I love Inkscape so much. I use it every other week to make presentations, slides or just simple graphics when I need it. I illustrated my thesis with it.
Another piece of 2D vector software that I use and recommend is Graphite [1]. It too is open source. Graphite has nodes and can be procedural in nature. Have them both in your graphics toolbox.
Thank you. This is the first time I've heard of the Graphite editor.
I think it could benefit from availability in package reposirories and looking at the license, it appears the program itself is free under the Apache license but the artwork is non-free. It cannot be modified and commercial use is prohibited.
When combined, Graphite as a whole is non-free so I won't be compiling this until the artwork is gone. I'll look into providing some dummy files and see where it goes.
The other packing problem is that there's already a server monitoring program also named Graphite. But given the above, a change of name and new icons would solve both problems.
For those who are confused I believe you're referring to the application logo and branding. So basically the Firefox > Iceweasel case again. While the art you create with it is still yours.
Of course anything you make yourself is yours. I'm not sure how the license can confuse anyone into thinking it wouldn't be. It likely wouldn't fly with the law anyway. Unless it was all saas.
You'd be surprised. There are a lot of people out there (and here) who think that unilaterally-declared LLM licenses can dictate what they are allowed to do with the output. Hell, a lot of people think that LLM's can be copyrightable. Copyright law is very clear about the conditions required for copyright protection, and LLMs fail to satisfy at least two. Even failing one is sufficient (see the Smiling monkey case).
Another gem in my graphics toolbox is edraw [1], an embedded vector drawing tool for Emacs. I use it to make quick sketches in Orgmode files, and it is highly recommended for any Emacs enthusiast.
That is truly impressive. I have a hunch though, that it is not well suitable for proper diagrams, due to all the things like wrapping text that is too long for a line inside a shape, inside the shape onto more lines. Dynamically wrapping text when a node's size changes. Moving edges when nodes are moved. All those things one takes for granted in an actual diagramming tool.
The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.
Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.
SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.
I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.
> I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
It didn’t need be a proprietary format, it could just as well be a new open format. Inkscape could itself create an open format that they saved to by default and supported many features SVG does not. They they publish the specification for it. Done.
A format doesn’t need to be popular, in widespread use, or proprietary to be useful.
I also wonder if they could still base it off SVG, but just append to the spec for their own new format. It's just XML under the hood right? They already have all of the complex parsing set up for SVG XML documents.
If svgx files or whatever just had some non-svg node in the top level that contained all of the special inkscape-only info, you might even be able to keep it totally compatible with svg itself. (Just obviously, lacking the special inkscape features)
I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.
SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure the gains promised by a proprietary format would be worth losing out on various SVG/XML tools.
So you are asking for an authoring tool that has a format that can do what SVG can't and then show examples of how Inkscape can do that? What exactly are you missing then? Is the problem that Inkscape SVG has SVG in the name?
All of the things you mentioned can be done in SVG and I've done all of these things before.
For multiple lines just duplicate your shapes and group or even join them. For varying thickness you can duplicate your shape and layer them. Rounded corners are supported on every vertice so I'm not sure where are you geting that.
I'm not the OP you're replying to but I think you missed some of their points.
1) multiple outlines: with your strategy, you can no longer edit the shape as a single shape afterwards.
2) varying thickness: it sounds like you're thinking of thickness varying abruptly from one line segment to another, but remaining constant throughout one segment. I would like a feature where the stroke width varies continuously from one vertex to another, that is, get smoothly thicker or thinner.
3) you can only have rounded corners on every vertex or no vertex of a shape. You can't choose individually for each vertex.
I think these are all features that SVG would benefit from adding.
You might look into https://graphite.rs/ . MS Paint is about my digital art interface complexity limit, but I do read Graphite's blog posts and their app sounds really attractive for more serious artists
I haven't used Graphite, but from what I've seen it allows for non-destructive procedural editing using nodes (à la Blender), which Inkscape mostly doesn't do.
SVG 1.1 does not support wrapping (textflow). There are posts in stack-overflow on how to use a foreignObject (HTML) inside SVG to do the line wrapping.
SVG 1.2 apparently supports but I have never used it so I don't know.
How is clipping different in Affinity and in Inkskape? Having used only Inkscape and not Affinity, I don't find the workflow Inkskape is using problematic.
In affinity, you have something like a layer window with all your shapes, similar to layer and objects in Inkscape. The "layers" work like groups, so if you drag one shape into another shape, it gets clipped.
So say you want to make something like a wall with a tunnel/cave and a road in it. You can draw a rectnagle, a circle, put the circle inside the rectangle and it's clipped, then use a triangle for the road and put it inside the circle and it's clipped.
