I have my first contribution to Inkscape in this release I think. It's quite a minor feature though, so I don't see it in the changelog. It allows the user to set their default saved file name. I was tired of drawing.svg :)
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.
I remember my car broke down, it was trash worth maybe 200 in scrap metal at the time. The tow to the yard was like 100 or something. I was screwed and couldn't get rides to work. My buddy lent me a car he had for free. I did not complain once to anyone about the things wrong with that car, and I never will. I even fixed some small issues with it to return the favor. The guy and that car saved my livelihood at the time.
I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.
If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.
Eh. I draw the line in a slightly different place. I think saying that some piece of software is bad is not an attack on the developers. It doesn't imply ill will, or entitlement or any of that. People are allowed to write whatever software they want. And its generally net positive to share that software, for free, with the world.
These things are true at once:
- Good work inkscape developers! Inkscape is used by lots of people. I'm happy for the developers and the users, and I hope inkscape keeps getting better.
- I don't want to use inkscape because when I tried it, it seemed ugly, slow and buggy.
The only problem here is when people equate "this program is junk" with "this person is junk". That's a very dangerous belief to have, because it makes an enemy out of practice. And an enemy out of experimentation. The road to expertise is paved by mistakes. If bad quality work makes you a bad person, you can never learn a new skill.
As an open-source developer, feedback is about 1% of what I need. Contributions are the other 99%. However, the reality is flipped where what I get is 99% feedback (issues/feature requests in the issue tracker) and 1% contributions. And this is not a "significant regression", I use Inkscape very often for graphics work and it works great for me. And it does not "justify" regressions, but if you are not willing to fix it yourself, you have no right to do anything other than kindly request a fix, not complain about it. And btw, I don't search hacker news for "feedback", I search my issue tracker.
Because the authors don't owe you anything. You aren't giving them a single thing. They don't have to justify a thing. There is no SLA, no contract, nothing.
Feedback is fine, but there are so comments being things like "ermahgerd I paid nothing for this thing and a feature wasn't working What the actual F!". Go file an issue and fix it yourself buddy.
Users don’t owe the authors anything either. If they want to ignore longstanding complaints, they can toil in obscurity.
Heck the only reason this post made the front page of HN is because of lingering goodwill that was built up when the software was actually decent. Now that it’s regressed into uselessness, the goodwill is drying up. I, frankly, don’t have any interest in the software anymore, since it was rendered unusable. I recommend everyone steer clear of it as well.
I don't think it really matters if they are on the front page of HN. It's free software they don't need to market it right? Maybe it helps them find people willing to contribute to the issues though. So there is that.
You are free to do that. I've only used inkscape like half a dozen times. It was fine for me.
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].
Inkscape is really good for products with no budget for designers. Let me explain why.
One of the apps I am working on hit 10,000+ active users (per Playstore dashboard), and Inkscape has a role to play in this.
Since the app is free and doesn't even have a backend, there is no budget for the designer.
I looked for a few tools online, but most of them failed to generate icons/logos.
I ended up using Inkscape to make logos for my app.
Without Inkscape, this workflow is difficult.
Though I am not able to intuitively use it well from the GUI. The thing is, you don't even need the GUI anymore!
But Claude or Codex is able to write SVG line by line (so you can make changes incrementally) and use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
I am pretty sure some designer will come and say "you did a bad job at this," which is fine. My experience is in writing backends, not mobile apps or design.
Every app is saying they use "AI for smart recommendation,” while I went the opposite route, of “no, our product does not use AI for any suggestion.“ It’s entirely deterministic.
> use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
I do the same thing. How many icon sizes does Apple require now? I create one SVG vector, and then dump them all out with a script. Need to change something? Update the SVG and instantly regenerate the icons.
I'm no Jony Ive, also a design stunted engineer but I'd say that looks decent given the constraints. My only obvious complaint is the kerning of the text "Get it on Google Play" and "Download on the App Store" (italics emphasis mine, what's in italics is what looks terrible on my laptop screen
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.
I'll have to see if I can get this working with our vevor vinyl plotter, as ink cut hasn't worked for a long time now and there doesn't seem to be any way to use the aliexpress/vevor vinyl plotters without paid proprietary software currently.
