Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

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> Is part of the problem authoring tools? Every time I need to make some SVG by hand, I look around and keep coming back to Inkscape and Illustrator. I can't afford Illustrator, and Inkscape has just never stuck for me, it feels very clunky. I've used lots of the other tools out there but nothing seems great.

I totally get this. I don't have Illustrator, but occasionally I get Illustrator produced SVGs and they remind me of HTML produced by early 2000 Word.

And I hate Inkscape with a passion, mostly the UI. I like exact coordinates for doing technical diagrams, and Inkscape seems to make that really hard. I have no issues with UIs that have a learning curve, and have previously gotten used to InDesign and Blender fine. But it seems like I'm fighting Inkscape all the way, only to have the output be of low quality.

What I actually use now is TikZ in LaTeX + dvisvgm, which I then pipe through SVGO. Super happy with the results, although writing TikZ isn't exactly smooth either. And LaTeX is a whole different world of pain and annoyance, so using it for just SVG seems wrong. But TikZ/PGF is pretty mature, and dvisvgm has a great, clean code base.

I started out doing vector based illustration in Illustrator and have been using Inkscape for probably 16 years now. I really like Inkscape for the performance and simplicity of it. It's also got a bunch of features I've come to enjoy, like specifying exact positions for guides, and guides on angles. The menus and tool pallets kind of suck, but I don't use those anyway. Really from what I've seen in the industry, most designers are heavy keyboard users and aren't clicking around on menus to do stuff. It takes too long!

The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color, so when I need something printed I bring it in to Illustrator and make sure my colors are mapped to the appropriate CMYK colors.

> The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color

This has been painful for me. As a side project I made a card game and produced the cards in SVG as a template (handwritten, but I use Inkscape to convert to PDF/PNG, so Inkscape has to render it correctly), a CSV file for all text content that should appear in it, and some scripting. SVG has been awesome for that, as it's a vector graphics format that's very easy to programmatically modify.

But when it comes to printing things you suddenly find yourself in a world where RGB is downright painful. Slightly off colours, wrong black tones (RGB black is blacker than CMYK black, so it's always mixed with colours). It probably wouldn't matter much with photos, but text and shapes are very affected.

So in the end we had to take Illustrator to the final PDF, convert to CMYK, and make sure every last bit of black is CMYK(0,0,0,1). SVG as a web technology only caters to sRGB as a colour space; there have been attempts at standardising CMYK, and Batik had a half-finished implementation, I think. But eventually both the standardisation efforts and the implementation were pulled, IIRC.

I had similar frustrations with Inkscape's UI, even after years of using it. I've been happy with Affinity Designer [0] (Windows version) as a replacement that doesn't require a monthly subscription.

[0] https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

This looks really good, thanks! Nice support for isometry.

CorelDraw is really nice for vector editing. The included PhotoPaint has languished on the vine but its unique object interface makes many things that are obtuse in PS or Gimp easy to handle.

That being said it's hard to beat Inkscape's native SVG support. You don't get surprised by fills and filters bloated into bitmaps like the legacy tools are wont to do.

While inkscape is fairly terrible at exact work, you can do it by using the builtin xml editor. I designed a fully working planetary gear train for a clock in inkscape. It involves placing mostly rectangles exactly using the XML editor and then using the snapping tools to place other objects relative to these exact positions. place rectangle -> control-shift -> change x and y properties.

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