In Inkscape you need to select both shapes and use clip group. Which shape clips which depends on which shape is above the other. I can't tell you which one sould be above, by the way, because I never remember it. If you want to clip one shape by another shape that is already inside a clipping group, you have another problem because you need to double click the group to be able to selected the clipped shape. The more layers of clipping you have, the more you have to double click.
The layer structure is also different. In Affinity, the shape itself is the group and occupies only 1 line in the layers window. In Inkscape, every clipping group creates 3 entries in the objects window. One for the group itself, one for the shape at the background, and one for the shapes being clipped. So in Inkscape you have something like:
I'm very ignorant in these areas, but if you don't mind me asking - how would using a proprietary format solve issues for Inkscape, or an imagined alternative to Inkscape?
Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?
A proprietary format would allow doing anything, without having to worry about how other programs will support it.
There’s a conflict between what is needed to simply display images, and what is needed for an ideal editable document.
A web browser doesn’t need the complexity of non destructive Boolean operations, but an editor program does. It can all be exported to SVG at the end once it doesn’t need to be edited anymore. Things like variable thickness outlines can just be turned in to filled Bézier curve shapes that happen to be the shape of the outline.
You don't have to have a proprietary format to do that.
You are doing the mistake of associating open format with standard format, which really are orthogonal concepts. Open format means the format specification is published under an open license. A standard format is one whose specification is maintained by a standards organization/body/consortium. It happens that most open formats are or end up being maintained by a standard body out of convenience[1] and because people often publish them in the open with the hope it will also be used by others but it doesn't have to be. You as developer of application foo can publish the spec of your .bar format on foo's website under an open license and do the fuck you want with it while not being limited by the potential slowness of a standard governing body.
[1] mostly to avoid multiple incompatible forked versions of the format being used with the same name and confusing others.
I don't think they are saying "proprietary" as in "secret, closed source", but just as in "custom format" that is built around one particular application.
The problem with SVG is the different demands between browser vendors and graphic editors. Browsers for example don't need pages to be in SVG, but it's unavoidable for proper graphic design tools. That makes the advancement of an open format a lot harder, and AFAIK Inkscape devs have thought of extending SVG into their own format (in a talk at LGM).
I suspect you could achieve a similar result with a standard specification format for vector graphics. You just need to be open to extensions for prototyping features. See open *OpenRaster.
The issue with using SVG is it's not meant for use as data exchange in vector graphics editors but for web publishing.
> From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Maybe Flash will become popular again at some point, so a well heeled enthusiast (or group of) could buy the source for the Flash Authoring tool from Adobe then release it as OSS. :)
Are you creatively crippled by not being able to create multiple outlines on a single shape on a file format that can be viewed in almost any device from here to eternity at no cost? Cause you know Michelangelo didn't use procreate in a iPad...do you?
And the cavemen drawing on walls before Michelangelo didn't have paintbrushes, complex pigments and cathedrals to paint on? Heaven forbid we make better tools.
Considering those operations are available in other vector art tools that aren't constrained by directly using SVG as the fundamental editing format it seems like a reasonable complaint.
This is my complaint about the current state of developer tools. You can buy beautiful tools to make a beautiful chest of drawers or a chair. We are, or at least were, trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with finger paints.
Maybe if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful and sensible tools it would be easier for us to write beautiful or sensible applications. Maybe there would be fewer dancing bears.
fwiw I make everything a path, make it small and edit > crop to selection, then save as optimized svg - open with a Webbrowser - Show source - copy - paste into html - remove width and height (handled in the css) add the title etc and done I think.
yay for Inkscape but please make dialog modals when multiple tabs are open come to the front and show themselves on macOS - don’t be shy
Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...
I am always surprised to see people recreating the faded/worn out branding of stuff they own when restoring them.
I mean as a consumer I see it as a mark of disrespect from the manufacturer to plaster its logo everywhere. I am paying for the product, not to be an advertising billboard ffs! If you want me to advertise your product, let me negociate the terms and my retribution. This was particularly annoying on road bicycles in the early 2000's where most bike manufacturers would put as many are 7 or 8 logos on the frame and every single component maker would also do the same with loud bright on black logos for every single other part.
If you were restoring a classic Lamborghini, you wouldn't keep the bull logo?
Most things are ugly though. The stuff people restore (like classic motorcycles) often have pretty great aesthetics and that's part of why they want to restore the object.
I guess it would depend if I have it as an investment or to drive it myself. I would certainly keep the original logos in storage for future sale anyway.
I guess I don't consider my motorcycles to be art projects. I want to experience the machine as it was originally designed, as much as I can. Once I've done that with this one, I'll move on to another. But I don't care to "make it mine." Car nuts who restore old Mustangs or Corvettes are the same way, just on a somewhat bigger scale.
