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Inkscape 1.1

inkscape.org

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Re: Inkscape 1.1

#81

This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.

I am an artist. Illustrator is my main tool, and has been for about twenty years now. And I've never felt much desire to switch when I look at Inkscape's features. Apparently it still doesn't do CMYK, never mind deal with spot inks: https://inkscape.org/learn/faq/#how-create-graphics-cmyk-col... - that was a deal-killer the last time I looked at it, probably something like a decade ago, and it's still a deal-killer f…

Another barrier is the stark difference in UX paradigms.

Illustrator and Inkscape have very different paradigms. Inkscape draws from the Corel Draw camp, and the barrier to use for anyone skilled in one or the other goes way back.

I have moderate skill using Illustrator and am adept at Inkscape, and that goes right back to Corel being totally capable enough and cheap, and because I basically had licenses bought for me, Corel has always been free.

As Inkscape really began to be robust, I found it simple to step off the Corel train, rarely missing a beat.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say that as someone who is a very occasional user of vector drawing tools (and mainly uses them for prepping SVG for web) I’m sufficiently impressed by the latest version of Affinity Designer as an Illustrator replacement. I was able to open an .ai file, modify it, and export an .svg which was a perfect drop-in replacement for an .svg previously exported by Illustrator. It’s still too expensive for me at full…

I bought all of their products the minute I found out they were still pursuing that oh so old fashioned idea of allowing you to OWN the software you buy from them.

same reason I just bought my 8th(?) copy of photoimpact first one around 2005(?). (two of those for other people's machines so they can use it without worrying about license failures or/and recurring billing)

I don't mind paying for a new license for each new box I want to use it on - because it still works on my xp machine, and each other one - with or without internet connectivity - no license check needed- it just works.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#83
post #24

I used Inkscape last week to convert an SVG vector image to EPS, for insertion into a PDF. The conversion was not perfect. I am using FPDF with an EPS add-on, and after study of the PHP source, I was able to open the EPS with a text editor and reformat it so that it would successfully import. Unfortunately, it loaded upside down, so I was forced to flip and save again in inkscape, then repeat the formatting. This odd…

I must say that as someone who is a very occasional user of vector drawing tools (and mainly uses them for prepping SVG for web) I’m sufficiently impressed by the latest version of Affinity Designer as an Illustrator replacement. I was able to open an .ai file, modify it, and export an .svg which was a perfect drop-in replacement for an .svg previously exported by Illustrator. It’s still too expensive for me at full…

Not commenting on Affinity's quality, but being closed-sourced and Linux support will (and probably should) turn off a lot of the HN community.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#84

This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.

I've found that Inkscape, GIMP, and Krita pretty much fill all my graphics-creation needs, and have never felt the need to use a commercial application instead. If you have a specific need that you can't figure out how to achieve in Inkscape, then asking how to do that specific thing would be much more productive.

Slap in Hugin and Darktable (or Rawtherapee) for photography and I would say I've not had issues ditching Adobe after CS6 and switching to Linux.

(With a massive exception for no color management in Wayland)

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#85
post #80

This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.

It's shot on 4k-8k resolutions even with the most basic vector documents.

Maybe on Mac. Works great on Linux at 4k+ with an nvidia.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#86
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far away from the "Blender of vector graphics" status, and I think that only clunky UI is stopping it to become that.

Color management i.e. CMYK and spots weren't working last time I checked. You can use Scribus to convert colors based on a profile, but color should be handled from the beginning. If its color management was good and it imports from/exports to pdf well, I wouldn't need Illustrator anymore. I honestly hate illustrator, would be glad to switch, but I'm more likely to move to Affinity than to Inkscape.

I use Krita if I need CMYK, but I don't do much print work anymore. (Both work great on Linux.)

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#87
post #59

In the old times I have used Inkscape from curiosity and to free my self from Adobe. After initial interface hick-ups I found it very useful for shape blocking. Nowadays Affinity Designer is 90 percent of my graphic design and part time UI workflow. The rest is in Figma. I hope new version of Inkscape is more responsive under Mac Os, the quartz version was frustrating to work with.

> I hope new version of Inkscape is more responsive under Mac Os It's not. Though you can tell macOS to launch it in low resolution mode and that does help a lot.

I’m curious as to if other commenters share the pet peeve of, particularly design software that wouldn’t present itself properly in Retina?

For a while Unity didn’t support it and it was definitely one of ‘those things’ about using it I hated until they perfected it. (There was a limited beta window for it as I believe an ‘experimental’ option?)

Design software should definitely ideally match the DPI it’s supposed to be presented in. That’s almost a make or break for myself.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#88

This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.

I've found that Inkscape, GIMP, and Krita pretty much fill all my graphics-creation needs, and have never felt the need to use a commercial application instead. If you have a specific need that you can't figure out how to achieve in Inkscape, then asking how to do that specific thing would be much more productive.

What OS do you use?

As an iOS dev for a living and a mainly MacOS user I have unfortunately found the UI/UX experience of Inkscape and GIMP (especially) to be kinda rough to use, I feel like maybe it’s better on Linux?

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#89
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the .dmg from their site. No idea why your defaults would be different from mine. Why is it even a "feature" in the first place? It's not the kind of thing I'd expect to even have to worry about whether it defaulted to on or off.

Probably for copyright and license. It's a common feature, MS Office documents include even more metadata, such as how many times the file has been saved.

Sorry I thought you were worrying about your PII and the filepath as two different things.

Re: Inkscape 1.1

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope new version of Inkscape is more responsive under Mac Os It's not. Though you can tell macOS to launch it in low resolution mode and that does help a lot.

I’m curious as to if other commenters share the pet peeve of, particularly design software that wouldn’t present itself properly in Retina? For a while Unity didn’t support it and it was definitely one of ‘those things’ about using it I hated until they perfected it. (There was a limited beta window for it as I believe an ‘experimental’ option?) Design software should definitely ideally match the DPI it’s supposed to…

I think in this case the problem is that Inkscape's rendering pipeline is just extremely computational inefficient on macOS. It's not that things don't show properly, it just takes too long to draw all the pixels. MS Excel for Mac actually has the same problem if you fullscreen a spreadsheet on a 5k external display unless you put the display in low res scaling mode.

If I remember correctly, which I probably don't, it's partly also because the macOS display process involves painting something like 2-4x as many pixels as the screen actually has and then downscaling the result because that looks prettier than just drawing the exact pixels directly. But I'm probably misremembering that part.

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