Inkscape is a great piece of design software. I've been using it for a good 8 years now to design websites, complex application interfaces, prototype many projects and everything in between.
The application has been designed with care and it shows. There is a sense of respect towards the user and you can really enjoy using it for long periods of time. It just fades away and lets you get to work. No fuss.
The interface and workflows are simple, yet extremely powerful if you spend some time understanding the tool. I have used Inkscape exclusively to do all my interface design work during my career.
After moving to OSX, I was put off by the lack of native support. So I tried moving to Sketch and Illustrator. I found Illustrator to be overly complicated and plain bloated. I've always had a distaste for Adobe software and Illustrator maintains that negative image for me.
Sketch on the other hand was unstable when I tried it. It had some serious bugs that made it unusable.
I went back to Inkscape and am now used to the GTK quirks & the lack of Retina support. The software itself remains my favorite tool. And I'm excited to see this major update to Inkscape.
Wow! It's works pretty well! I could never get Inkscape working on OS X before. There is still the big startup time but it's definitely better than using xquartz.
FWIW - the long startup time is just the first time you launch the application, I think it's doing something with fonts, after that it launches pretty quickly.
> I am not sure posting it on HN is the best way to not share the link though.
I simply don't want the link itself to appear elsewhere, I don't care if the whole HN crowd downloads it and send the link privately to their coworkers or whatever.
We're on a 100Mbps link so bandwidth should not be an issue if people are not selfish dicks.
I too am a long timer user and fan of Inkscape .. I'd love to know more about your flow/process of using it to design websites .. got an inclination to share the details?
I think a lot of the power of Inkscape comes from harnessing the abstractions of SVG. I've used it in the past as a container for GUI elements, and as long as you name things properly and maintain a good order of abstraction, using Inkscape to create SVG that can be parsed directly into working code is a thing of joy to behold.
Agreed, I'm in love with Inkscape's support for SVG. Like some of the other posters here, I am fed up with Adobe and it's bloated software. In Adobe's defense, this is likely due to all of the backwards compatibility they need to do.
However, when it comes to using SVGs on the web, Inkscape is clearly the king. Illustrator has a bunch of nice and fancy filters and such, but you try exporting as an SVG for web and you will find a great deal of your design has been lost due to non-svg-compatabile "frills" Illustrator adds.
Not at the moment - but I am preparing something for release shortly, and it'll be mostly focused around the MOAI framework. If you want to tune in to the forums at http://getmoai.com, that'll be where I launch first .. I'm targetting specifically the Hanappe framework for MOAI, if that will give you some clues ..
FWIW, I use Sketch daily and it has been a lifesaver after I abandoned Photoshop. Give it a second try! (This is v3, to be fair -- I believe earlier versions had new-adopter quirks.)
I've also recently started using Sketch as an Illustrator replacement (for basic icon/design work, I'm not a professional graphic designer). I've really enjoyed using it so far.
I'm much quicker with Inkscape than with Illustrator. I know Illustrator is much more powerful, but Inkscape just feels more productive to me.
Example: last week I had to open a bunch of EPS files in Illustrator and extract shapes to make new images. I had to realign shapes all the time, and had to set the "Relative to" field ALL THE DAMN TIME. While in Inksapce it remembers my previous choice.
I'm also a long time Inkscape user and it suits my need perfectly. However, I'd rather be able to edit the nodes of an image to clip it, as in Corel Draw, instead of having to commit to a shape, combine, and set the clip onto the image. But that's a minor problem.
Another reason why Inkscape rocks where other vector editors don't fare as well is in their understanding of Bezier curves. It's right on, just like in Corel Draw. One example of a program that does not get Bezier curves right is Adobe Illustrator. It's impossible, or very very hard, to draw a rectangle, make the top two nodes cusp, and curve only the top side. I remember reading in forums where people were trying to do that and long time users were admitting that it's complicated. However, in truth there's nothing complicated about it, as Inkscape demonstrates very well.
