimp May have fixed this one issue but it’s an example of why paid UX design wins 99 times out of 10
Gimp has had a single-window layout for a long time now.
So has photoshop ;). I think you are forgetting the thread you replied to
I agree with the spirit of jorvi's comment but your specific point points are notable.
Last time I checked ps still defaulted to require control-shift-something-non-standard for redo, unless you customize the key mappings. there are much more standard bindings and they even admit the only reason for this default is legacy users .
If you refer to Ctrl+Shift+Z, it is very common for redo and also very convenient since you switch between undo/redo by pressing Shift (which is also consistent with many other shortcuts that use Shift as a way to reverse their effect - see Tab/Shift+Tab, Alt+Tab/Shift+Alt+Tab, etc). Many programs provide both shortcuts for redo (including by OS vendors, e.g. Microsoft) though they're not always shown in the Edit menu (f.e. Notepad++ shows both whereas Visual Studio only shows Ctrl+Y but also supports Ctrl+Shift+Z)
Having said that i think Photoshop's non-standard Undo/Redo use is that it uses Ctrl+Z as a "last step undo" in that Ctrl+Z flips between undo/redo so that if you do some operation, press Ctrl+Z, it undoes that operation and if you press Ctrl+Z again it redoes it (and Ctrl+Z again undoes it, etc). This is because Photoshop at the past, like many other programs, had only a single step undo where Ctrl+Z would undo the last operation - including undo itself (so if you painted, undo would undo the paint and the next undo would undo the undo itself thus restoring the paint). Many artists used to this as a way to quickly compare the result of operations like crops, filters, etc so it became part of their workflow and was mentioned in articles, books, etc so Adobe most likely decided to use a different key when they introduced an undo stack. That was at a time that many other programs still had a single undo step so using a different key wouldn't really be non-standard. But again that became part of workflow, documented, etc so both remained as they were to avoid alienating users.
Though TBH that is based on my very brief use of Photoshop many many years ago, things may have changed since then.
Note that some simple programs still work like that, e.g. Notepad only has a single level of undo and pressing undo again undoes the undo itself.
I think we're agreeing after the fog clears of remembering the details.
To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it:
In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z.
from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier
There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.
Inkscape vector tools are way more sophisticated than Sketch’s. For simple vector editing tasks Sketch might be ok, and for creating whole responsive screen designs Sketch is awesome. But vector editing is really one of Sketch’s weakest points (eg. creation of combined paths). The look of the UI is of course not comparable, but i’d prefer functionality over looks.
It doesn’t need to be any better to satisfy this user. I also pull it out 2-4 times a year and am happy that everything has more or less stayed the same for 8+ years.
That was my point. Sure it could be better, but at a cost (design+dev'p, and alienation of users). It seems big/commercial softwares love to take that cost.
Because they have paying and active customers who want improvements even if it means that one has to relearn some things here and there.
Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ ). What about all the people you don't get on board because the UX is terrible compared to all the other tools?
> they have paying and active customers who want improvements
My experience is that when software reaches a certain level of maturity, major 'improvements' to the UI are driven very much not by the users.
> Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted
Perhaps. It depends proportion of 'some'. 1%..99%, it depends doesn't it. You're pushing for change with no quantification of the value of it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so first find out if it's broke.
This is the message I hear very consistently about Inkscape. The people who love it most are the occasional users. It's good enough for small, infrequent work.
They seem to keep pushing it as a professional alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but no matter how many individual features they add, it just doesn't seem designed for that kind of user.
I do agree with you. There's an advantage to having an interface remain predictable. At the same time I wish you had the ability to dynamically re-arrange the UI with plugins. It'd be very cool to have a Sketch-emulating layout for Inkscape, as a plugin.
I want to mess with vector graphics about twice a year, and I do essentially zero visual work beyond that.
Every time I'm pleased at how easy Inkscape makes it. And it's completely smooth on both Linux and Windows.
Xfig is open source and has barely changed since 1991, but I don't think that's a feature.
Learning to use updates to a UI is relatively cheap. Having a bunch of tools that are outdated is expensive.