There are of course a large number of people who do the opposite. They take vintage bikes and chop them up into cafe racers or whatever. And that's fine too. Just not what I'm interested in.
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.
It's not universal but some of this stuff seemingly stems from the framework level -- Gtk and Qt.
For example, QGIS and FreeCAD are very good indeed on the Mac, and the quirky problems FreeCAD has on the Mac are generally Qt problems (font mapping, some window handling stuff, very occasional high-DPI things).
Command-line/server-based FOSS stuff is usually not a great challenge.
I guess this is kind of what one could predict, comparing Linux and the Mac. Though it's also the case that Qt and Gtk get more portability eyeballs on Windows, which again is probably what one could predict.
I suspect that not only relieved some of their own stress, but also sent a very clear message to the community that someone needed to take up that slack if they wanted OSX builds.
Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.
Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.
EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.
Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]
Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.
1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.
Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:
cd <Inkscape directory>
set GDK_SCALE=2
start inkscape.exe
And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.
On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.
For me it's gotten a lot better since one or two versions ago. There's still some lagginess, but it's nowhere near the horror show that it used to be, and they fixed some excruciating screen resolution issues as well. I used to avoid Inkscape on macOS like the plague, now I can use it fairly comfortably.
I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.
For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.
Inkscape has a lot of additional problems on MacOS, like dialogs appearing below the main window making it look like it's frozen, occasional text rendering issues, interference with input methods (on Windows too), and other problems that cannot be reproduced on Linux. To be fair a big part of it can be attributed to GTK, the underlying UI toolkit.
Came here to say the same. The app is very useful for me (pen plotters etc) but it’s awful on my Mac. Barely useable despite being required for some of my workflows.
Not too bad for me. You likely face the universal problem with more complex software when you don't use them regularly. It's a real skill that requires significant use over time to bed down some lasting neural paths. I have much more difficulty with e.g. Blender, Reaper etc. when every few years I use them. I too have start from tutorials again but I still think they are good tools despite not retaining anything between my rare uses. I bought Affinity, learned to use it but when I returned to it after some time, nothing remained in my head and I had to use inkscape instead.
For inkscape, some of the more sophisticated generative things were "use and forget" for me but they have actually improved to be much more intuitive. The main thing I lose is some of the natural touch that makes it so fast to use. I do love when I use it regularly because it's so quick to pump about svgs at the speed of thought.
Getting really good at a vector tool is such a valuable life skill for explaining all manner of tricky things whether it's for UI mockups, software architecture or graphic design stuff like logos/t-shirt/marketing designs. I live for the "how on earth have you done this?" reaction when I can create a quality diagram while on a call with people. It can really enrich the quality of interactions and reduce cycle time to create designs in real time.
I also use it for all sorts of personal stuff like interior design, DIY, scaffolding etc. I've even submitted official architectural plans I made with it. It's as valuable as a spreadsheet.
Do you have prior experience with other vector editors? For me it's pretty intuitive (save for some papercuts), but that may be due to my lack of experience with other editors.
I like Inkscape very much and use it for all my (usually quite simple) vector drawing needs. From the get go, it was quite intuitive to use - my first vector editor experience was with CorelDRAW 3 in the early 90s.
There's an obscured close button in the top right corner. If you want to skip the welcome dialog just click that.
The second time it appears, you can uncheck "Show this every time" in the lower left corner and then click "New Document".
...or you could click Save on the first dialog and then click " Thanks!". You'll get the same dialog as above when you'd have closed it with the button in the corner.
Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players.
And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.
If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.
I did a lot of strange things in old Inkscape to achieve the same result as given by this new:
Shape Builder
You can now tackle quick edits on raster (pixel) images within Inkscape using the Shape Builder tool. Load an image and select sections that you want to isolate.
Inkscape is one of the best and most important tools in my arsenal. From creating and editing vectors for use with a laser cutter to designing icons when tools like Illustrator are too expensive and alternatives like ChatGPT fall short, Inkscape never ceases to amaze me with its capabilities. It's remarkable how well this open-source, free application performs. Thank you, Inkscape, for being one of the most reliable and impressive apps I know!
I am working on another SVG editor called Hyvector ( https://hyvector.com ). It is an SVG editor, but I am trying to hide the strange quirks of SVG from the user.
Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.
… bug fixes and setting the stage for the arrival of GTK 4.
Gtk4. Meanwhile at Gimp? Puh. Maybe they will manage to port to the 14 year old Gtk3 soon. I hope it at least. I’m sure the Gimp developers doing their best and will benefit soon from Wayland and HiDPI.
That sort of thing makes me wonder if Inkscape shouldn't have a configurable "Post-processor" option like to that used for G-code, possibly on a per-file basis (add the editing commands needed after saving to a user-editable pane).