Fine control over nodes is the reason you want Inkscape. Illustrator gets on my nerves because it's so roundabout in this regard.
The notable thing here is that it has a whole new cairo-based renderer. Great job inkscape team! My go-to tool for svg editing once things get complicated.
IMHO, using Xquartz doesn’t allow for a good user experience. So I have installed iDraw instead. I haven’t used it that much yet but it seems nice. Not open source though.
It is not the developer's fault. The problem is that there is no up to date builds with up to date dependencies. Maybe msys2 provides an answer. Currently is in pre version.
Yes, 0.91pre4 r13712 from Debian Experimental repository installed on Sid. Interface rendering significantly faster than stable version (e.g. rotating a spiral with blur).
Inkscape is amazing. One of the only pieces of "big" software that I use without first fiddling around in the settings and changing a bunch of things. It just feels right to use.
It has come a long way, I remember when I first tried Inkscape several years ago and it was constantly crashing or freezing on Windows, but now - no problems at all, the UI is great and it has all the features you need for vector graphics.
A friend of mine quite involved in the Inkscape community told me to reply this to you: source package is up, packagers haven't still compiled for the various systems (the official release annoucement will be made after that, in short time).
I am graphic designer, Inkscape made me realize that Free software could be also for designers. Now I work exclusively with F/loss on linux. I use Inkscape every day and I am really happy to see this release.
Excellent stuff! Inkscape really is a superb bit of software.
I still recall the first time I tried the included tutorials and realised that the tutorials themselves were just SVG docs. So it had things like, "Let's explore the handles of an ellipse. Select this one", and the shape is right there in the tutorial. Brilliant idea!
Just loaded up a 17MB OpenStreetMap svg file (map of Bath, UK) which was unworkable on my Mac under 0.48. 0.91 is fast. Really fast. I'm sold. Well done.
I'm not a designer but I do occasionally whip up my own images if the task is simple enough. One thing I've always wanted in a drawing program is the ability to create shapes by typing in dimensions. e.g. Dragging out a a rectangle to be exactly NxM units is so tedious and it comes up all the time. Does Inkscape or any other drawing program support anything like that?
Yes, you can have full control over SVG element dimensions in InkScape through input boxes as well as dragging by mouse. You can also use a snapping grid to define all your elements in relation to the grid, or enable many other types of snapping and automatic aligning.
Sure, Inkscape does that. It's a vector library, but if you create a rectangle, the coordinates and dimensions are available for editing. Type in "N" and "M" and hit enter, and it updates, which makes sense, given that those values are linked to the underlying SVG.
Yes. The shapes are xml and you can control them precisely. You can even control them with javascript should you want to embed them in a web page and, say, animate them or scale them.
Time is pretty irrelevant for versioning, unless you have paying customers and you want to trick some into paying the full price for a minor upgrade (eg. Windows 98, FIFA 2015, etc.)
1.x tends to fulfil the original goals of the project. As long as there are some unfulfilled goals, it's still 0.x. 2.x, 3.x, etc. are breaking changes, often a rewrite.
One reason we're not at 1.0 yet is because the original 1.0 goal was to have complete SVG 1.1 support in, which will likely never happen. We changed the version numbering scheme to better reflect where we think we are.
The reason why we're still not there right now is because there are some essential things like canvas coordinates, fixed "flow text" support (so it works in browsers), etc that we need to rectify first before we're comfortable with 1.0.
As a long term user I'd agree to some extent, the 1.0 version feel has definitely been and gone - probably I'd say this is about a version 4, to my mind.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/InkscapeInvariants are the stated aims of the project and AFAICT they've not achieved the SVG spec compliance completely yet. Though I thought I recalled them aiming at the reduced SVG "basic" set (? if that's what it's called) and reaching it.
I've been a user since it forked from SodiPodi (and indeed was a SodiPodi user too).
