Hacker News Reader

Comment by drschwabe | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape is a daily driver for me and its OSS

It has its quirks and even some annoying bugs but where it excells its IMO way better than what any competing/proprietary design tool can do (vector and bitmap exporting, vector+bitmap combined layering, shape/colors/text layout, PDF editing/creating, vector pen tool, etc). I use it to create UI for games & apps and more generally to build sprawling UX scenarios and concept flowcharts.

In more recent builds its performance has become quite good which was a problem it had before. Granted, lots of room for improvement still particularly wish it had more natural flowcharting capability.

View on HN

Inkscape is amazing, and it's had incredible growth. I remember using it 5+ years ago and it was incredibly buggy and the UX was terrible. I now use it extensively and it rocks.

Concurring that Inkscape today is awesome, while it definitely was not a decade ago (how the time flies... and decade ago it was already... ten years old or so!).

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer not a UX/UI designer, and I use Inkscape mostly for graphic designs and the odd super-simple CAD stuff where I don't think starting qcad is worth it. Still, I'm immensely happy that I can just get stuff done in Inkscape and that everything inside makes sense and is generally discoverable "solely by logic".

Another vote for Inkscape here - amazing tool. I probably use less than 1% of it's functionality, but it is far and away the best PDF editor I've come across (I work with a lot of design drawings that started life as DWG/CAD files, are exported to PDF and sent around for proofing/review and need to have changes marked up on them).

Nice hearing about Inkscape, I have to give it a try now that I’ve quit Paydobe.

Is Inkscape good for svgs?

SVG is Inkscape's native file format (albeit it adds some of its own extensions by default), so yes.

Yeah it's great for SVGs. I still use illustrator because the type tools are a lot easier to work with for constant use,I already have a CC subscription grandfathered in at a cheap rate, and some things in it I'm just plain-old used to... But I could deal with Inkscape if I decided to dump Adobe. Gimp not so much. I'd definitely be buying affinity's photo editor or something for raster work.

Indeed, that is primarily where it excels. Your layered source files are SVG and you can export to SVG (and you can import in SVG obviously). The bitmap selection/exporting is also excellent as such you can have these massive vector canvases (with any number of bitmaps and vector shapes/graphics mixed in) and quickly export any slice or selection you make without having to resize the canvas or copy/paste somewhere - and it will remember the export path when you click on the object or layer again later (aside from a bug with symlinks on Linux); ideal for iterative work/exporting revisions to clients or colleagues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com