It can be a bit fussy, but works well --- unfortunately, there hasn't really been a vector drawing program focused specifically on stylus use since Futurewave Smartsketch (which became Flash by way of Futuresplash Animator).
Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient
I really hope it does, but for now it lacks in the basics such as panning (Krita can hold down a button + move pen to pan the canvas), button support (I don't think there's a way to map pen buttons to specific functions, let alone switch between them), and the drawing tools are still really basic. They are focusing on UX for the next release though, and UX issues can be discussed in the Inkscape UX Gitlab repo.
Calligraphy pen is still unusable, laggy and jaggy. Too slow, not enough setting increments to fine tune it, awfully, almost absurdly angular on even slightly fast motions. 0.92 remains the most responsive version. Welp, i don't know what i expected, since every time i'd check latest version it'd still be like this. Celebrating 4 years of Inkscape breaking calligraphy tool and never fixing it since.
What about line style etc?
Is is possible to define the style of line you want and then create lines of that style.
Presently one workflow to work around it is to consider a small area of the canvas as a palette area and create lines/objects in them and apply the desires styles on them. Then duplicate these palette objects into your main drawing.
It does have Ai shortcuts to choose from in the settings, if there's problems or inaccuracies with it you can also open an issue at https://inkscape.org/report/ .
I love Inkscape so much. I use it every other week to make presentations, slides or just simple graphics when I need it. I illustrated my thesis with it.
Another piece of 2D vector software that I use and recommend is Graphite [1]. It too is open source. Graphite has nodes and can be procedural in nature. Have them both in your graphics toolbox.
[1] https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite
Thank you. This is the first time I've heard of the Graphite editor.
I think it could benefit from availability in package reposirories and looking at the license, it appears the program itself is free under the Apache license but the artwork is non-free. It cannot be modified and commercial use is prohibited.
When combined, Graphite as a whole is non-free so I won't be compiling this until the artwork is gone. I'll look into providing some dummy files and see where it goes.
The other packing problem is that there's already a server monitoring program also named Graphite. But given the above, a change of name and new icons would solve both problems.
For those who are confused I believe you're referring to the application logo and branding. So basically the Firefox > Iceweasel case again. While the art you create with it is still yours.
Of course anything you make yourself is yours. I'm not sure how the license can confuse anyone into thinking it wouldn't be. It likely wouldn't fly with the law anyway. Unless it was all saas.
You'd be surprised. There are a lot of people out there (and here) who think that unilaterally-declared LLM licenses can dictate what they are allowed to do with the output. Hell, a lot of people think that LLM's can be copyrightable. Copyright law is very clear about the conditions required for copyright protection, and LLMs fail to satisfy at least two. Even failing one is sufficient (see the Smiling monkey case).
Another gem in my graphics toolbox is edraw [1], an embedded vector drawing tool for Emacs. I use it to make quick sketches in Orgmode files, and it is highly recommended for any Emacs enthusiast.
[1] https://github.com/misohena/el-easydraw
That is truly impressive. I have a hunch though, that it is not well suitable for proper diagrams, due to all the things like wrapping text that is too long for a line inside a shape, inside the shape onto more lines. Dynamically wrapping text when a node's size changes. Moving edges when nodes are moved. All those things one takes for granted in an actual diagramming tool.
Inkscape has been a staple in my toolbox for decades. The only gripe I have is that it could have been a bit more stable at times.
Is there any open source hybrid vector and bitmap drawing tool?
I used to use Xara Extreme and it's very fast, intuitive and handy mainly due its hybrid features. It's also used to be open source but not anymore:
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/
Xara was never fully open source. They kept the renderer proprietary, so it never really had a chance.
Graphite has raster editing in their roadmap[1], but afaik it's not really there yet.
[1] https://graphite.rs/features/
Krita is the big one.
Krita doesn't have good vector controls, sadly.
Graphite looks pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!
If you've not, please donate x
The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.
Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.
SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.
I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.
> I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
It didn’t need be a proprietary format, it could just as well be a new open format. Inkscape could itself create an open format that they saved to by default and supported many features SVG does not. They they publish the specification for it. Done.
A format doesn’t need to be popular, in widespread use, or proprietary to be useful.
I also wonder if they could still base it off SVG, but just append to the spec for their own new format. It's just XML under the hood right? They already have all of the complex parsing set up for SVG XML documents.
If svgx files or whatever just had some non-svg node in the top level that contained all of the special inkscape-only info, you might even be able to keep it totally compatible with svg itself. (Just obviously, lacking the special inkscape features)
Great idea. But what would you call such a format? Perhaps "Inkscape SVG"?
> proprietary format
I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.
SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure the gains promised by a proprietary format would be worth losing out on various SVG/XML tools.