I miss SodiPodi, with it being multiple-document single-toolbar'ed. Iirc this was the sole contention of the fork- Inkscape was born explicitly to have each document have it's own suite of controls.
No, it was born because of the structure of SodiPodi. Lauris was effectively the gatekeeper and others did not have commit access. He wasn't accepting patches he didn't want to, so a handful of our founders decided to fork and have a much more open approach. As it stands, if you have two patches accepted with the project (Inkscape) and want it, you can have commit access.
Totally agree. I'm a huge fan of Inkscape. When I moved to OSX I started using Sketch as my main design software, but I do often find myself frustrated wanting a feature that Inkscape had. Really pleased to see this update. Hoping for better native OSX support, rather than running it through X11.
The native OSX beta already works much better than the broken XQuartz thing(in the past you could not even copy paste real vectors, today it requires a special version of XQuartz and changing parameters and other nasty stuff) .
I've both installed and used Inkscape on OS X with no problems, via MacPorts. My sole gripe with it was that it didn't support my HiDPI/Retina MBP screen.
Is there an official location for this project, with source code etc.? Forgive me if I sound paranoid, but downloading a binary from a random Dropbox is a little weird.
It is VERY weird. However, that dropbox link is indeed on the launchpad page that robotfelix posted. If you trust the page, I suppose you can trust the dropbox link.
I wonder if there's any chance it could be made to work on Homebrew...?
I like Inkscape a lot, but there are still cases where it just doesn't work well. The import of postscript or PDF produces some strange results sometimes, especially with text. That is something the commercial alternatives still do quite a bit better.
The speed increase is nice, Inkscape could be painfully slow on complex drawings with lots of paths.
For me the PDF import and export already works well enough: it's been years since I printed a PDF form just to fill it, sign it and then scan it to email it back. I just open the PDF in Inkscape, fill it with the text tool, insert à JPG of my hand signature, save it, and send the resulting PDF back. The administrative efficiency I gained with this technique is gigantic, especially because I don't have to wait to have access to a printer and a scanner to do such things anymore.
When you want to edit the text a bit (so not just to fill forms, but actually edit a PDF/EPS, extract a figure from a paper and rework some text), in 0.48 imported text looked nice initially, but as soon as you start changing a single character the whole text block gets completely wrong (misaligned, writing new characters over the beginning of the text instead of appending...)
Inkscape is great. I've only recently started using it more heavily as a tool for building a board game with my wife. It gets the job done for me, and I don't have to unlearn anything, as I'm not coming from illustrator.
I'm very pleased to see it's under active development.
They didn't rewrite the whole software, that would take ages...
The migration from C to C++ was slowly progressing since Inkscape was forked from Sodipodi over 10 years ago, but there are still some C files remaining and SP* prefixes are used all over the place.
Besides, Sodipodi was already using simple GObject-based architecture.
You want a stable performant language OO language that uses the GUI toolkit on Linux, Windows and MacOS. Your team and existing project have a C background. What do you choose in 2012 and why?
There is already an SVG editor written in Java called Kiyut Sketsa, it is unusable due to the poor performance of the Batik rendering engine (also written in Java).
It makes sense to use high level languages to manipulate the document model or to implement widgets, but when it comes to the renderer you want to be as close to the metal as possible.
But, yeah, it's going to be easier. It's also an opportunity to consider another language that might improve productivity, reliability etc. in the future. Just wondering. Didn't mean to start a language war :-)
My only feature request is GUI-less builds, to match running it GUI-less. This would significantly cut down on dependencies and also reduce compile time.
I notice there was a discussion about this on inkspace-devel years ago, but it yielded no results from what I can tell.
I think my biggest problem with inkscape is the tearing of the screen when I move the canvas around and it redraws. something about it makes the entire thing seem unstable to me. I dislike Illustrator but I feel like it could handle a big file better than inkscape, if inkscape can't even draw the screen fast enough. How will it handle the memory of a three-hundred thousand node vector image. Somebody tell me what the heck is that tearing happening and why after 20 versions isn't it improving?
