Inkscape 1.0
wiki.inkscape.org
wiki.inkscape.org
Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855357 (710 points, 23 days ago, 157 comments)
Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969 (603 points, 7 months ago, 167 comments)
Inkscape launches versions 0.92.4 and 1.0 alpha – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940568 (299 points, Jan 18 2019, 68 comments)
Including an extensive comment by dang explaining why they didn't have it hit the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428
As someone who has used Inkscape for well over a decade on desktop Linux, I continue to be impressed at how nice it is, how well it works, and how much it does. It's really a shining example of not-for-profit software development.
FYI, a short essay on the history of the project was just posted on its website: https://inkscape.org/news/2020/05/04/roots-and-shoots-inksca...
That said community problems can impede quality obviously.
Instead, you can call Potrace directly from the command line. So the components within Inkscape are also worth understanding individually.
I've used Potrace to vectorise raster images of text that was pixelated.
I think it's time for a mixed-content VFX BOMP with all the sequences composited and edited in Blender, end to end.
https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/images/2.10-update-ui.jpg
Perhaps related: Inkscape has always felt quite laggy for me, even with my extremely basic needs. I pretty much just make text in boxes and connect them with arrows. So together with all these new lovely features, I hope that performance is improved in this release also.
Either way, I love Inkscape. I draw all of our apps icons as acts with it and then use it to create all of our pdf icons of iOS and convert to drawables for Android.
I'd love to see the wiki back up, and more v1.0 examples of scripting. Ideally there would be a Inkscape specific Scheme-based language for scripting, with scripts not needing to be packaged as extensions but loaded into a directory. Insert 'I'd do it myself, but..' lame excuses here. I'd love to, but other projects occupy my time.
Sketch has so many small life-improving tidbits, that combined they make me 50 times more productive when drawing anything, than in Inkscape.
Inkscape isn't "it". It's "us".
Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.
Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.
The performance is janky, but I think that's a "known issue" since switching away from quartz - but I'm excited for Inkscape again!
*twitches.
Now I just need to finish the figures for this paper so I can update to this newest version. But everyone in my lab is quite excited about it.
Inkscape may not be perfect and perhaps it's not the best tool for graphics professionals but, as a person who is really bad at anything having to do with graphic design, drawing, layout design and graphics programs, it's the only vector graphics program I have been able to learn at a relatively decent level, allowing me to make effective diagrams for slides, papers, etc. With every other vector graphics editor I've tried, the learning curve felt to me like climbing a vertical ice wall.
So kudos for how intuitive it is, and hoping for many new versions to come.
Some features I'd like to see in upcoming releases:
- Calligraphic strokes, and the possibility to convert them to paths.
- Better UX for filters (e.g. adding a drop shadow and changing the parameters could be simpler)
I used AI a lot for creating cartoons. But then at some point I completely moved away from MS-Windows, which meant that I couldn't use AI any longer. I've been missing the calligraphic strokes option ever since (including the ability to convert these strokes to paths).
For more information about why calligraphic strokes are essential for drawing/inking cartoons:
This would work for any path. And you could change the Bezier points after you applied the calligraphic pen to the stroke.
Inkscape is for vectors (almost anything created primarily on a computer) while Gimp is for rasters (when your input consists of pixels - eg a photo).
- Non-destructive filters, AKA "layer effects" or "smart filters" (I've read it's supposed do come in some distant future when the GEGL overhaul is finished). A node-based nondestructive filter system would be awesome
- Smarter selection tools. Current tools create little to no gradient in the mask they create, and it's a pain to refine a selection after creating it. Sure there are workarounds, but it feels repetitive and inefficient.
Sure the interface is a bit all over the place but it's not so bad, and it's free!
Gimp is primarily a raster graphics tool (pixels), where inkscape is vector graphics (lines and points).
If you've been using gimp to do flat graphicy design stuff with its pathing tool suite, it's unsurprising that you found inkscape a better fit.
What is surprising, is that gimp is a ridiculously simple program, and inkscape is slightly notorious for having a questionably intuitive interface, and vectors are also less intuitive than raster.
What were your use cases?
Inkscape/CorelDraw/Illustrator/etc. are drawing programs. They deal with vector images.
Gimp/Photoshop/Paintshop Pro/etc. are painting programs. They deal with bitmaps.