So you are asking for an authoring tool that has a format that can do what SVG can't and then show examples of how Inkscape can do that? What exactly are you missing then? Is the problem that Inkscape SVG has SVG in the name?
All of the things you mentioned can be done in SVG and I've done all of these things before.
For multiple lines just duplicate your shapes and group or even join them. For varying thickness you can duplicate your shape and layer them. Rounded corners are supported on every vertice so I'm not sure where are you geting that.
I'm not the OP you're replying to but I think you missed some of their points.
1) multiple outlines: with your strategy, you can no longer edit the shape as a single shape afterwards.
2) varying thickness: it sounds like you're thinking of thickness varying abruptly from one line segment to another, but remaining constant throughout one segment. I would like a feature where the stroke width varies continuously from one vertex to another, that is, get smoothly thicker or thinner.
3) you can only have rounded corners on every vertex or no vertex of a shape. You can't choose individually for each vertex.
I think these are all features that SVG would benefit from adding.
You might look into https://graphite.rs/ . MS Paint is about my digital art interface complexity limit, but I do read Graphite's blog posts and their app sounds really attractive for more serious artists
In what ways are they different from Inkscape? (My knowledge of Vector Editors is quite limited)
I haven't used Graphite, but from what I've seen it allows for non-destructive procedural editing using nodes (à la Blender), which Inkscape mostly doesn't do.
> No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.
SVG 1.1 does not support wrapping (textflow). There are posts in stack-overflow on how to use a foreignObject (HTML) inside SVG to do the line wrapping.
SVG 1.2 apparently supports but I have never used it so I don't know.
There is Cenon:
https://cenon.info/
which runs well in Mac OS and Linux and for the basics has the basic vector editing capabilities which folks would expect.
That's interesting but what can it do better than Inkscape?
It handles the basics of:
>shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
in a fashion which most folks will find more familiar.
How is clipping different in Affinity and in Inkskape? Having used only Inkscape and not Affinity, I don't find the workflow Inkskape is using problematic.
In affinity, you have something like a layer window with all your shapes, similar to layer and objects in Inkscape. The "layers" work like groups, so if you drag one shape into another shape, it gets clipped.
So say you want to make something like a wall with a tunnel/cave and a road in it. You can draw a rectnagle, a circle, put the circle inside the rectangle and it's clipped, then use a triangle for the road and put it inside the circle and it's clipped.
In Inkscape you need to select both shapes and use clip group. Which shape clips which depends on which shape is above the other. I can't tell you which one sould be above, by the way, because I never remember it. If you want to clip one shape by another shape that is already inside a clipping group, you have another problem because you need to double click the group to be able to selected the clipped shape. The more layers of clipping you have, the more you have to double click.
The layer structure is also different. In Affinity, the shape itself is the group and occupies only 1 line in the layers window. In Inkscape, every clipping group creates 3 entries in the objects window. One for the group itself, one for the shape at the background, and one for the shapes being clipped. So in Inkscape you have something like:
g277 (this is the group)
-> circle
-> Clip
---> rectangle
In affinity you have:
rectangle
-> circle
I'm very ignorant in these areas, but if you don't mind me asking - how would using a proprietary format solve issues for Inkscape, or an imagined alternative to Inkscape?
Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?
A proprietary format would allow doing anything, without having to worry about how other programs will support it.
There’s a conflict between what is needed to simply display images, and what is needed for an ideal editable document.
A web browser doesn’t need the complexity of non destructive Boolean operations, but an editor program does. It can all be exported to SVG at the end once it doesn’t need to be edited anymore. Things like variable thickness outlines can just be turned in to filled Bézier curve shapes that happen to be the shape of the outline.
You don't have to have a proprietary format to do that.
You are doing the mistake of associating open format with standard format, which really are orthogonal concepts. Open format means the format specification is published under an open license. A standard format is one whose specification is maintained by a standards organization/body/consortium. It happens that most open formats are or end up being maintained by a standard body out of convenience[1] and because people often publish them in the open with the hope it will also be used by others but it doesn't have to be. You as developer of application foo can publish the spec of your .bar format on foo's website under an open license and do the fuck you want with it while not being limited by the potential slowness of a standard governing body.
[1] mostly to avoid multiple incompatible forked versions of the format being used with the same name and confusing others.
I don't think they are saying "proprietary" as in "secret, closed source", but just as in "custom format" that is built around one particular application.
The problem with SVG is the different demands between browser vendors and graphic editors. Browsers for example don't need pages to be in SVG, but it's unavoidable for proper graphic design tools. That makes the advancement of an open format a lot harder, and AFAIK Inkscape devs have thought of extending SVG into their own format (in a talk at LGM).