As long as I work on Windows, there is Xara thankfully. It's got quirks but has been good to me and my workflow. On Mac now thankfully is Affinity Designer. Not quite fully fleshed out but still excellent to have. Inkscape is a great utility program for me that has a lot of low level tweak settings and it's great it constantly gets better.
Inkscape is a vastly underrated app. It makes simple things possible and for complex things, it has a great Python-based plugin system. The API is quite easy to understand. You would be building scripts in no time to automate your art pipeline.
Best of all, it has great single-key keyboard shortcuts for higher productivity :)
Implementation-wise, the only place where real world units such as "mm", "cm" or "px" make sense are the "width" and "height" properties of the outermost <svg> element.
This is because everything inside SVG document lives in an imaginary infinite world where dimensions and distances are expressed in abstract "user units".
You use "viewBox" attribute on the outermost <svg> element to specify a rectangular fragment of that world for the purpose of rendering. You use "width" and "height" properties to specify the real-world size of that fragment.
Authoring tools might show you dimensions of SVG objects such as rectangles or paths in real-world units computed from "viewBox", "width" and "height" of the outermost SVG element, but under the hood the size of those objects should be stored in user units.
The issue is with translating "user units" to real world units. Up until now SVG is tricky as a CNC file format because of this little detail. For Inkscape you had to translate user units/px based on the assumption of 90dpi.
Not a big deal if you only use Inkscape. The real mess starts when going between different authoring apps. Then pretty soon a 100mm line in Inkscape turns into something longer or shorter. This is when you revert back to DXF, the bastard of all file formats.
I don't see how the viewBox's real world units can solve this. I think the geometries need to actually use real world units (which the SVG standard supports).
I don't understand how DPI is relevant here, if an authoring tool takes into account DPI when translating user units to viewport units then it's a bug in the authoring tool rather than limitation of the SVG format.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but some tiny rounding errors might occur during conversion if there are many transforms involved between the user space and the viewport space, but this can be avoided if user space values are stored with high enough precision.
In order to convert user units to viewport (physical) units and vice versa you only need the current transformation matrix, viewBox rect and viewport size. I have created a demo which shows how I can determine the line length in physical units: http://jsfiddle.net/9n5hf2jw/1/
The way how real world units are interpreted inside the SVG document is so messed up that even the SVG spec itself discourages their use:
Defining the size of a document in mm and then using mm units for shapes within it is going to give counterintuitive results, since they'll be converted to user units to resolve against the view box. (https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/coords.html#Units)
Thanks for the jsfiddle. I think I understand what you mean. Cross-referencing this with how the new Inkscape saves files actually makes sense. By using width/height and viewBox you can define how user/px units are converted to physical units.
When I setup up Inkscape to use mm it does set with/height in mm and then the viewBox to the same dimensions (without units). This way it is implying the user/px units (e.g. all unitless dimensions in the file) are basically mm.
Previous versions of Inkscape would always safe in user/px units with an implied conversion of 90dpi, meaning a scaling factor of (25.4/90) to go from values in the file to mm. CorelDraw always uses 96dpi, Illustrator always 72dpi. I am not saying this makes sense. It's just how different authoring apps do it. If you want to use the file in a CNC machine you have to make sense of what the app meant when it uses unitless dimensions. When a file was edited with two different apps it very often is not possible to make a smart guess by some basic heuristics.
BTW: the CNC app I am working on is LasaurApp, part of an open source laser cutter called Lasersaur - http://lasersaur.com
I so wish they would have picked Qt of GTK back in the beginning. That said: I love the tool, use it all over the place, one of the apps i always install.
Has support for embedded drawings in Word improved? I remember it didn't work or there were bugs..
Anyway inkscape is otherwise good- it passes my figure drawing test: draw a ruler with tick marks and numbers. Corel can do it. Vizio can do it. Xfig can do it. Not too many others can (try this with the draw tool built into open office and you'll see).
