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Inkscape 1.2 released

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Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#161

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…

> For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping, what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping? > filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows), I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago. > The text edit…

> what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping?

Luckily it appears that it has actually been implemented in this new version. It's the feature called "Alignment and Distribution snapping".

> I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago.

While that's nice and all, I think it should be built-in functionality, with the same level of stability and user friendliness as the rest of the application.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#162

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…

I really think that the future is Local-First software and FOSS can greatly benefit from the new paradigm [1]. With Local-First software the cloud is just the natural extension for backup and collaboration (real-time or offline) not the sole repository for the data. [1]Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Once you have your centralized cloud service integrated, you have ongoing support costs so you must charge subscription instead of letting your users fully own the software. The only acceptable paradigm in my view is local-first with P2P collaboration options.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles… As a reasonably serious user of Office 365 and someone who's desperately wanted to like LibreOffice, I'm not sure what you could mean by "properly use styles". I'm guessing this is specifically a cri…

Libre office is pretty much the only game in town on Linux. Well excepting the web based office suites. I really like it, especially for csv files which it works great for.

I tried Gnumeric for a bit. When sorting, the formats stay in the cells they were, but the content moves.

That said, AbiWord is a serious lightweight contender to Writer.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#164
post #132

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…

> The design space has been very rapidly moving towards online I think the opposite will eventually be true, a browser is no space for complex documents. > 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. O365 has worked like this for years and…

> a browser is no space for complex documents.

Why not? What UX paradigms can you do in a desktop that can't be done in a browser?

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#165

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…

Do you ever think a project like Blender will end up like this. I don't think there is anything remotely similar to it online and I doubt there ever will be.

I think it will when the web becomes powerful and efficient enough to run such a tool in the browser. I don't think its there yet but I'd expect it will be eventually.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's single threaded going through multiple slow compatibility APIs.

Sort of, but it's not the whole story. They do use cairo for rendering to a CGContext via cairo_quartz_surface_t which has traditionally not been all that great on macOS. Additionally they're dealing with colorspace transforms on more recent macOS along with some bugs in macOS that were causing non-native applications to do considerable damage/redraws. If/when Inkscape moves to GTK 4, a lot of this will just go away.…

Isn't openGL deprecated in favour of Metal on macos? I assume the transition to Metal might not be too big though?

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of, but it's not the whole story. They do use cairo for rendering to a CGContext via cairo_quartz_surface_t which has traditionally not been all that great on macOS. Additionally they're dealing with colorspace transforms on more recent macOS along with some bugs in macOS that were causing non-native applications to do considerable damage/redraws. If/when Inkscape moves to GTK 4, a lot of this will just go away.…

But GTK4 text rendering is blurry

All text rendering on recent macos versions is blurry in the same way as GTK4.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is an example of that for the simple reason that it is a CMS, which by its very nature implies it works in a server-client fashion. Of course Wordpress can be run as SaaS or self-hosted–it is software that needs to be hosted to serve its purpose. On the other hand, editing vector graphics has no intrinsic need to be hosted. Just because a cloud-based FOSS desktop in the future could be imagined doesn't make…

Lots of points, but the most obvious one is with SaaS you can deploy a single version of software, which makes it orders off magnitude less difficult to maintain.

Until you have users that want a feature in an older version that's not in a newer one. Oh, and companies are always saying "nobody uses feature X, it was hard to maintain so we got rid of it" which is infuriating if you're a user of feature X.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#169
post #69

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.

It's only weird if you learn Illustrator first. For me it was extremely intuitive, and at this point the shortcuts are muscle memory. I taught it to 10 year olds for 3 years.

But... you want people to use the software you make as a developer, I assume? In the same way that Blender provides an input mode for Maya users, Inkscape could provide input modes for Illustrator users.

FOSS is supposed to serve people, if your system can easily accommodate that, I see absolutely no reason not to other than some ideological desire to be different.

If someone that has been using Illustrator for years tries Inkscape and goes "Why the hell would it work like that, that's insane", then gives up, that doesn't serve that user nor FOSS, and they go back to paying Adobe.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But GTK4 text rendering is blurry

All text rendering on recent macos versions is blurry in the same way as GTK4.

two wrongs don't make a right. I'm pretty sure google chrome or firefox rendering are unaffected.
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