I suspect you could achieve a similar result with a standard specification format for vector graphics. You just need to be open to extensions for prototyping features. See open *OpenRaster.
The issue with using SVG is it's not meant for use as data exchange in vector graphics editors but for web publishing.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster
Illustrator uses its own proprietary .ai format (which Inkscape can load IIRC)
"Multiple outlines in a single shape? No."
Copy/paste/recenter/resize. No live filter needed. So good even EZCad does it and it can barely do any sort of SVG editing or creation.
> From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.
Maybe Flash will become popular again at some point, so a well heeled enthusiast (or group of) could buy the source for the Flash Authoring tool from Adobe then release it as OSS. :)
(not holding my breath though)
Use Krita for art.
Krita is not for vector art.
Are you creatively crippled by not being able to create multiple outlines on a single shape on a file format that can be viewed in almost any device from here to eternity at no cost? Cause you know Michelangelo didn't use procreate in a iPad...do you?
And the cavemen drawing on walls before Michelangelo didn't have paintbrushes, complex pigments and cathedrals to paint on? Heaven forbid we make better tools.
Considering those operations are available in other vector art tools that aren't constrained by directly using SVG as the fundamental editing format it seems like a reasonable complaint.
This is my complaint about the current state of developer tools. You can buy beautiful tools to make a beautiful chest of drawers or a chair. We are, or at least were, trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with finger paints.
Maybe if we surrounded ourselves with beautiful and sensible tools it would be easier for us to write beautiful or sensible applications. Maybe there would be fewer dancing bears.
Speaking of SVG spec, is there a guide on how to create SVG files with Inkscape that will render well on most web browsers supporting SVG?
I have failed a number of times producing an SVG file that would render the same on browsers and in Inkscape editor window. This is frustrating.
fwiw I make everything a path, make it small and edit > crop to selection, then save as optimized svg - open with a Webbrowser - Show source - copy - paste into html - remove width and height (handled in the css) add the title etc and done I think.
yay for Inkscape but please make dialog modals when multiple tabs are open come to the front and show themselves on macOS - don’t be shy
This should be an export option or at least some sort of plug-in
thanks
Care to elaborate? I'm curious.
Yes, it is very important for learning Inkscape to understand that Inkscape is a SVG editor, but not for common graph editor.
Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...
I am always surprised to see people recreating the faded/worn out branding of stuff they own when restoring them.
I mean as a consumer I see it as a mark of disrespect from the manufacturer to plaster its logo everywhere. I am paying for the product, not to be an advertising billboard ffs! If you want me to advertise your product, let me negociate the terms and my retribution. This was particularly annoying on road bicycles in the early 2000's where most bike manufacturers would put as many are 7 or 8 logos on the frame and every single component maker would also do the same with loud bright on black logos for every single other part.
see this example of a cannodale supersix of that era: https://files.bikeindex.org/uploads/Pu/582923/large_BRD28952...
Bottom line: when I am restoring a bicycle, motorbike, whatever, the first thing to go are usually the branding and logos.
If you were restoring a classic Lamborghini, you wouldn't keep the bull logo?
Most things are ugly though. The stuff people restore (like classic motorcycles) often have pretty great aesthetics and that's part of why they want to restore the object.
https://classictwowheels.com.au/1973-norton-850-commando/
I guess it would depend if I have it as an investment or to drive it myself. I would certainly keep the original logos in storage for future sale anyway.
I guess I don't consider my motorcycles to be art projects. I want to experience the machine as it was originally designed, as much as I can. Once I've done that with this one, I'll move on to another. But I don't care to "make it mine." Car nuts who restore old Mustangs or Corvettes are the same way, just on a somewhat bigger scale.
There are of course a large number of people who do the opposite. They take vintage bikes and chop them up into cafe racers or whatever. And that's fine too. Just not what I'm interested in.
The one new feature in 1.4 that I appreciated the most is the ability to disable anti-aliasing when exporting from the command line:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.
They’ve historically been quite open about needing help on the macOS front. For example, https://inkscape.org/news/2021/06/22/seeking-macos-dev-contr...
I’d imagine there just isn’t a huge group of people who work on foss software, and use Mac.
I’ve noticed that just in general foss apps which work great on Linux, are often broken on macOS.
It's not universal but some of this stuff seemingly stems from the framework level -- Gtk and Qt.
For example, QGIS and FreeCAD are very good indeed on the Mac, and the quirky problems FreeCAD has on the Mac are generally Qt problems (font mapping, some window handling stuff, very occasional high-DPI things).
Command-line/server-based FOSS stuff is usually not a great challenge.
I guess this is kind of what one could predict, comparing Linux and the Mac. Though it's also the case that Qt and Gtk get more portability eyeballs on Windows, which again is probably what one could predict.
