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Inkscape 1.2 released

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Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#191

Post by Beltiras »

simonh wrote: post #144
progman32 wrote: post #115

Amazing, 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…

IMO it's different for various types of softwares. I prefer my games closed-source and untamperable (by me). I prefer my operating systems open and scrutinized (althou I do have a gaming PC at home with Win10, I guess it's derivative of the closed-for-games-open-for-work thing). I can't work with the web systems I do without having access to the source. I don't care really what other people really do but I can't understand how the superior tech hasn't won out in the OS wars. I think Unix eventually will be the de-facto OS but it might take decades or centuries.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#192

Post by jjoonathan »

Lio wrote: post #160
warning26 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word 97 was amazing and leagues beyond LibreOffice, IMO. The best part is that the entire installed size of word 97 is like 50mb!

This is a really interesting opinion. Would you mind elaborating? I don’t really use either Word or LibreOffice much as my needs are really simple, (I mostly get away with just plaintext tools). What is it that separates these two for you? Is it some specific missing features you rely on or something to do with UX?

I periodically check on LibreOffice to see if it's usable and typically I don't last more than a minute or two without hitting a major show-stopper. Last time I tried LibreOffice Writer, the text didn't render until after I stopped typing. The time before that, LibreOffice Calc took 3 seconds to begin editing any cell.

It's a common problem with Open Source: who does the slog work of testing, tracking down, and fixing the simple bugs and perf issues? Evidently, LibreOffice doesn't have enough maintainer cycles to have good coverage of common setups. It's unfortunate and as a developer I feel for them, but as a user it makes paying Microsoft an easy choice.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#193

Post by jjoonathan »

easrng wrote: post #73
redox99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that this thing about moving to the browser is currently relevant outside of the drawing software like figma and equivalents. I don't see NLE, 3D suites, DAWs and many more moving anytime soon to the browser. Maybe photo editors like photoshop? But even that isn't there yet. And to be honest the only FOSS content creation software that actually competes at the professional level (i.e not just simple edi…

I would still use inkscape, it's way faster and lighter and though it crashes sometimes, it doesn't corrupt files like Illustrator. It also has (IMO) a simpler interface that's somewhat more discoverable than Illustrator but not by much.

> it's way faster

Does Inkscape have GPU rendering yet or does it still slog down on anything more complicated than a minimalist icon?

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#194

Post by s1291 »

ant6n wrote: post #155
l8rlump wrote: post #154

This is the obligatory post suggesting Affinity Designer. It also appears they're running a 50% off sale: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ (No affiliation. I just notice it comes up in a lot of conversations here about Inkscape)

Why should one use this over Inkscape?

Here is a decent video comparing both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2XfFvW4yII

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#195

Post by Gigachad »

ur-whale wrote: post #113
Gigachad wrote: post #10

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…

> FOSS just has no answer for this market And thank god for that. Users literally hate the Adobe model, but aren't given a choice. Please remember what the 'F' in FOSS stands for. Hint: it's not about money.

Users are given a choice. There are mountains of alternatives to adobe products. But they keep paying for the adobe one because it’s the best. And it’s the best because people keep paying their monthly subscriptions to fund it.

They might complain but at the end of the day they are very happy to pay adobe for the best in class tools.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#196

Post by riidom »

cycomanic wrote: post #135
jeppester wrote: post #125

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…

Usually I make the final document in scribus, once text blocks with more than one line are involved. Similar to how AI users reach out for ID when it gets text-heavy, I guess.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#197

Post by m-p-3 »

usr1106 wrote: post #129
m-p-3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gsheets offers some formulas I found quite useful and would be a pain to replicate in Excel.

Excel formulas have a horrible 1970:ish syntax. Reminds me of BASIC programming. But typically I get the job done, sometimes after several awkward intermediate steps. I wasn't aware that Google has a different one. I have never used more than simple sums and differences in Google sheets. Can you give an example where Google offers better, incompatible functionality?

For example, QUERY [1], SPLIT [2] and ARRAYFORMULA [3] are the ones that comes to mind. To be fair MS Excel can do arrayformulas, but I prefer GSheet's syntax. Last time I tried Excel, TRANSPOSE wasn't a thing it but it seems to be there now.

[1]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343

[2]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3094136

[3]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#198

Post by frameset »

kilburn wrote: post #120
foxes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a style? Are you trying to create a poster or do some graphic design? Some weird xml style sheet thing? Yes it’s not for that, but then also doing that in libre office or word also sounds horrible and unmaintainable.

To define a custom style in a word processing context means to define "a group of settings that I can apply at will to parts of the text". That is, I should be able to define a "Code block" style that should appear in the same dropdown where google docs lets you select heading levels. When I select that "Code block" style, the app should format the selected bit of text according to the syte's definition. For instance…

To add on to your well laid out points, many companies have "house styles" embedded into their templates that allow a consistent look and feel. GDocs lack of support for these makes it a non-starter.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#199

Post by sfriedr »

dash2 wrote: post #183
gopiandcode wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, exactly. It's absolutely insane we've now reached for a point where when people see a standalone, working, polished piece of software that respects your freedom, they somehow feel that it is "inferior" because it doesn't take away your rights. I, for one, am glad that Free/Libre software like inkscape continues to be heading strong, and find that it far outpaces any of the proprietary malware SAAS applications o…

It's not insane. People want to know whether free software package X is a good alternative to the proprietary version. If it isn't, the fact that it's "good enough on its merits" is irrelevant. If they don't think proprietary software is intrinsically evil, then the free/proprietary distinction is irrelevant to them too. In what way do you find Inkscape to outpace e.g. Figma? That would be interesting to hear.

The free/proprietary distinction is only irrelevant for small-ish projects, on the order of a few months, where "good" is a one-dimensional measure in terms of features the application has: The risk of the software maintaining company being bankrupt in this timespan is low. A typical mid-level employee at a company might be very happy with such tools, especially because they are usually new & shiny too.

Now imagine you are part of a team that wants to solve BIG problem, over a LONG timescale. Suddenly the picture becomes more nuanced as software features aren't the only thing that matters anymore. Would you really want to make the success of your project dependent on a third-party software company whose objectives aren't aligned with yours and that can take the tools you use away from you on a whim? FOSS makes a very strong point there. The interface may not make you cry and melt your eyes with shiny buttons, but you can be sure that years down the road the software will still be there and you can read your old files no matter what, as the file formats are open. You can depend on the software, and,.more importantly, you can assess and proactively mitigate the failure modes in advance! (E.g. the tex files from the 90s that you can find on some researchers website can still be compiled today; I imagine the entire research community would be significantly hindered if they would have to deal with the zoo of formats of proprietary software, rtf, doc, docx etc. In this sense FOSS can even act as the catalyst for establishing a standard, as is the case for tex files in domains of science.)

Though I agree that for image editing specifically, typically projects are probably not longer than you few months, so in this you case I imagine you could go without issues with the flow of new and proprietary software.

Re: Inkscape 1.2 released

#200

Post by jillesvangurp »

flobosg wrote: post #2

> Inkscape documents can now hold multiple pages, which are managed by the new Page tool Finally!

I never got the need for pages in a vector graphics tool. Why do vector images need a page? Do people print them?

The whole point for me is that the vector image scales. Mostly there is no pre-defined size. So the page dimensions are meaningless. Why would you want multiple of those?

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