Inkscape is great for what it is, but it could definitely use a well thought out interface refresh.
"* Learn how to use it once * Keep using it for a life time"
Yeah, right. Like Xara XL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Xtreme_LX
Inkscape is my go to image editor. The UI is reminiscent of the old Macromedia Fireworks, with a paradigm that feels much nicer (to me) than Photoshop et al.
I downloaded the beta pessimistically thinking that they still wouldn't have native OSX Menu support (I've been using the non-updated 0.91+devel+osmenu fork/branch forever), but was pleasantly surprised to see full OSX integration in this beta. Great job guys!
Thanks for this comment. I will probably download for that reason alone. That said, my goto vector editor is InkPad on an iPad Pro. It's everything I need and nothing I don't.
I thought Inkscape was an alternative to Illustrator and other vector drawing programs, didn't know people were using it for photo editing.
They said image editor, not photo editor. Vector images are still images.
There's a comparison to photoshop.
People use Photoshop where a vector graphics program would be more appropriate because they know and are familiar with Photoshop.
If you just want to crop a photo and add some filters to it, most vector graphics editors can do that and are good enough.
yeah, indeed, strange.. I always use Gimp in those situations. I'm fairly fluent in Inkscape and cropping images is not something I would use it for.
yeah, this is super weird, it's a vector graphics editor, come on people, use GIMP or photoshop for images.
The program is still able to handle it, and I know its features more than GIMP or Photoshop. To me, it's still an acceptable tool.
I'm used to Affinity Designer, unfortunately Inkscape is very slow for even just ~10 layers of medium complexity shapes on MacOS :-/
While on Affinity, I can have hundred layers without noticeable performance issues.
Sounds like it's caching things? How does the memory usage compare?
I'm not on MacOS but find Inkscape pretty snappy in general, even with big projects.
Perhaps it's not the Layers but the effects? Blur in particular is pretty slow. Have you tried reducing the displayed filter quality? This doesn't effect the image itself, only the display in Inkscape. It's in the render tab in Inkscape preferences.
At View -> Display Mode you can also toggle between full display, display without filters and only outlines. If Inkscape is significantly faster without displayed filters, setting down the display quality will definitely help.
I'm using plain symbols and pen drawing when testing and CPU shoots up to 70% instantly, moving objects are sluggish and every move makes the CPU spike again.
The more curves I have, the more sluggish it becomes.
Do you use MacOS, too?
The very first item on Affinity Designer's feature list [1] is "Pan and zoom at 60fps". You don't generally accomplish this by accident. They apparently wrote the engine from scratch to use hardware acceleration, and be usable on an iPad with a very small amount of available RAM [2].
There's no reason blur, in particular, must necessarily be slow. Everybody (and their phone) has a GPU that's more than fast enough to do that in real-time. I wonder if the (cross-platform) interfaces that Inkscape are using on macOS aren't hardware accelerated. Or if it's using some syscall which is cheap on some platforms and expensive on others.
I haven't done any testing but I agree that Inkscape feels much slower than Affinity Designer.
[1]: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/full-feature-list/ [2]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/18079-what...
I use Affinity Designer and Photo and they are very fast even at huge sizes (I do art). But they don't listen to user feedback or suggestions much if at all. AD/P can use OpenGL Vulcan or Metal (I use Metal) and it's amazingly fast for most operations. I also use Artrage 5 and it's abysmally slow probably not optimized for any platform either, probably not much different from Inkscape (though mostly bitmap drawing).
I'm getting 2fps when panning an empty document on macOS...
I love Affinity Designer! I used to use Inkscape, but it has a horrible user interface (typical FOSS software). Paying $50 to buy Affinity Designer with a decent UI is ok for me.
Yeah compared to Affinity, Inkscape is garbage.
I would say Inkscape is even less robust than Gimp.
If you liked Fireworks, try Sketch. It looks like Fireworks, but with those little annoying bits done right. I wish Inkscape copied these interface tricks.
In our startup we do all our website and web app mock up in inkscape. Even artwork for our physical banner and posters we do using inkscape, krita [1] and then use scribus [2] to generate print quality pdf's.
