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…
Inkscape 1.2 released
141–150 of 233 posts
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#142When 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.
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
LibreOffice is great, but it's not comparable to commercial desktop word processors. However, it's far, far better than any browser-based one I've used.
Depends on what you want to do... I find LibreOffice fine because if I want to create documents that are actually complex I'm going to reach for InDesign or LaTeX. I don't find something like Microsoft Word really much better for anything I'd want to do with it than LibreOffice.
If I just want to make notes, I'll use Org or Markdown in plain text. These can also be converted to HTML for web.
If I want to print something with lots of text, nothing beats LaTeX.
If I am making something design intensive, I'll use Scribus or some other desktop publishing software.
I guess regular people think of word processors as the Swiss army knife here: does everything, not particularly well, but worth only having to learn one software?
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#144Amazing, 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 rent…
Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial.
So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it. I don’t see how that’s anyone else’s business.
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#145Amazing, 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 rent…
All very good points and I don’t disagree with you. For me the issue is that FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources needed to solve many problems. Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial. So I ap…
If you're looking for FOSS DTP, try Scribus.
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#146Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#147I'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...
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#148Amazing, 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 rent…
All very good points and I don’t disagree with you. For me the issue is that FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources needed to solve many problems. Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial. So I ap…
FOSS isn't about it being free though. You've already stated the issue:
> FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources
That doesn't mean FOSS is has as a moral to not charge for software.
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#149Amazing, 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 rent…
I would add than in my opinion, Inkscape specifically has a remarkably easy learning curve and great documentation. So little learning allowed me to accomplish so much.
Admittedly, I don't use polar arrangements.
Re: Inkscape 1.2 released
#150Great 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…
Some people speculate whether the rise of SaaS is a response to FOSS, which made it difficult to monetise software development. I’ve certainly begun to question my previous automatic assumption that FOSS is a good thing in the long term. The good news for FOSS is that hosting costs just keep getting cheaper, so providing free SaaS is increasingly feasible. There’s also the “third way” of FOSS with a hosted option ava…
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 it a reasonable idea. What would be the point, other than massively increasing complexity and points of failure in terms of reliability and security?