Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.
If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.
These things are true at once:
- Good work inkscape developers! Inkscape is used by lots of people. I'm happy for the developers and the users, and I hope inkscape keeps getting better.
- I don't want to use inkscape because when I tried it, it seemed ugly, slow and buggy.
The only problem here is when people equate "this program is junk" with "this person is junk". That's a very dangerous belief to have, because it makes an enemy out of practice. And an enemy out of experimentation. The road to expertise is paved by mistakes. If bad quality work makes you a bad person, you can never learn a new skill.
Secondly, how does being OSS justify significant regressions?
I deeply appreciate that FOSS exists. But - subjective feeling - in general it always had certain reputation for jankiness and user unfriendliness. Sniping down feedback "because the software is free" certainly contributes to that perception. If I have a choice between free, volunteer made software that's unreliable or doesn't even work for some of my use cases, and a commercial, but non-free product, I will be pragmatic about it and choose the latter.
Feedback is fine, but there are so comments being things like "ermahgerd I paid nothing for this thing and a feature wasn't working What the actual F!". Go file an issue and fix it yourself buddy.
The worst thing they said was that it was "kinda disappointing". Which is perfectly valid. They really want to use inkscape but can't.
Heck the only reason this post made the front page of HN is because of lingering goodwill that was built up when the software was actually decent. Now that it’s regressed into uselessness, the goodwill is drying up. I, frankly, don’t have any interest in the software anymore, since it was rendered unusable. I recommend everyone steer clear of it as well.
You are free to do that. I've only used inkscape like half a dozen times. It was fine for me.
One of the apps I am working on hit 10,000+ active users (per Playstore dashboard), and Inkscape has a role to play in this.
Since the app is free and doesn't even have a backend, there is no budget for the designer.
I looked for a few tools online, but most of them failed to generate icons/logos.
I ended up using Inkscape to make logos for my app.
Without Inkscape, this workflow is difficult.
Though I am not able to intuitively use it well from the GUI. The thing is, you don't even need the GUI anymore!
But Claude or Codex is able to write SVG line by line (so you can make changes incrementally) and use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
Here's my app for those who are curious: https://macrocodex.app/
I am pretty sure some designer will come and say "you did a bad job at this," which is fine. My experience is in writing backends, not mobile apps or design.
Every app is saying they use "AI for smart recommendation,” while I went the opposite route, of “no, our product does not use AI for any suggestion.“ It’s entirely deterministic.
The defaults are tuned to aesthetics of my personal logo, but it's quite configurable. (You can even copy your own SVG into the icon input)
Example logos:
- https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.
I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)
The extension is inkscape-silhouette (https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette) and is apparently being maintained by a makerspace in Germany.
I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" button.
Literally everything else about Inkscape is amazing! Congrats to the team!
~~~
Maybe this is also the right time & place to plug my favourite SVG path editor? https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ - free as in both beer and freedom, a tool to craft minimalistic well-behaved SVG paths.
Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?
SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.
(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)
I have also had trouble with some generated SVGs, for example:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/5317
Part of the problem is that Inkscape is too good, and the file format it uses mostly conforms to standards, so I have the expectation that opening arbitrary SVGs would just work. With other programs that use proprietary formats, I wouldn't have tried to generate drawings at all. It's a bummer when I run into what seem to be corner cases of Inkscape's SVG handling, but fortunately the set of corner cases seem to be shrinking.
I highly recommend using SVGO (https://svgo.dev/).
Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.
But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)
1.0 and after, and it's been truly a dream. I now use it to make all my figures for my research publications and presentations. Inkscape has gone from compromise I begrudge to my tool of choice in relatively little time. This is a good reminder that I should probably send them a donation.
There is a plugin for blender that allows CAD style sketching. It may be a way forward.
Great news! Having to reconnect the USB cable each time is no fun.
I'm glad this project keeps going.
- Set display units to "px"
- Set scale (px per user unit) to 1.0
I have a script that converts SVGs to PNGs as part of my build process:
https://github.com/uguu-org/sor6/blob/master/data/svg_to_png...
But their UX is getting worse with each release. I think they need another Blender-style overhaul
It used to be almost unusable with all the UI bugs (can't close tabs when you open them, can't resize the window without panes bugging out or the app crashing, etc).
I get the occasional crash where it just closes completely for no reason, but very rarely in the last year.
It seems to me Tikz does the same but programmatically.
That’s one reason to use Inkscape. If I want to draw a design, I have a shape in mind I then try to draw by editing the points as I see them, with instant visual feedback. I don’t want to code in points and have to modify coordinates.
It’s like asking why people use a parametric CAD suite like NX if they could just use OpenSCAD. If you want to model something, seeing it and editing it in the 3D view can be much nicer than editing code.
It seems to me the Caterpillar does the same but with better offroad capabilities.