We are overall very pleased with it.
We were eagerly waiting for 1.0 to have a HiDPI support and native Mac application. They both are there besides a lot of other features.
Kudos to team to keep it alive and continuously improve it. Even though Adobe XD,sketch and figma are preferred tools for UI and UX design, we build our assets using inkscape. We got this inspiration from Taiga [3] project which has an open source design repository in svg and a completed single page app using angularjs based on those designs. It gave our team confidence we can do it.
The added advantage is the artwork developed using inkscape can directly be used as svg images in website and single page app and are responsive by default.
Once again thanks to inkscape team to keep it alive and improve continuously.
[1] https://krita.org/en/
[2] https://www.scribus.net/
[3] https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-design
If Inkscape would have chosen Qt over GTK back then, combined with where Krita/Scribus are at right now, it could have been the KDE creative suite!
> The added advantage is the artwork developed using inkscape can directly be used as svg images in website and single page app
We had a lot of success cleaning Inkscape's svg output.
See here for solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680559
I'm pretty happy with svgcleaner (https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner)
Oh wow it's finally no longer using XQuartz! This is great!
I’m overly excited for this fact!! I’ve been an avid user of Inkscape for some time, but abandoned it because the UI was unbearable. So so so happy
link to the beta download page:
https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.0/?latest=1
That’s awesome!
For those wondering why this is significant, this means that it will run as a native application on macOS. Really neat!
Ok I gotta upgrade now :o
This is probably the biggest news for Inkscape for a while. I can't count the number of times I've not been able to recommend it to mac-using colleagues who don't have an adobe license.
My go-to graphics packages are still Gimp for raster / Inkscape for vector graphics.
Started using Inkscape in 2007 to illustrate a math paper, and been using it ever since whenever I needed to TeX something up.
Me too. I only recently came across TikZ which is an even more epic way to TeX up fancy diagrams (you "program" them). Still use inkscape for most stuff though.
> Started using Inkscape in 2007 to illustrate a math paper, and been using it ever since whenever I needed to TeX something up.
That reminds me of this series of posts I read a while back:
• https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
• https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/
• https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-3/
> I only recently came across TikZ which is an even more epic way to TeX up fancy diagrams (you "program" them). Still use inkscape for most stuff though.
Check out link 2 in particular there.
You and GP wrote "[to] TeX up", is this a common idiom?
Yes? At least in some mathy/sciencey circles.
I learned enough TikZ for a project to create a pretty wide range of generic flowcharts/diagrams.
Now I'm no longer using TeX daily and kind of regret boxing myself in.
I find that I'm either working with teams that are 100% "TeX all the way" or 0% "please no."
The Latex plugins really make things interesting. The LaTeXText package [1] allows formula rendering and editing from within the Inkscape canvas.
For tidy circuit diagrams the CircuitSymbols plugin [2] produces exquisite results by hooking into Latex's circuitTikz package and dumping the rendered result on the canvas. Typically I generate a bunch of circuit promitives and then connect them afterwards using snaps and the line tool.
[1] https://inkscape.org/~seebk/%E2%98%85latextext-render-latex-...
[2] https://inkscape.org/pt-br/~fsmMLK/%E2%98%85circuitsymbols
edit: wording
Slight aside, I don't see anything in the release notes about OCAL (Open ClipArt Library): is it still integrated?
Reason I'm asking is because there are links between the projects and OCAL has been offline since April [1].
OCAL doesn't seem to be coming back, their official line is they are handling a DDoS ... if it's no longer included I'd conclude that OCAL probably expired.
There was a death, of an associated dev, I believe.
1 - https://alicious.com/openclipart-ddos-offline/ my blog post on the issue.
It looks like there is currently only one person in charge of OCAL and he works on it for free, which would explain why it takes so long to bring it back.
It's also sad to see that Pixabay has basically copied all assets from OpenClipart and republished them under a more restrictive license rather than try to cooperate and support them.
