Calligraphy pen/tool is still unusable, messy and less responsive (lower resolution, more angular, etc), much worse than in 0.92, and it's been this way ever since 1.0. It also now requires windows ink to be on, and they removed devices panel so you can't even tell if your device is recognized properly. It's bad with a tablet, but it's still just as bad and much worse in comparison even with the mouse. It's kinda disappointing to see this bad of a regression to just linger there for years. Here's the issue for this problem on their gitlab https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/1473#note_...
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
There seems to be pervasive opinion among FOSS enthusiasts that the software being free and volunteer made is kind of get out of jail card for not only criticism, but often simply just feedback.
I deeply appreciate that FOSS exists. But - subjective feeling - in general it always had certain reputation for jankiness and user unfriendliness. Sniping down feedback "because the software is free" certainly contributes to that perception. If I have a choice between free, volunteer made software that's unreliable or doesn't even work for some of my use cases, and a commercial, but non-free product, I will be pragmatic about it and choose the latter.
Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.
It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.
I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)
CMYK support is currently in active development. Martin has been working working on it for about two years, and he regularly posts update videos about inkscape [0].
Some of the plugins for it are pretty interesting. We have a Brother embroidery machine in our work Makerspace, and it ends up there's an Inkscape plugin (called Inkstitch) to create command files for the machine. It's like working with a slicer for 3d printing, but more about changing thread than filament, plus how stitches should be oriented and such.
Yes! I use an Inkscape extension to send my own designs to a vinyl cutter that works perfectly well but has LONG since stopped being supported by its manufacturer or any other closed-source tools.
Ah, the tool I love and hate. Mostly love though. Let me tell you about the single thing I hate:
I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" button.
Literally everything else about Inkscape is amazing! Congrats to the team!
~~~
Maybe this is also the right time & place to plug my favourite SVG path editor? https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ - free as in both beer and freedom, a tool to craft minimalistic well-behaved SVG paths.
Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?
SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.
(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)
Part of the problem is that Inkscape is too good, and the file format it uses mostly conforms to standards, so I have the expectation that opening arbitrary SVGs would just work. With other programs that use proprietary formats, I wouldn't have tried to generate drawings at all. It's a bummer when I run into what seem to be corner cases of Inkscape's SVG handling, but fortunately the set of corner cases seem to be shrinking.
I too love the SVG Path Editor, used it many times to create SVGs that had "nice code". Nobody really appreciates it, but it just felt good.
Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.
But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)
There are options to simplify and optimize SVGs on 'Save as'. Apart from the Plain SVG, there is Optimised SVG that you might find useful since you're into editing manually.
inkscape has had a long and quiet ascent from quintessentially janky foss creative software to genuinely pleasant to use. i still wish it were a little easier to edit the individual portions of deeply nested clip/mask operations, but if you need to crank out some icons, you can use inkscape and not hate your life, which is something i'd have called someone insane for telling me a decade ago.
Pre-1.0, I remember hating and wrestling with UI. It was so jank.
1.0 and after, and it's been truly a dream. I now use it to make all my figures for my research publications and presentations. Inkscape has gone from compromise I begrudge to my tool of choice in relatively little time. This is a good reminder that I should probably send them a donation.
Calligraphy pen/tool is still unusable, messy and less responsive (lower resolution, more angular, etc), much worse than in 0.92, and it's been this way ever since 1.0. It also now requires windows ink to be on, and they removed devices panel so you can't even tell if your device is recognized properly. It's bad with a tablet, but it's still just as bad and much worse in comparison even with the mouse. It's kinda disappointing to see this bad of a regression to just linger there for years. Here's the issue for this problem on their gitlab https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/1473#note_...
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
Keep in mind that it's FREE and OPEN SOURCE software
Firstly developers and designers of OSS need honest feedback from users as well, not just commercial developers.
Secondly, how does being OSS justify significant regressions?
There seems to be pervasive opinion among FOSS enthusiasts that the software being free and volunteer made is kind of get out of jail card for not only criticism, but often simply just feedback.