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.
In my experience Blender seemed to change the UI and naming of UI elements and options with almost any release making many tutorials incomprehensible thus almost obsolete, making it super hard to get into
The only problem I have with it is GTK-style bulkiness. I feel like every open source software is developed for 4k quad-monitors in mind, or tablets. Everything is thicker and taller than it needs to be.
What issues do you have? I use Inkscape on Mac almost every day and lately hit very few bugs. I think a lot of them have been fixed in the last year or so.
It used to be almost unusable with all the UI bugs (can't close tabs when you open them, can't resize the window without panes bugging out or the app crashing, etc).
I get the occasional crash where it just closes completely for no reason, but very rarely in the last year.
That’s one reason to use Inkscape. If I want to draw a design, I have a shape in mind I then try to draw by editing the points as I see them, with instant visual feedback. I don’t want to code in points and have to modify coordinates.
It’s like asking why people use a parametric CAD suite like NX if they could just use OpenSCAD.
If you want to model something, seeing it and editing it in the 3D view can be much nicer than editing code.
I have my first contribution to Inkscape in this release I think. It's quite a minor feature though, so I don't see it in the changelog. It allows the user to set their default saved file name. I was tired of drawing.svg :)
That's how it starts.
Haha thank you! This had been mildly bothering me for a while actually.
Good job!
Nice! :)
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
I remember my car broke down, it was trash worth maybe 200 in scrap metal at the time. The tow to the yard was like 100 or something. I was screwed and couldn't get rides to work. My buddy lent me a car he had for free. I did not complain once to anyone about the things wrong with that car, and I never will. I even fixed some small issues with it to return the favor. The guy and that car saved my livelihood at the time.
I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.
If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.
Eh. I draw the line in a slightly different place. I think saying that some piece of software is bad is not an attack on the developers. It doesn't imply ill will, or entitlement or any of that. People are allowed to write whatever software they want. And its generally net positive to share that software, for free, with the world.
These things are true at once:
- Good work inkscape developers! Inkscape is used by lots of people. I'm happy for the developers and the users, and I hope inkscape keeps getting better.
- I don't want to use inkscape because when I tried it, it seemed ugly, slow and buggy.
The only problem here is when people equate "this program is junk" with "this person is junk". That's a very dangerous belief to have, because it makes an enemy out of practice. And an enemy out of experimentation. The road to expertise is paved by mistakes. If bad quality work makes you a bad person, you can never learn a new skill.
Potential users like honest reviews and criticisms of open source software. It helps us decide if it’s worth using or not.
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?
As an open-source developer, feedback is about 1% of what I need. Contributions are the other 99%. However, the reality is flipped where what I get is 99% feedback (issues/feature requests in the issue tracker) and 1% contributions. And this is not a "significant regression", I use Inkscape very often for graphics work and it works great for me. And it does not "justify" regressions, but if you are not willing to fix it yourself, you have no right to do anything other than kindly request a fix, not complain about it. And btw, I don't search hacker news for "feedback", I search my issue tracker.
Because the authors don't owe you anything. You aren't giving them a single thing. They don't have to justify a thing. There is no SLA, no contract, nothing.
Feedback is fine, but there are so comments being things like "ermahgerd I paid nothing for this thing and a feature wasn't working What the actual F!". Go file an issue and fix it yourself buddy.
The feedback wasn't that though.
The worst thing they said was that it was "kinda disappointing". Which is perfectly valid. They really want to use inkscape but can't.
Yea sure but read the comments in this post it's kinda gross.
Users don’t owe the authors anything either. If they want to ignore longstanding complaints, they can toil in obscurity.
Heck the only reason this post made the front page of HN is because of lingering goodwill that was built up when the software was actually decent. Now that it’s regressed into uselessness, the goodwill is drying up. I, frankly, don’t have any interest in the software anymore, since it was rendered unusable. I recommend everyone steer clear of it as well.
I don't think it really matters if they are on the front page of HN. It's free software they don't need to market it right? Maybe it helps them find people willing to contribute to the issues though. So there is that.
You are free to do that. I've only used inkscape like half a dozen times. It was fine for me.
“uselessness” he says…
I'm not a big inkscape user or a big fan but last time I used it that was absolutely not a word that approached my mind... ...
