by progman32 on 5/17/22, 5:18 AM
Amazing, just two days ago I was searching for a polar arrangement tool in Inkscape. FOSS tools are often worse from a UI/UX perspective, sure, but I contend that they usually provide something consumer commercial tools often don't: respect for users. I'm not necessarily talking about welcoming communities here - respect can take the form of, say, not engaging in hostilities like:
- The sword of Damocles that is renting software. Can't pay? Can't access your data. Or worse, it's gone.
- Developed-country-centric pricing models/heavy focus on newer hardware.
- Locking you out of creative uses of the software - either our way or the highway
- Effectively forced TOS or pricing changes
- Unexplained bans/AI moderation/guilt by association/becoming subject to laws not relevant to your jurisdiction
- Forced upgrades breaking workflows or removing features
- Corporate bankruptcy/"amazing journey"/sales/pivots/mergers/etc ruining your investment
- Misfeatures such as nag screens, dark patterns, engagement boosters (time wasters), unclear data collection...
- Opaque bug submission channels, limited to no access to the engineers building the thing
- Optimizing for revenue, not usefulness
There is a feature count/learning curve price for this, I will readily admit. Sometimes, untenably so. My claim is simply that FOSS tools are important as a backstop/foundation.
I feel that any problem solved exclusively by proprietary software is only solved temporarily and for a tiny percentage of the world population. If the company goes away or the IP otherwise becomes inactive, that's it. Especially with cloud software. With FOSS, the software never really goes away. The problem mostly stays solved, and anyone can resume the work if they are willing and able. I'd imagine a forked FOSS version of Win2k, VB6, or maybe the late-2000s Google indexer (bit of a stretch) would be quite successful today, for example. Guess I'll never be sure of that.
Just musing after a beer and some Red Vines - I welcome any criticism or kindred spirits.
by Gigachad on 5/16/22, 11:57 PM
Great to see the project moving along, but it's been a persistent feeling of mine that FOSS is starting to get left behind in the dust. The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online, live collaboration tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, etc and FOSS just has no answer for this market. Even a lot of the big name proprietary tools are finding themselves becoming rapidly obsolete in a world where people want to IM a link and just have it reflect the latest version rather than attaching files back and forth.
It's not even clear how FOSS would even work in this market or how it would benefit the user when it would be hosted all on someone else's server with self hosting diminishing the ease of collaboration.
by oxguy3 on 5/17/22, 3:10 AM
> Inkscape documents can now hold multiple pages , which are managed by the new Page tool
> Layers and objects dialog merged
> Redesigned Export dialog with preview and ability to select objects/layers/pages and even multiple file formats to export to
Is it my birthday? Holy moly, those are like three of my biggest dream changes to Inkscape. I think I might need to start donating.
by tarball on 5/16/22, 11:45 PM
I am a daily user of Inkscape and I love this software. Thank you for that version, snapping and multiple pages are incredibly helpful. Earlier in the day, I was about to download a suspicious add-on to batch export images, what a pleasure to find this option in this new version!
by meibo on 5/17/22, 1:56 AM
Inkscape definitely needs an UX refresh like Blender had one. It's very hard to pick up, lots of weird/arcane behavior that doesn't match other tools in the space.
Happy to see that work is still being done.
by thepasswordis on 5/17/22, 4:18 AM
Inkscape is an absolutely
divine software. I use it almost every single day.
I have a copy of illustrator as well (which I pay for), but it mostly serves to export things to something inkscape is happy with, or for helping me identify fonts.
Inkscape blows it out of the water with its UI. Illustrator is confusing and it seems like everything useful is hidden behind a few layers of menus. I hate it.
by ihappentobe on 5/16/22, 11:20 PM
Haven’t downloaded this release yet, but as a longtime user of Inkscape the ability to add and manage pages sounds like an amazing addition to the application. Previously, I would approximate managing multiple pages by hiding and showing layers, then exporting each page manually. Needless to say, I am excited to leave that workflow behind!
by flobosg on 5/16/22, 11:20 PM
> Inkscape documents can now hold multiple pages, which are managed by the new Page tool
Finally!
by jeppester on 5/17/22, 5:56 AM
As a mostly web/app programmer Inkscape is a great tool to do minor alterations to icons, logos etc.
Change an icon to use fills instead of strokes? No problem. Change colours? No problem. Align the image in the middle of viewport? Remove excessive spacing? Make icons from different sources the same size? Grab a logo from a PDF? No problem.
Though my days as an aspiring graphics designer are long past, I would think that Inkscape is also a good tool for creating logos and icons. The node editor really is quite good.
For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping, filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows), reusable components. The text editor is also very basic and counter-intuitive.
by fabiensanglard on 5/16/22, 11:58 PM
I draw all of the illustrations for my side-projects and books with Inkscape. This is an amazing project.