I love Inkscape, I still use it, even though the Mac version is abysmal. It's such a shame that it does not have any proper OSX developers as I think it can more than compete with professional vector software.
Inkscape is very easy to use. We have used it for creating brochures, posters,.. for our Free Software conference. What I like most about Inkscape is, it is easy to use, learn and do.
Inkscape is really great but what I really need are Photoshop and After Effects. What are the best Linux equivalents? And don't say GIMP the UI is too different.
I've used photoshop on a contracting (professionally) basis since I was 15 using version 4. I've used just about every version since, but kind of stopped since Adobe is moving to more of a service based model with the creative suite cloud crap.
I've also used gimp for approximately 8 years and it has made HUGE strides in the past few years. In fact, I've done a few professional, or semi-professional (ie: not paid) photo restoration jobs recently and I used gimp to do it. Not that surprisingly, people still absolutely loved the work I did restoring pictures of their loved ones or whatnot.
Photoshop still has nothing equivalent to the SIOX background removal tool as the guy who wrote his PHD thesis on it wrote a gimp plugin. If you've not seen it, it is kind of amazing: http://www.siox.org. See this video for an example using a much much older version of gimp: http://www.siox.org/videos/siox-in-gimp.mpg
Maybe it's because I'm a software developer myself but I never had a problem with GIMPs UI. I never had a problem with Blenders UI either (only when they changed some things and I couldn't find them anymore because they are now somewhere else). In fact back in 2001 when I once tried Photoshop I found GIMP quicker to grasp than Photoshop (maybe because it has less features and thus one can get an overview of all the functions quicker).
Having used both, I think that gimp is actually much easier than Photoshop. To prevent him from sending me 5Mb pictures over email, I showed my father how to shrink the size of pictures using both gimp and photoshop. Then I asked which he wanted to use and he went with gimp, which surprised me. But using it more, the menus do make a lot more sense in gimp than they do in photoshop.
Think about a new graphics design person coming to photoshop. It is very much a learning curve, a higher one than gimp.
I don't mind the GIMP's UI so much. What really bothers me are the lack of non-destructive layer effects and other niceties that make its workflow so much inferior to Photoshop's.
you can still buy CS6 last I looked but you better do it pretty soon, as that might not last. I'd also sign up for a communicyt college course for a great discount again if you can. This whole renting requirement may subside. Adobe is going to be suffering some from people who don't want to rent and will stick to cs6 for so long that they will try something new to convince them. Like way cheaper prices or go back to an licensed / ownership model. CS6 still does everything CC does for 99% of people, but Adobe will start to feel the pinch as every year passes. A lot of people hate renting software. Rent to own is ok, but just to rent, that's a bunch of BS for the amount charged in my view.
It seems to be getting harder to run the older versions of Photoshop on newer versions of OSX. Photoshop didn't like the migration from my MacBook to a MacBook Pro. I tried to reinstall from the disc for CS3, but I can't get the installer to run. I'd don't feel like renting it, so starting to look for new options.
if you can stomach it, Blender can do some great things after effects can do. Photoshop there's no way to know the best replacement without knowing what you use photoshop for primarily. Becuae there are a lot of things can can do better than photoshop type features, but none work exactly the same. If you need the majority of what photoshop does, buy it.
The interface and workflows are simple, yet extremely powerful if you spend some time understanding the tool. I have used Inkscape exclusively to do all my interface design work during my career.
After moving to OSX, I was put off by the lack of native support. So I tried moving to Sketch and Illustrator. I found Illustrator to be overly complicated and plain bloated. I've always had a distaste for Adobe software and Illustrator maintains that negative image for me. Sketch on the other hand was unstable when I tried it. It had some serious bugs that made it unusable.
I went back to Inkscape and am now used to the GTK quirks & the lack of Retina support. The software itself remains my favorite tool. And I'm excited to see this major update to Inkscape.