+1. It's frustrating me right now, because newer members onboarding to our team are having all kinds of issues with Element amongst other software.
Yeah, happened to GIMP as well, for a while they didn't have anyone in charge of macOS builds, so they just skipped the platform for a few releases.
I suspect that not only relieved some of their own stress, but also sent a very clear message to the community that someone needed to take up that slack if they wanted OSX builds.
Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.
Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.
EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.
Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]
Can't say about Windows but on Linux - it works flawlessly since ages.
Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.
Illustrator is on Linux too? Could this low frame rate be related to missing drivers? Very less likely though.
I think Inkspace probably should have its own UI kit rendered directly on GPU. That's lot of work however.
> should have its own UI kit rendered directly on GPU. That's lot of work however.
It's more like that's the minimum that's expected.
It's laggy on windows. On linux it works great.
1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.
Ditto, I wouldn't quite say it flies on my M1 MBA, but performance is by no means frustratingly laggy. I use Inkscape a lot on both my MBA and Surface Laptop and it is much more frustrating on the latter device. The lack of support for fractional scaling is an annoyance on my 150% scaled Surface. The tiny UI has to be remedied by pinning a .bat to my taskbar and disguising it as Inkscape, with the following code:
cd <Inkscape directory>
set GDK_SCALE=2
start inkscape.exe
And within Inkscape using the Minwaita-Inkscape theme and 80% font scaling to scale back the otherwise-now-too-big UI.
On both my Mac and PC, the main frustration once the UI is scaled correctly is that often closing pop-up windows (i.e. Document Properties) simply doesn't work. Sometimes using Inkscape's tab close button rather than the MacOS/Windows close window button works, but other times the whole app will freeze up and crash when attempting to close these pop-up windows. Have had this issue for multiple Inkscape versions now, hoping the devs find a way to fix it.
$ nix-shell -p inkscape
[nix-shell:~]$ inkscape --version Inkscape 1.3.2 (091e20ef0f, 2023-11-25)
[nix-shell:~]$ nixos-version 24.05.3787.a781ff33ae25 (Uakari)
Seems flawless for me. simple example I made: https://imgur.com/a/wi0kXbm
Never had issues on Linux...
For me it's gotten a lot better since one or two versions ago. There's still some lagginess, but it's nowhere near the horror show that it used to be, and they fixed some excruciating screen resolution issues as well. I used to avoid Inkscape on macOS like the plague, now I can use it fairly comfortably.
I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.
For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.
Inkscape has a lot of additional problems on MacOS, like dialogs appearing below the main window making it look like it's frozen, occasional text rendering issues, interference with input methods (on Windows too), and other problems that cannot be reproduced on Linux. To be fair a big part of it can be attributed to GTK, the underlying UI toolkit.
Came here to say the same. The app is very useful for me (pen plotters etc) but it’s awful on my Mac. Barely useable despite being required for some of my workflows.
Is it only me that, when I open Inkspace, I really cannot get anything done without watching a tutorial or reading docs / blog posts?
Not too bad for me. You likely face the universal problem with more complex software when you don't use them regularly. It's a real skill that requires significant use over time to bed down some lasting neural paths. I have much more difficulty with e.g. Blender, Reaper etc. when every few years I use them. I too have start from tutorials again but I still think they are good tools despite not retaining anything between my rare uses. I bought Affinity, learned to use it but when I returned to it after some time, nothing remained in my head and I had to use inkscape instead.
For inkscape, some of the more sophisticated generative things were "use and forget" for me but they have actually improved to be much more intuitive. The main thing I lose is some of the natural touch that makes it so fast to use. I do love when I use it regularly because it's so quick to pump about svgs at the speed of thought.
Getting really good at a vector tool is such a valuable life skill for explaining all manner of tricky things whether it's for UI mockups, software architecture or graphic design stuff like logos/t-shirt/marketing designs. I live for the "how on earth have you done this?" reaction when I can create a quality diagram while on a call with people. It can really enrich the quality of interactions and reduce cycle time to create designs in real time.
I also use it for all sorts of personal stuff like interior design, DIY, scaffolding etc. I've even submitted official architectural plans I made with it. It's as valuable as a spreadsheet.
Do you have prior experience with other vector editors? For me it's pretty intuitive (save for some papercuts), but that may be due to my lack of experience with other editors.
I like Inkscape very much and use it for all my (usually quite simple) vector drawing needs. From the get go, it was quite intuitive to use - my first vector editor experience was with CorelDRAW 3 in the early 90s.
Same for me, if I want to get something done, I need illustrator (which i don't know well too, but it's way more intuitive)
There's an obscured close button in the top right corner. If you want to skip the welcome dialog just click that.