Which would be no problem if that was publicly given as a reason. There have been 2 promises for "we're just about done" to my recollection too. Moreover the people running it aren't responding to requests to put up the torrent files of the current library.
It's extremely bad public relations at best.
I am looking forward to having one less Python 2 dependency. Inkscape 1.0 only uses Python 3.
Next up will be GIMP 3 as that will mean I no longer need GTK2 a dependency of unmaintained PyGTK.
PyGTK also depends on python2-cairo and python2-gobject2 so I will finally be rid of Python 2 once and for all.
Inkscape is just totally awesome and very much needed. Without it the only serious option left for vector graphics is the overly expensive Illustrator, entering Adobe's sucking subscription model where you can only edit your own files when a subscription is paid.
Inkscape is another great example of why we should try to support open source if we can.
Why does Inkscape's UI feel so... sloppy? I mean, Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI. So how does Inkscape's UI still contrive to look like the first Java AWT application I wrote in the 90s?
I know it's just a surface thing, and there's a lot of great functionality there. But it's still not exactly a sight that helps inspire you to create beautiful content using it.
> Blender is a cross-platform, open-source design tool, and it manages to have a tight, professional looking UI
Well let's remember that there was HEAVY criticism of Blender's UI up until the 2.5/2.6 releases, with some people even criticizing it now that 2.8 is released. There was an extreme amount of work done since 2.5 to clean up the UI.
It also has a lot more functionality than Inkscape, and so I think there is incentive as more people start using it to make sure that all those functions are filed away neatly and accessible without cluttering the interface too much.
Also, just going on users subscribed to their respective subreddits, Inkscape has around 6000 and Blender 151,000. So the size of the user base might have a direct impact.
Personally I don't find the Inkscape UI to be all that bad, although I agree it could do with some tightening up. I still prefer to use Adobe Illustrator if I have it to hand, but Inkscape will always work in a pinch.
Being able to use it to create SVG that can be directly imported into Blender as curves is something I've used it a lot for, for that kind of task they complement each other very well.
If you're just looking at the surface of the UI, the v1 release appears to include theming. There's a lot more to UI than that, but it might help it feel a bit fresher
Maybe it's your GTK theme? I would certainly call its UI tight and professional-looking in Kubuntu (even a bit too "nice-looking", as there's not much colour with which to identify icons at a glance; Blender looks like it has the same problem). The default theme on Windows does look kind of clunky, but it's never bothered me.
I think this in general looks fine: https://inkscape.org/~doctormo/%E2%98%85ferrari
I hate programs that re-invent toolbars and menus just to look "good" on the surface.
My main problem, as a non-expert user, is that the different "groups" on the toolbars are not obvious to me, and so I don't understand all of the icons. They should have had a couple of more labels in there, or somethime.
It's fun how fashions change - for over a decade I listened to people decry how "unintuitive" and "cryptic" blender's interface and approach was (and I do realize that blender's interface has changed over the years, but not that much) and praised tools like Inkscape for following the "user friendly" approach and straightforward paradigms.
(I have spent quite a long time using both and appreciate each's merits)
> Better HiDPI screen support
Oh finally! Haven't used it for the last two years simply because the interface was too tiny on my laptop.
huh, what OS are you on ? I have hidpi screens since 2014 and inscape has always honored Xft.dpi
Are you using Xorg or Wayland? When I looked into it last there were issues in Wayland when you set the Xft.dpi clashing with things like GDK_SCALE.
Like the GP I've hardly been using Inkscape recently as it's such a pain with the small icons.
I use X11, wayland has way too many issues for me at the moment (and I test sway, plasma and GNOME every other month)
Glad to read this. Never used inkscape beyond the CLI tools. I hope they continue to keep this chunk of their software mature and growing, too.
Here's my all-time favorite thing to do... transform font types to paths inside svgs (so one doesn't need to hold that font asset in CDN, ...) :
inkscape -T -A tmp-hack.pdf orig-w-custom-fonts.svg
inkscape -l final.svg tmp-hack.pdf
So excited to try out the native mac os support, I use inkscape for everything but I often have to unplug my second monitor to get it to show up thanks to XQuartz!