They're fundamentally different paradigms. Very little intuition from one carries over to the other. Of course, they've been adding some bridge functionality (Photoshop smartobjects, etc.), if people want to nitpick, but the core UX is designed for something fundamentally different.
For both there is the question how editing multiple files at the same time is being dealt with, i.e. how processes and windows relate to files. Both have to arrange many tools and helpers together with the main view on the file being edited. Both want to have help and documentation. The files being edited support meta-data.
Both raster images and vector images are visual and can therefore be exported to other visual representations, and especially both can be printed. So both programs have to deal with printing, page setup etc.
The whole topic of colors and color spaces applies to both raster images and vector images.
I could go on, but the above should give a hint how much these programs conceptually have in common.
Try using Inkscape to cut a person out of a photo, adjust contrast/white balance, and add a vignette...
On the other hand, try making a beautiful invoice template in gimp, with a nicely laid out table, and nicely typeset text....
It's kind of like comparing Word to PowerPoint. Both can place text on pages, and it's possible to write an essay in PowerPoint, or make a presentation in Word, but you'll be hurting to do it.
To pick a more obvious dimension, if somebody said, "Word is buggier than Powerpoint", nobody would say, "You can't compare them because they don't do the same thing." Bugginess is an abstractable quality across kinds of product.
The same thing is true about UI quality. It goes well beyond intuitiveness. You can look at fit-and-finish details. You can look at number of unnecessary actions. You can look at difficulty for novices completing common tasks. You can compare utility of error messages. How much are key concepts related to a task obvious vs hidden? Et cetera, et cetera.
In my experience, Inkscape is better in that dimension. I think this even though I have used GIMP a lot more, and so normally would be biased the other way, because familiarity makes its UI issues less obvious to me.
I just wish it wasn't so expensive.
The filters are phenomenal though, I've been using Gimp for fifteen years and find it's good enough even though I still find the UI difficult.
For me the weirdest part is that clicking on the X on the toolbar closes only the toolbar instead of it realizing that probably if I click an X anywhere I mean to close at least the currently open project. I get the logic with multiple windows open, it's just the one weird thing that I will never get used to. I'm sure we all have those stories.
Thanks, I'll look into that.
Edit: Didn't even need to look that far, was in an obvious menu (good UI!) and was just unchecked probably since upgrading didn't switch the option by default. Can't really argue with that but boy is the single window mode less painful to look at! Thanks again!
Startup times certainly seem to be CPU bound, it pins one core to 100% during startup. This means they somehow are spending something to the tune of 1e10 cpu cycles to start a vector editor.
When inkscape is started up they use around 70 mb of ram. If they just store everything they need in ram in a linear file and load that at startup, the program would launch in a fraction of a second on an SSD.
I started using inkscape recently for editing a few svg's and was impressed at how much this free program can do while also being easy to use.
I've been using gimp for a long time now and still get lost in it's poorly laid out UI, with inkscape I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first try.
At first it was very confusing, but I'm slowly realizing that where tools like Sketch give a very clean, simple UX, inkscape often has the extra functionality I need!
It's awesome to see this Inkscape 1.0 release and it's incredible to think about how much impact Inkscape has had on the open source design tool landscape.
I'm the Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab, btw. Thanks @Inkscape for being part of the GitLab for Open Source community!
The one feature I'm missing before I can use it is multipage support, to be able to print a large image across several sheets of paper (which can then be taped together, etc.)
Apparently this isn't in there because SVG has no notion of such a thing?
Even if desired I could use the operating system print driver to use lots of pages for a large drawing or embed lots of SVG drawings in an HTML document that had a print stylesheet to give the pagination needed.
Now one showstopper on Inkscape for me has been support for SVG viewbox where the origin is centred on the drawing rather than in a corner.
Somehow I was able to do these things easier with 1990s DTP tools?
In the end Microsoft Publisher has worked for me. Sort of.
I'm amazed it just reached v1.
Very user friendly for easy tasks but I am struggling with more complex edits. But that is just because I never upgraded my knowledge since both Gimp and Inkscape provide everything I need.
Thumbs up to Inkscape from me!
I am curious - does anyone here use Krita? How does it compare to either? What is its place in the graphics toolbox?
side note - anyone know of an mspaint style 'simple' raster image editor? use gimp currently but sometimes I just want the simplicity
My one and only complaint is, for very large drawings, selecting a large number of elements and moving them is very slooooooow. It would be great if, going forward, performance improvements can be made.
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