The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.
Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.
SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.
I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.
You might look into https://graphite.rs/ . MS Paint is about my digital art interface complexity limit, but I do read Graphite's blog posts and their app sounds really attractive for more serious artists
I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.
SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure losing out on various SVG/XML tools would be worth the gains promised by a proprietary format.
I'm very ignorant in these areas, but if you don't mind me asking - how would using a proprietary format solve issues for Inkscape, or an imagined alternative to Inkscape?
Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?
How is clipping different in Affinity and in Inkskape? Having used only Inkscape and not Affinity, I don't find the workflow Inkskape is using problematic.
Are you creatively crippled by not being able to create multiple outlines on a single shape on a file format that can be viewed in almost any device from here to eternity at no cost? Cause you know Michelangelo didn't use procreate in a iPad...do you?
And the cavemen drawing on walls before Michelangelo didn't have paintbrushes, complex pigments and cathedrals to paint on? Heaven forbid we make better tools.
Considering those operations are available in other vector art tools that aren't constrained by directly using SVG as the fundamental editing format it seems like a reasonable complaint.
This is my complaint about the current state of developer tools. You can buy beautiful tools to make a beautiful chest of drawers or a chair. We are, or at least were, trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with finger paints.
Maybe if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful and sensible tools it would be easier for us to write beautiful or sensible applications. Maybe there would be fewer dancing bears.
Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.
Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.
Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.
EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.
Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]
Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.
1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.
Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:
cd <Inkscape directory>
set GDK_SCALE=2
start inkscape.exe
And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.
On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.
I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.
For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.
Came here to say the same. The app is very useful for me (pen plotters etc) but it’s awful on my Mac. Barely useable despite being required for some of my workflows.
Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.
It can be a bit fussy, but works well --- unfortunately, there hasn't really been a vector drawing program focused specifically on stylus use since Futurewave Smartsketch (which became Flash by way of Futuresplash Animator).
Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient
What about line style etc?
Is is possible to define the style of line you want and then create lines of that style.
Presently one workflow to work around it is to consider a small area of the canvas as a palette area and create lines/objects in them and apply the desires styles on them. Then duplicate these palette objects into your main drawing.
Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players.
And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.
If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.
The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
Care to elaborate? I'm curious.
From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.
Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.
SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.
I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.
You might look into https://graphite.rs/ . MS Paint is about my digital art interface complexity limit, but I do read Graphite's blog posts and their app sounds really attractive for more serious artists
In what ways are they different from Inkscape? (My knowledge of Vector Editors is quite limited)
> proprietary format
I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.
SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure losing out on various SVG/XML tools would be worth the gains promised by a proprietary format.
I'm very ignorant in these areas, but if you don't mind me asking - how would using a proprietary format solve issues for Inkscape, or an imagined alternative to Inkscape?
Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?
Illustrator uses its own proprietary .ai format (which Inkscape can load IIRC)
How is clipping different in Affinity and in Inkskape? Having used only Inkscape and not Affinity, I don't find the workflow Inkskape is using problematic.
There is Cenon:
https://cenon.info/
which runs well in Mac OS and Linux and for the basics has the basic vector editing capabilities which folks would expect.
That's interesting but what can it do better than Inkscape?
Use Krita for art.
Krita is not for vector art.
Are you creatively crippled by not being able to create multiple outlines on a single shape on a file format that can be viewed in almost any device from here to eternity at no cost? Cause you know Michelangelo didn't use procreate in a iPad...do you?
And the cavemen drawing on walls before Michelangelo didn't have paintbrushes, complex pigments and cathedrals to paint on? Heaven forbid we make better tools.
Considering those operations are available in other vector art tools that aren't constrained by directly using SVG as the fundamental editing format it seems like a reasonable complaint.
This is my complaint about the current state of developer tools. You can buy beautiful tools to make a beautiful chest of drawers or a chair. We are, or at least were, trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with finger paints.
Maybe if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful and sensible tools it would be easier for us to write beautiful or sensible applications. Maybe there would be fewer dancing bears.
Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...
The one new feature in 1.4 that I appreciated the most is the ability to disable anti-aliasing when exporting from the command line:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.
They’ve historically been quite open about needing help on the macOS front. For example, https://inkscape.org/news/2021/06/22/seeking-macos-dev-contr...
Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.
Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.
EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.
Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]
Can't say about Windows but on Linux - it works flawlessly since ages.
Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.
Illustrator is on Linux too? Could this low frame rate be related to missing drivers? Very less likely though.
I think Inkspace probably should have its own UI kit rendered directly on GPU. That's lot of work however.
It's laggy on windows. On linux it works great.
Never had issues on Linux...
1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.
Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:
cd <Inkscape directory>
set GDK_SCALE=2
start inkscape.exe
And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.
On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.
$ nix-shell -p inkscape
[nix-shell:~]$ inkscape --version Inkscape 1.3.2 (091e20ef0f, 2023-11-25)
[nix-shell:~]$ nixos-version 24.05.3787.a781ff33ae25 (Uakari)
Seems flawless for me. simple example I made: https://imgur.com/a/wi0kXbm
I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.
For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.
Came here to say the same. The app is very useful for me (pen plotters etc) but it’s awful on my Mac. Barely useable despite being required for some of my workflows.
It can open Affinity Designer files!? That’s something of a buried lede.
That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.
Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.
We really need a vector editor that has some of the features of Flash's UI. I haven't seen them in other programs.
They were called Fireworks and Freehand. Sadly, they didn't survive Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.
Serif's Affinity Designer was consciously modeled on Freehand, and Quasado became GraviT which likewise was inspired by Freehand.
Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash:
https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
I've just bought a Surface Pro tablet. Does Inkscape interface work well in a tablet or with a pen?
It can be a bit fussy, but works well --- unfortunately, there hasn't really been a vector drawing program focused specifically on stylus use since Futurewave Smartsketch (which became Flash by way of Futuresplash Animator).
As noted elsethread:
Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
If you're willing to consider a commercial option, Serif's Affinity Designer may suit.
Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient
Have they added any method of setting a tool style before drawing, rather than adjusting style after drawing?
It's always fun to set up your font, then write some text and realize it's in the wrong font and all your work was lost
I just installed 1.4 to check and it now appears to keep the font you've chosen.
that's great, thank you for checking!
What about line style etc? Is is possible to define the style of line you want and then create lines of that style.
Presently one workflow to work around it is to consider a small area of the canvas as a palette area and create lines/objects in them and apply the desires styles on them. Then duplicate these palette objects into your main drawing.
It would be nice if Inkscape supported SVG P/S. We need that for BIMI, and now have to pay someone who has access to Adobe.
For anyone in a similar boat, I just heard of someone using Adobe Illustrator's 7-day trial to generate their BIMI logo file.
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-996-notes.pdf (page 18) https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/996
Thanks, I'll give it a shot.
Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players. And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.
If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.