I deeply appreciate that FOSS exists. But - subjective feeling - in general it always had certain reputation for jankiness and user unfriendliness. Sniping down feedback "because the software is free" certainly contributes to that perception. If I have a choice between free, volunteer made software that's unreliable or doesn't even work for some of my use cases, and a commercial, but non-free product, I will be pragmatic about it and choose the latter.
Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.
It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.
I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)
CMYK support is currently in active development. Martin has been working working on it for about two years, and he regularly posts update videos about inkscape [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiW1cCXOK3s
Some of the plugins for it are pretty interesting. We have a Brother embroidery machine in our work Makerspace, and it ends up there's an Inkscape plugin (called Inkstitch) to create command files for the machine. It's like working with a slicer for 3d printing, but more about changing thread than filament, plus how stitches should be oriented and such.
Yes! I use an Inkscape extension to send my own designs to a vinyl cutter that works perfectly well but has LONG since stopped being supported by its manufacturer or any other closed-source tools.
The extension is inkscape-silhouette (https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette) and is apparently being maintained by a makerspace in Germany.
Ah, the tool I love and hate. Mostly love though. Let me tell you about the single thing I hate:
I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" button.
Literally everything else about Inkscape is amazing! Congrats to the team!
~~~
Maybe this is also the right time & place to plug my favourite SVG path editor? https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ - free as in both beer and freedom, a tool to craft minimalistic well-behaved SVG paths.
That's a pretty absurd complaint.
Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?
SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.
(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)
> a simple hand-crafted SVG
I have also had trouble with some generated SVGs, for example:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/5317
Part of the problem is that Inkscape is too good, and the file format it uses mostly conforms to standards, so I have the expectation that opening arbitrary SVGs would just work. With other programs that use proprietary formats, I wouldn't have tried to generate drawings at all. It's a bummer when I run into what seem to be corner cases of Inkscape's SVG handling, but fortunately the set of corner cases seem to be shrinking.
I too love the SVG Path Editor, used it many times to create SVGs that had "nice code". Nobody really appreciates it, but it just felt good.
Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.
But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)
There are options to simplify and optimize SVGs on 'Save as'. Apart from the Plain SVG, there is Optimised SVG that you might find useful since you're into editing manually.
inkscape has had a long and quiet ascent from quintessentially janky foss creative software to genuinely pleasant to use. i still wish it were a little easier to edit the individual portions of deeply nested clip/mask operations, but if you need to crank out some icons, you can use inkscape and not hate your life, which is something i'd have called someone insane for telling me a decade ago.
Pre-1.0, I remember hating and wrestling with UI. It was so jank.
1.0 and after, and it's been truly a dream. I now use it to make all my figures for my research publications and presentations. Inkscape has gone from compromise I begrudge to my tool of choice in relatively little time. This is a good reminder that I should probably send them a donation.
> Fixed a crash when starting Inkscape with a graphics tablet plugged in
Great news! Having to reconnect the USB cable each time is no fun.
Love inkscape and wish it could get some engineering love around MacOS. For quick work I'll use it on MacOS, but anything deep I switch to Windows.
I wish Inkscape would add constraints, as found in CAD tools.
I love Inkscape.
But their UX is getting worse with each release. I think they need another Blender-style overhaul
I wish they would consider Freehand/Virtuoso as an exemplar
What features of Freehand or Virtuoso would you like to see in Inkscape?
Inkscape is great but I wish Xara Xtreme for Linux had not died.
I love Inkscape! My game Enalim was made with Inkscape. (https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim)
I'm glad this project keeps going.
You use Inkscape for pixel art? How does that workflow go?
I also use Inkscape for pixel art. There are two settings under document properties that make it easier to draw in screen pixel units:
- Set display units to "px"
- Set scale (px per user unit) to 1.0
I have a script that converts SVGs to PNGs as part of my build process:
https://github.com/uguu-org/sor6/blob/master/data/svg_to_png...
Wow, I think they finally fixed the awful lag just in time for me to have completely moved my practice to https://graphite.art/
Where is the Inkscape MCP?
Is there a reason to consider Inkscape instead of Tikz?
It seems to me Tikz does the same but programmatically.
Is there a reason to consider a Toyota Corolla instead of a Caterpillar excavator?
It seems to me the Caterpillar does the same but with better offroad capabilities.
Is there a reason to advertise Tikz like this?