Using it on Windows or Linux is a pleasure.
by bavell on 5/17/22, 12:30 AM
I'm a dev and I'm pretty comfortable with gimp and raster editors but I haven't spent enough time with inkscape or other vector editors yet.
Anyone have some inkscape-specific links or resources to share on best practices and workflows? E.g. using layers, creating custom shapes, mirroring curves, exact measurements, etc...
by musicale on 5/16/22, 11:55 PM
I want to like Inkscape, but the macOS version seems sluggish and buggy.
by foxes on 5/17/22, 12:57 AM
Why does it see so hard for FOSS to design a good looking UI. I honestly struggle visually with distinguishing what all those symbols mean. I don't use inkscape enough to memorise keyboard shortcuts. I'm sure an experienced user will come along and proclaim it just works, but as someone who wants to use it intermittently, it needs some serious refinement.
by mastazi on 5/16/22, 11:41 PM
I was using Scribus for multi page documents but, as a fully fledged DTP solution, it is often overkill, I'm glad I can now use Inkscape for smaller jobs, thanks to the new Page tool.
Inkscape is truly the Swiss Army knife of the open source graphics ecosystem, I use it more often than any other application.
by hollasch on 5/17/22, 1:27 AM
I will be very happy if one day I open up Inkscape and I'm not presented with a virtual sheet of paper as my starting point. I find it extraordinarily off putting to have to pretend I'm going to print out the end result.
by shp0ngle on 5/17/22, 7:20 AM
To tell something positive too:
When I researched it last time, Inkscape was the only reasonable way to do programmatically edit arbitrary SVGs. Other tools always had some troubles with some weird edge-cases, Inkscape knew how to edit everything I threw at it. Including really weird CSS inside SVG.
It was pretty annoying that I needed to install all the graphical layers in Docker just to do that, but hey, it worked.
It also doesn't look atrocious on Mac anymore, that's great.
That being said, I am still not used to the "corel draw-like" UX, I prefer the "illustrator" UX. So with that said I prefer Affinity tools.
by mattl on 5/16/22, 11:46 PM
Big, big fan of Inkscape. The latest release was horribly broken on my M1 Mac (every keyboard shortcut didn’t need the modifier so typing a Z was Undo, etc) I’ll download this and try it out.
by s1291 on 5/17/22, 1:05 AM
by eyelidlessness on 5/17/22, 1:20 AM
I have a lot of respect for Inkscape (the fact of its existence and ongoing development). I used it to make the main logo/home link on my personal site and for some freelance work, partly because I wanted to see how it had progressed, partly because I was between jobs and found it unreasonable to budget a commercial tool license.
I’ll be … gentle in my criticism but, I found Inkscape hard to use. I eventually found my way to do what I needed to do. But it was like relearning Adobe tools with subtly different confusions almost every step of the way. If I recall, it’s structurally very close to 1:1 with the SVG output. Which might be what users want! It might even produce better SVGs. But I found myself thinking “can I bail out to the text editor like I’m using an HTML WYSIWYG?” fairly often.
I’m sure if I used it more and got more familiar I’d know or develop instincts for where to look for … everything. But if Inkscape devs are here and want (I promise, this is intended as constructive) feedback, the learning curve was pretty steep for me.
by BMc2020 on 5/17/22, 12:27 AM
I am not ashamed to say I found it too difficult to learn.
Sometimes I do colored circles or something else easy at one of the free online sites but I just can't spare the time or mental energy.
It's a shame too, I have a laser engraver, SVG is made for that.
by jamesfisher on 5/17/22, 3:01 PM
Really hoping they have fixed the performance issues. On both Windows and MacOS, Inkscape is really sluggish, even with small SVGs.
by glennos on 5/17/22, 7:40 AM
If you’re reading this, thank you Inkscape team!
by rtpg on 5/17/22, 1:13 AM
Inkscape is sometimes my goto for this kind of work, but I've _always_ had really weird performance issues with it with even really basic stuff across many different machines/OSes over the years. Hopeful those performance improvements will affect whatever I've been doing.
by AtNightWeCode on 5/17/22, 8:13 PM
Looks great! Glad to see the gradients are more intuitive again. I think the UX can be a bit tighter since it still takes a lot of space on laptops. Less spacing perhaps.
Anyway, I love Inkscape, and it is my go-to software for any vector graphic needs.
by Ducking_Insane on 5/17/22, 8:53 AM
I really like Inkscape and have used it quite extensively. Nice to see it getting an update. I look forward to exploring the new version.
by transfire on 5/17/22, 12:02 AM
I so wish I could use Inkscape with my GCC Mercury III laser engraver/cutter. Right now it only works with Corel Draw (or AutoCAD).
by Minor49er on 5/17/22, 1:33 AM
The batch export will be super useful. The tiling feature also looks like a lot of fun
by l8rlump on 5/17/22, 8:40 AM
This is the obligatory post suggesting Affinity Designer.
It also appears they're running a 50% off sale:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
(No affiliation. I just notice it comes up in a lot of conversations here about Inkscape)