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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

It bums me out to hear SVG is in such limbo, I've been looking forward to SVG 1.2 support. It seems to be taking a long time, I guess this is why.

It's strange because I know many many companies are using SVG at least a bit for their sites. Maybe it's simmering just under the threshold where it seems necessary to have to do business, but so many sites would be hosed if SVG suddenly went away.

Is part of the problem authoring tools? Every time I need to make some SVG by hand, I look around and keep coming back to Inkscape and Illustrator. I can't afford Illustrator, and Inkscape has just never stuck for me, it feels very clunky. I've used lots of the other tools out there but nothing seems great.

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> Is part of the problem authoring tools? Every time I need to make some SVG by hand, I look around and keep coming back to Inkscape and Illustrator. I can't afford Illustrator, and Inkscape has just never stuck for me, it feels very clunky. I've used lots of the other tools out there but nothing seems great.

I totally get this. I don't have Illustrator, but occasionally I get Illustrator produced SVGs and they remind me of HTML produced by early 2000 Word.

And I hate Inkscape with a passion, mostly the UI. I like exact coordinates for doing technical diagrams, and Inkscape seems to make that really hard. I have no issues with UIs that have a learning curve, and have previously gotten used to InDesign and Blender fine. But it seems like I'm fighting Inkscape all the way, only to have the output be of low quality.

What I actually use now is TikZ in LaTeX + dvisvgm, which I then pipe through SVGO. Super happy with the results, although writing TikZ isn't exactly smooth either. And LaTeX is a whole different world of pain and annoyance, so using it for just SVG seems wrong. But TikZ/PGF is pretty mature, and dvisvgm has a great, clean code base.

I started out doing vector based illustration in Illustrator and have been using Inkscape for probably 16 years now. I really like Inkscape for the performance and simplicity of it. It's also got a bunch of features I've come to enjoy, like specifying exact positions for guides, and guides on angles. The menus and tool pallets kind of suck, but I don't use those anyway. Really from what I've seen in the industry, most designers are heavy keyboard users and aren't clicking around on menus to do stuff. It takes too long!

The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color, so when I need something printed I bring it in to Illustrator and make sure my colors are mapped to the appropriate CMYK colors.

> The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color

This has been painful for me. As a side project I made a card game and produced the cards in SVG as a template (handwritten, but I use Inkscape to convert to PDF/PNG, so Inkscape has to render it correctly), a CSV file for all text content that should appear in it, and some scripting. SVG has been awesome for that, as it's a vector graphics format that's very easy to programmatically modify.

But when it comes to printing things you suddenly find yourself in a world where RGB is downright painful. Slightly off colours, wrong black tones (RGB black is blacker than CMYK black, so it's always mixed with colours). It probably wouldn't matter much with photos, but text and shapes are very affected.

So in the end we had to take Illustrator to the final PDF, convert to CMYK, and make sure every last bit of black is CMYK(0,0,0,1). SVG as a web technology only caters to sRGB as a colour space; there have been attempts at standardising CMYK, and Batik had a half-finished implementation, I think. But eventually both the standardisation efforts and the implementation were pulled, IIRC.

I had similar frustrations with Inkscape's UI, even after years of using it. I've been happy with Affinity Designer [0] (Windows version) as a replacement that doesn't require a monthly subscription.

[0] https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

This looks really good, thanks! Nice support for isometry.

CorelDraw is really nice for vector editing. The included PhotoPaint has languished on the vine but its unique object interface makes many things that are obtuse in PS or Gimp easy to handle.

That being said it's hard to beat Inkscape's native SVG support. You don't get surprised by fills and filters bloated into bitmaps like the legacy tools are wont to do.

While inkscape is fairly terrible at exact work, you can do it by using the builtin xml editor. I designed a fully working planetary gear train for a clock in inkscape. It involves placing mostly rectangles exactly using the XML editor and then using the snapping tools to place other objects relative to these exact positions. place rectangle -> control-shift -> change x and y properties.