The second time it appears, you can uncheck "Show this every time" in the lower left corner and then click "New Document".
...or you could click Save on the first dialog and then click " Thanks!". You'll get the same dialog as above when you'd have closed it with the button in the corner.
I think they are implying they can't figure out how to use the program, not complaining about the helpful start screen.
Y'know, I only figured this after reading myself back the next day.
Sorry.
Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players. And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.
If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.
I did a lot of strange things in old Inkscape to achieve the same result as given by this new:
It can open Affinity Designer files!? That’s something of a buried lede.
That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.
Inkscape is one of the best and most important tools in my arsenal. From creating and editing vectors for use with a laser cutter to designing icons when tools like Illustrator are too expensive and alternatives like ChatGPT fall short, Inkscape never ceases to amaze me with its capabilities. It's remarkable how well this open-source, free application performs. Thank you, Inkscape, for being one of the most reliable and impressive apps I know!
We really need a vector editor that has some of the features of Flash's UI. I haven't seen them in other programs.
They were called Fireworks and Freehand. Sadly, they didn't survive Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.
Serif's Affinity Designer was consciously modeled on Freehand, and Quasado became GraviT which likewise was inspired by Freehand.
I am working on another SVG editor called Hyvector ( https://hyvector.com ). It is an SVG editor, but I am trying to hide the strange quirks of SVG from the user.
I'm working on Boxy SVG which combines vector drawing and animation tools: https://boxy-svg.com
Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash:
https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.
Woo-ha!
Gtk4. Meanwhile at Gimp? Puh. Maybe they will manage to port to the 14 year old Gtk3 soon. I hope it at least. I’m sure the Gimp developers doing their best and will benefit soon from Wayland and HiDPI.Good. I hope Gimp stays on GTK 3 for as long as possible so I don't have to use GTK 4.
The funny part is what the G in GTK initially represented.
Woah . I googled to make sure I read right. It's true!
It would be nice if Inkscape supported SVG P/S. We need that for BIMI, and now have to pay someone who has access to Adobe.
For anyone in a similar boat, I just heard of someone using Adobe Illustrator's 7-day trial to generate their BIMI logo file.
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-996-notes.pdf (page 18) https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/996
Thanks, I'll give it a shot.
You could just hand-edit Inkscape's plain or optimized SVG file: https://bimigroup.org/creating-bimi-svg-logo-files/
(It's really not too difficult.)
That sort of thing makes me wonder if Inkscape shouldn't have a configurable "Post-processor" option like to that used for G-code, possibly on a per-file basis (add the editing commands needed after saving to a user-editable pane).
From what I understand of Inkscape's (somewhat dodgy) extensions protocol that shouldn't be too hard with a little xml processing magic.
--edit--
Looking at the linked page that would be super trivial to implement.
That site has links to tools at github.
I've just bought a Surface Pro tablet. Does Inkscape interface work well in a tablet or with a pen?
It can be a bit fussy, but works well --- unfortunately, there hasn't really been a vector drawing program focused specifically on stylus use since Futurewave Smartsketch (which became Flash by way of Futuresplash Animator).
As noted elsethread:
Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/
If you're willing to consider a commercial option, Serif's Affinity Designer may suit.
Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient
I really hope it does, but for now it lacks in the basics such as panning (Krita can hold down a button + move pen to pan the canvas), button support (I don't think there's a way to map pen buttons to specific functions, let alone switch between them), and the drawing tools are still really basic. They are focusing on UX for the next release though, and UX issues can be discussed in the Inkscape UX Gitlab repo.
Also check out the HyVector app mentioned elsethread:
https://hyvector.com/
Calligraphy pen is still unusable, laggy and jaggy. Too slow, not enough setting increments to fine tune it, awfully, almost absurdly angular on even slightly fast motions. 0.92 remains the most responsive version. Welp, i don't know what i expected, since every time i'd check latest version it'd still be like this. Celebrating 4 years of Inkscape breaking calligraphy tool and never fixing it since.
Have they added any method of setting a tool style before drawing, rather than adjusting style after drawing?
It's always fun to set up your font, then write some text and realize it's in the wrong font and all your work was lost
I just installed 1.4 to check and it now appears to keep the font you've chosen.
What about line style etc? Is is possible to define the style of line you want and then create lines of that style.
Presently one workflow to work around it is to consider a small area of the canvas as a palette area and create lines/objects in them and apply the desires styles on them. Then duplicate these palette objects into your main drawing.
that's great, thank you for checking!
The prospect of discarding 25 years of muscle memory in Adobe Illustrator is unfathomable to me, as much as I loathe what Adobe has become.
It does have Ai shortcuts to choose from in the settings, if there's problems or inaccuracies with it you can also open an issue at https://inkscape.org/report/ .
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