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.
Criticism can be constructive. For understaffed teams, patches are even better.
In this day and age, why not fork it and use Codex or Claude to fix the specific problems you're hitting?
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
Inkscape is really good for products with no budget for designers. Let me explain why.
One of the apps I am working on hit 10,000+ active users (per Playstore dashboard), and Inkscape has a role to play in this.
Since the app is free and doesn't even have a backend, there is no budget for the designer.
I looked for a few tools online, but most of them failed to generate icons/logos.
I ended up using Inkscape to make logos for my app.
Without Inkscape, this workflow is difficult.
Though I am not able to intuitively use it well from the GUI. The thing is, you don't even need the GUI anymore!
But Claude or Codex is able to write SVG line by line (so you can make changes incrementally) and use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
Here's my app for those who are curious: https://macrocodex.app/
I am pretty sure some designer will come and say "you did a bad job at this," which is fine. My experience is in writing backends, not mobile apps or design.
Every app is saying they use "AI for smart recommendation,” while I went the opposite route, of “no, our product does not use AI for any suggestion.“ It’s entirely deterministic.
Next time, perhaps my quick logo generator can help: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
The defaults are tuned to aesthetics of my personal logo, but it's quite configurable. (You can even copy your own SVG into the icon input)
Example logos:
- https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
- https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense
- https://github.com/Leftium/multi-launch
That looks neat! Thanks for sharing, I’ll try to use it next time I need a logo. :D
> use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
I do the same thing. How many icon sizes does Apple require now? I create one SVG vector, and then dump them all out with a script. Need to change something? Update the SVG and instantly regenerate the icons.
I'm no Jony Ive, also a design stunted engineer but I'd say that looks decent given the constraints. My only obvious complaint is the kerning of the text "Get it on Google Play" and "Download on the App Store" (italics emphasis mine, what's in italics is what looks terrible on my laptop screen
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.
I'll have to see if I can get this working with our vevor vinyl plotter, as ink cut hasn't worked for a long time now and there doesn't seem to be any way to use the aliexpress/vevor vinyl plotters without paid proprietary software currently.
My wife makes extensive use of inkstitch and loves it.
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!)
Well duh the inkscape team should write this feature just for them. For free of course lol. My god
There is actually one tool I've dealt with that works nicely with hand-crafted SVG's: https://boxy-svg.com/
> 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 have zero expectation that any design tool will export concise and optimal SVG markup.
I highly recommend using SVGO (https://svgo.dev/).
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.
I wish Inkscape would add constraints, as found in CAD tools.
This is what I'm looking for. This would replace Corel Draw for me.
There is a plugin for blender that allows CAD style sketching. It may be a way forward.
> 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.
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...
I love Inkscape.
But their UX is getting worse with each release. I think they need another Blender-style overhaul
In my experience Blender seemed to change the UI and naming of UI elements and options with almost any release making many tutorials incomprehensible thus almost obsolete, making it super hard to get into
The only problem I have with it is GTK-style bulkiness. I feel like every open source software is developed for 4k quad-monitors in mind, or tablets. Everything is thicker and taller than it needs to be.
I wish they would consider Freehand/Virtuoso as an exemplar
What features of Freehand or Virtuoso would you like to see in Inkscape?
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.
What issues do you have? I use Inkscape on Mac almost every day and lately hit very few bugs. I think a lot of them have been fixed in the last year or so.
It used to be almost unusable with all the UI bugs (can't close tabs when you open them, can't resize the window without panes bugging out or the app crashing, etc).
I get the occasional crash where it just closes completely for no reason, but very rarely in the last year.
Wow, I think they finally fixed the awful lag just in time for me to have completely moved my practice to https://graphite.art/
Inkscape is great but I wish Xara Xtreme for Linux had not died.
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.
> but programmatically.
That’s one reason to use Inkscape. If I want to draw a design, I have a shape in mind I then try to draw by editing the points as I see them, with instant visual feedback. I don’t want to code in points and have to modify coordinates.
It’s like asking why people use a parametric CAD suite like NX if they could just use OpenSCAD. If you want to model something, seeing it and editing it in the 3D view can be much nicer than editing code.
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?