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Comment by struppi | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to be that guy, but I always had the impression that Inkscape is way more cumbersome and difficult than it should be. And it seems to me that there is very little progress.

I don't use/need vector graphics editors very much, but I now bought affinity designer. It seems to be way more professional, and is quite affordable (basically in the same price category as Inkscape, at least for me).

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I don't know why you are downvoted for your opinion, but totally agree that Inkscape is pretty low quality and buggy as well. On the Mac specifically the experience is so 1990s and un-macOS (yeah I know, it's an X app)

I used it for a while for generating SVG files, ended up writing a script that would optimize the crappy files it generated and reduce them 10 to 20 times in some cases. Oh and then there are these odd floating point drifts (coordinate 10 becomes 10.035 etc.). Seems like one of those pieces of software that would be very difficult or impossible to fix.

If you're using it on OSX with the X11 layer it's kind of awful. But on Linux, or even on Windows I've found it reasonably decent. I found it less annoying to spin up a fedora virtualbox to run it on OSX than to use the X11 layer.

Its also not great on small screen resolutions.

Yes, I also had to create some SVG files during a project for a client and used Inkscape on Windows for that. Then hand-edited all of them, because I wanted to get rid of all the crap before importing them.

I basically just bought Affinity Designer as a knee-jerk reaction because I disliked Inkscape so much.

Inkscape adds a bunch of metadata to it's svg's, but also has a "Simple SVG" save-as option, did you try it ?

I did try it. Apart from metadata there are two other major problems: it generates a lot of unnecessary attributes with their default values, and also the floating point errors I mentioned. The latter can affect the appearance of your graphics on your screen unfortunately, i.e. a vertical line with X=10 is one thing but X=10.035 is another.

Optimized SVG is the one you want.

I find that the latest Adobe Illustrator does a pretty decent job with SVG's but of course Adobe stuff is a matter of taste (and is overpriced too).

there's a branch that gets gtk+ quartz (no X11) support, I'm sure you can find a build, the experience is a lot better.

I have that branch, and makes Inkscape awesome on OSX

It's great on windows. Maybe mac's not their main focus, as it's less than 10% of market share.

Not to mention it's really really slow when you start editing stuff with even simple effects like drop shadow, it's good for some things (like say you get an SVG file and you need to convert fonts to curves with a free app or something like that) but it's very limited and the UI is ghastly (the side panels that open when you edit effects and stuff in particular - huge controls with so much padding and ugly layout). GTK+ is just the worst for these kinds of feature packed UI (it can be OK for material design style UIs where you have few elements and don't mind the empty space, but not densely packed stuff like graphics effect panels and dialogs), GIMP and Inkscape suffer because of it.

It's a GTK+ X11 application on MacOS X. Last time I tried it, it was completely unusable--copy-paste totally non-functional (would paste vector selections as bitmaps).

On Linux, it's vastly more usable, and quite polished for a GTK+ application.

Ther's a faq item about this issue: https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#copypaste-rasterizes-obje...

There is no such thing as a polished GTK app. GTK widgets are really bad designed take for instance the `open` or `save` dialogues, only somebody how does not care about usability could come with that. Any application (no exceptions) made in GTK+ can be done better, faster in Qt through a much more polished and robust API. it's ashamed that inkscape is tied with such bad widget toolkit.

After trying to use Inkscape for few days to draw myself vector logo in few versions for my OS projects, I've decided to bite it and get Affinity Designer while it was 20% off at App Store. I've had logo I was pleased in few versions and setup to export in all formats and sizes I've required in two hours. Its not even complex stuff, its basic things like making square with each corner having different radius.

I have been using Gravit.io and their Twitter(template)for custom Tweets it's fast,online & convenient.

How is Affinity Designer, do you run it on Windows?

I'm running it on windows, only had one quick try yet. Looks promising, but didn't do any serious work with it yet.

Inkscape is free, so unless you mean using stolen property, which is not free, there is no comparable vector image editor on the market for that price.

No, I am not talking about stolen property. But a one-time payment of 40€ is close enough to free for me to give it a try. That's why I said basically the same price category, not "the same price".

Or unless you include your time in the total cost of ownership, at which point an efficiently designed UI becomes crucial.

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