> Pinch-to-zoom
> On supported hardware (trackpad, touchpad, multi-touch screen), the canvas can be zoomed with the two-finger pinch gesture.
Thank god! As a macOS user, this is really one of my pet peeves because I'm so used to pinch-to-zoom that I almost forget it exists until I use a program that doesn't support it.
Inkscape is fantastic. I used it to convert a taster image to vector art and it exceeded my expectations.
I hope a minor annoyance in the UI which has been nagging me has been fixed in the recent versions:
To draw lines with arrows, one needs to draw a line then select the arrow style, where as a the natural flow would be to set the style before drawing the line. Imagine if you have 20 lines of the same style, it is painful to draw 20 standard lines and then go back to change each of their appearance individually. It would be better if one could define a style of line, then create lines of that style as many number of times as required.
Having such stylesheets will for example change the width of all lines of the given style easily later.
This is great news. Really a gem of an open-source/ free SVG editor that can produce high quality images.
Do they have "flatten-layers" and export as a single file (similar to Illustrator) functionality yet?
I checked the release notes, but could not find anything around it.
This can sometimes be an issue, in the way the image is rendered especially by different browsers. You end up with some unintended image output than you developed in the tool because of the interaction between different layers and opacities. Even a .png export did not help in one instance.
One thing I still miss in inkscape is calligraphic strokes, which is very useful for creating a professional looking cartoon style.
EDIT: Calligraphy is available but only hand-drawn. What I meant is calligraphy applied to a path, and the ability to transform the resulting stroke back into a path. These are powerful operations that are available in commercial offerings but not yet in inkscape, afaik.
Are they patented?
That's a looong journey to reach 1.0 beta. Congrats to the team.
I... love... inkscape... to those who work on it, thank you.
Free is not free when said product results in reduction of productivity.
I've tried to make Inkscape work, after ending my Adobe subscription. Conclusion - Inkscape is not worth it.
Just pony up $50 for Affinity Designer. Great app. Facilitates tremendous productivity
It's too bad Affinity is probably never going to port to Linux. Esp. Affinity Publisher would be great. There's no good layout application for Linux.
$50 is not $50 when it also requires Windows or Mac to even function.
Huh. My experience differs. I have both Illustrator and Inkscape, and for certain tasks (e.g. stuff I want to be native SVG or making icons), I always go back to Inkscape because I find it faster/easier.
As a Mac user looking to avoid Illustrator, this is a gift from the gods. XQuartz has issues with mouse movement, making it difficult to keep the drawing on the screen. Now it looks and acts like you'd expect.
Inkscape is great. I don't want to be a dick but I miss Xara XL
I don't know if they'll be able to get GTK 3 into 1.0, but that would be awesome. The fact that the new builds don't need a X server kind of make it awesome already!
Inkscape is that one Open Source app where the UI isn't utter nonsense. Could be better but it's alright. Great to see it reaching 1.0.
I wish it would have better color profile support, so that it can be used to send graphics straight to a printer. This seems like a basic thing but I could never get it to work. So now I have to use Scribus which has its own problems.
Non-destructive boolean operations! This it so much easier to reuse shapes. Great for obscured features, surface details, shadows, reflections... Too bad they are hidden away in live effects; I will still (ab)use them to no end.
Yay! Always missing these since my main tool is parametric CAD background (FreeCAD). Using Inkscape is nice when output is more visual in nature.
Inkscape is still in beta? Yes, I know it is, but I can't quite wrap my mind around it. Have been using this awe-inspiring tool for more than a quarter of my life. And I was born before the first human spaceflight.
This is great news! Will check if they fixed the issues loading files with autoconnectors, which was the only thing preventing me to use it for engineering diagrams.
I just wish that Krita had the same text editing capabilities as Inkscape.
I use Affinity Designer for vector work. However, Designer doesn't support tracing, so for that I'll fire up Inkscape. I'll do the trace, save it, then import into Designer and continue working.
I can't stress enough how happy I'm because Inkscape is finally getting proper macOS support, I've been using the ~suv osxmenu build for years wondering which OS update would render it unusable
`Ctrl + 4` to center view on page!
