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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you are downvoted for your opinion, but totally agree that Inkscape is pretty low quality and buggy as well. On the Mac specifically the experience is so 1990s and un-macOS (yeah I know, it's an X app)

I used it for a while for generating SVG files, ended up writing a script that would optimize the crappy files it generated and reduce them 10 to 20 times in some cases. Oh and then there are these odd floating point drifts (coordinate 10 becomes 10.035 etc.). Seems like one of those pieces of software that would be very difficult or impossible to fix.

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If you're using it on OSX with the X11 layer it's kind of awful. But on Linux, or even on Windows I've found it reasonably decent. I found it less annoying to spin up a fedora virtualbox to run it on OSX than to use the X11 layer.

Its also not great on small screen resolutions.

Yes, I also had to create some SVG files during a project for a client and used Inkscape on Windows for that. Then hand-edited all of them, because I wanted to get rid of all the crap before importing them.

I basically just bought Affinity Designer as a knee-jerk reaction because I disliked Inkscape so much.

I find that the latest Adobe Illustrator does a pretty decent job with SVG's but of course Adobe stuff is a matter of taste (and is overpriced too).

Inkscape adds a bunch of metadata to it's svg's, but also has a "Simple SVG" save-as option, did you try it ?

I did try it. Apart from metadata there are two other major problems: it generates a lot of unnecessary attributes with their default values, and also the floating point errors I mentioned. The latter can affect the appearance of your graphics on your screen unfortunately, i.e. a vertical line with X=10 is one thing but X=10.035 is another.

Optimized SVG is the one you want.

there's a branch that gets gtk+ quartz (no X11) support, I'm sure you can find a build, the experience is a lot better.

I have that branch, and makes Inkscape awesome on OSX

It's great on windows. Maybe mac's not their main focus, as it's less than 10% of market share.

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