Pressure sensitive pencil for the PowerStroke Live Path Effect (LPE) "if a pressure sensitive device is available"!
The performance is really bad for me. It runs at like 2fps with an empty document.
I'm on a fairly powerful 5K iMac with High Sierra...
What other free software is good for vector graphics? Is there only Inkscape?
What is that list of changes relative to? I'm using 0.92.4 myself.
Fantastic program.
Please please please make an IOS version!
Just in case you are looking for a commercial alternative to Inkscape with a more modern UI and Chromium-based rendering engine, check out my project Boxy SVG: https://boxy-svg.com
The next version (to be released in 2-3 weeks) is going to introduce full support for filters and color swatches. In the upcoming 12 months I expect to reach full feature parity with Inkscape.
I'm sad to say that I judged it purely on the fact that it wasn't open source.
Then I went ahead and tried it out... mind blown. It's that good. Feels like a native app in it's UI quality and speed. And $9/month is a very good price point, especially for those that regularly create vector art.
I'm amazed at the quality of your app. It'll be especially incredible once you're at Inkscape parity. How large is the team you got working full time?
I'm working on it alone, which is possible thanks to Electron and Chromium projects which are abstracting away the difficult tasks.
BTW, the widget toolkit used by Boxy SVG is open sourced and can be used by other projects. You can try it out on https://xel-toolkit.org. In near future I'm planning to improve it by adding Windows 10 theme and full support for color schemes and dark mode.
Only $1080 over the next decade compared to zero for inkscape! You would probably be better off writing a check for $100 to fund improvements to same and put the other grand in your pocket.
Everyone on earth wants to turn a sale into a recurring revenue stream for a reason. Trivial individual costs add up substantially over time.
Boxy SVG desktop app does not and will not require recurring payments. You pay for it once and after that you will be receiving updates for free as long as I'm in charge of the project (i.e. I won't get hit by a bus or something along those lines).
hey, you might wanna change your website a little bit then. it's not obvious right now.
i clicked on the link of your site, and the first box i saw said "9$/month". that's enough to click away (for me).
only after i did some more clicking and followed an external(!) link to the store it was obvious you can do a one-time purchase.
in a normal situation i would never have gotten to that point and would have clicked away immediately after seeing 9/month for a new product that still has to prove itself and doesn't have a big name behind it.
Yes, it's not at all clear. If you switch away from "Web app" by clicking on an OS, you don't get that (or any) pricing info. Going to the stores themselves, Windows and Mac seem to have a one-time payment, and Chrome and Snap don't seem to have a price.
Originally I was assuming that the vast majority of potential desktop app users would discover it throw the app stores, therefore the website should focus on marketing the web app. I guess this assumption was wrong, I will update the marketing materials per your suggestions.
It's sad that you're getting downvoted.
I was trying this out on my phone and although I had to switch to landscape to make the UI fit, it was buttery smooth!
I was really impressed with the sheer amount of features included, many of which I have never seen implemented in any other web based editor.
Why would someone look for a commercial alternative?
Thanks but I'll stick with free software. Why don't you give me an option to pay you to contribute to Inkscape instead?
Probably because not everyone wants to mess with decade old dependency and just start with something fresh? So it is sad, that it is not open source, but apparently he proved the starting new approach is worth it.
There are already some Inkscape developers who accept donations, for example Tavmjong Bah [1] who has been a long time contributor and still actively works on it.
I'm not sure why you want new developers to donate to when the existing ones clearly didn't reach their goals yet.
[1] https://www.patreon.com/tavmjong
Thanks. Now this is an appropriate link asking for money for this thread. The post I was replying to was completely inappropriate and shameless hijacking of an Inkscape thread.
"Unsupported browser. Please view this page in Internet Explorer 6.0"
"Unsupported browser" what exactly does Firefox not support?
https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+71,chrome+80
I meant what it doesn't support that your application needs, not the general differences in terms of functionality.
I need a rock solid support for Custom Elements, Shadow DOM and Pointer Events. There is a ton of browser-specific bugs that need special handling and workarounds.
Full feature parity with Inkscape in a year is a bold claim, and I’m rather sceptical of it. You have built an impressive app (and I’m sure that being just one person helped with that), but there is a lot of advanced functionality in Inkscape that you don’t have at present. A few examples that spring to mind: full pressure-sensitive tablet support (and sure, this is the beauty of using the web as your platform—it’s all there in the PointerEvent; well, until you need more fine control, then you’re completely stranded), live path effects, extensions, tracing. I’d also like a much stronger keyboard interface. I’d be interested to see your take on some of Inkscape’s extensions particularly, like JessyInk and font editing.
I did test the app for compatibility with Wacom Intuos. "Blob" tool already supports pressure sensitivity [1], as you said it was relatively easy to implement with the Pointer Events API. I'm not sure how pressure and tilt information could be used by other tools (other than "Spray") as SVG does not support stroke with variable width.
Tracing could be easily implemented using third party libraries [2]. Custom extensions would be initially limited to the "Generators" panel. I haven't thought about the live path effects yet.
The hardest part remaining is full support for filters, but I have this feature mostly sorted out in the dev branch and the UI is going to be much nicer than in Inkscape [3][4].
[1] https://i.imgur.com/e08OW5x.png
[2] https://boxy-svg.com/ideas/5/vectorize-generator
[3] https://i.imgur.com/oGbfa5q.png
[4] https://i.imgur.com/l0IkfKK.png
Ah, didn’t spot the blob tool. Good show.
Inkscape 1.0 adds what’s basically a more powerful version of that, a pressure-sensitive pencil, implemented with the powerstroke live path effect—more powerful, I say, because it’s editable, because it’s not immediately flattening it to what SVG can represent, but is also keeping its own editor information in namespaced attributes. That’s how you can add things like that and mesh gradients before SVG supports the concept.
I’m still intensely sceptical of your claim of full feature parity with Inkscape in a year, but I’ll believe parity for >95% of users and use cases.
My biggest problem with your app at the moment looks to be that path editing is painful compared with Inkscape. I like to show the outline of the path, and its keyboard and mouse operation also feels just all-round superior at present, and I don’t think that that’s just my greater familiarity with Inkscape showing through.
I’d also like more text labels and fewer icons. Iconless labels have no place on something like your filters panel; text labels are objectively superior. I’d say similar for the Defs panel and other such panels.
I wish you joy!
On second thought, 100% parity might be a bit overoptimistic as some features such as auto-wrapped text and mesh gradients rely on APIs that must be implemented upstream by Chromium (and those features are not the top priority for Google). But 95% seems sensible to me.
There should be an outline shown when you hover a path with the "Edit" tool [1], though it's a bit sloppy and needs more optimization. Most path-related commands are exposed by the "Shape" panel. To convert a node between a smooth and an edge type you must double-click it. The ability to box-transform selected nodes and to move them with arrow keys is missing but should be added soon.
My main problem with text labels is that they take a lot of horizontal space. Text labels could be shown only when the panel is wide enough to fit them, or when user hovers the icon (like it's done in Autodesk Graphic).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/FgglFOw.gif
You don’t need upstream support for all features; you can often implement them in older SVG techniques with namespaced extra data to help with editing. That’s how text wrapping has worked in Inkscape historically, though 1.0 is introducing support for the actual defined SVG functionality.
Not everything is possible this way; mesh gradients can’t be emulated in vectors, for example—though you could effectively implement a canvas-backed renderer for it to polyfill it; but a lot of functionality can be implemented without upstream support.
> a more modern UI…
This is typically code for "doesn't respect my OS theme." I didn't like skinz in the past and that hasn't changed over the years, though the name has.
Good luck on an otherwise cool app however.
One thing I love about Inkscape is its keyboard interface and specifically how it lets you scroll up and down, left and right and in and out. This should be standard in all two-dimensional editing applications but I find it sadly is not. When it comes to editing speed, the keyboard is absolutely essential and shouldn't be an afterthought.