> I can't afford Illustrator, and Inkscape has just never stuck for me, it feels very clunky. I've used lots of the other tools out there but nothing seems great.

Have you tried Affinity Designer? I'm not a designer, but for me it's simply amazing. And it's only $50, no subscription bullshit.

They seem to have an incredibly effective marketing strategy. The launch trailers for both of their flagship graphics editors were super sexy.

But are all the features really there?

I watched a few videos of people using it about half a year ago and I noticed that a) a few essential features were missing and b) the interfaces have limited room for customization, and they are split up across several "workflow" views that really just get in the way.

Does that mirror your own experience? Have you used other vector drawing programs like Inkscape, Illustrator, or Blender?

> Does that mirror your own experience? Have you used other vector drawing programs like Inkscape, Illustrator, or Blender?

My experience with creative tools such as this is very limited. I mostly customize things and follow instructions from video tutorials. That said, I can't stand Inkscape on macOS. It's a disaster, and not worth the trouble.

I've used Illustrator during their 30 day trial, but since I'm not using it on a daily basis, it's not worth the subscription.

Affinity hands-down has the most attractive pricing scheme I've seen for its class of software. I have no doubt it isn't worth every penny. I prefer supporting Free Software like GIMP and Inkscape when possible, but there are some things that Photoshop does much better, and some of these things were absent in my evaluation of Affinity Photo.

The only software I've found to have a better pricing overall scheme is the Substance suite. $20 a month rent-to-own, and you can "buy" individual programs from the suite with this strategy one at a time instead of all at once, in case you want to secure ownership of a particular program. It's an incredible business model for software.

I prepare files for my laser cutter, I used to use Illustrator but the subscription fees were just ridiculous. When Affinity Designer came out I bought it and started using that instead.

It definitely doesn't have feature parity with Illustrator and while quite polished feels like a beta to me because of some interface issues. The one that always bugs me is that it's really painful to delete a segment between two points (ie. for vector A-B-C-D I want to remove B-C and end up with two vectors A-B and C-D).

I have an illustrator friend who uses Affinity and he loves it because he doesn't have the same precision requirements I do (every extra line in a laser design is wasted time on the cutter). So it depends what you're doing with it.

Affinity is committed to continuing development on it and those updates are free, and adoption has been quite good so I expect issues like this to be fixed eventually.

I've used Illustrator and Inkscape, but Affinity Designer is my daily go-to. There's certainly some stuff it doesn't have that I miss, but overall it's a great piece of software, with fantastic performance and enough novel, useful features that it's definitely worth the price, and using over the other two.

You should try Sketch out. I also despise making SVGs in Illustrator. I find it much, much easier in Sketch.

Also try out Figma. Switched to it a few months ago and it's been mostly awesome (some meh stuff like shoddy offline support)

Agreed, I've found the SVG produced by Sketch to be pretty palatable (for small graphics at least).

For me who is comfortable in inkscape or illustrator my issue has been a library thing when it comes to using SVG. You end up having to try and strip out half the rendering engine of something way too big (Skia, Cairo) for your one off thing and it just ends up dominating the complexity of the project in the early stages.

It feels that there isn't a really great SVG library to build consensus around compared to a lot of other things that people can hack on.

> Is part of the problem authoring tools? Every time I need to make some SVG by hand

I find it strange how unfriendly or unintuitive it is to do by hand. I'd like to use it for more programmatic stuff, but it feels like more of an interchange format than something most of us should understand.

That may be one of the problems with SVG 2. SVG in its full capacity seems rarely used on the web.¹

SVG as a static vector image format, or as an export target for other tools, or as a vector image format easily scripted on the web ... all those things seem to be met already by what is implemented in browsers. What is missing have been mostly things that can be emulated with a bit more work (e.g. markers were problematic in some implementations for a while). SVG 2 brings a lot more things that make it easier for people to author SVG by hand (new path commands), as well as some features that have been simply impossible to do before (gradient meshes). But those need to be implemented, of course, and since SVG seems to be doing well enough currently, it looks like no more effort is warranted (and it seems to be hard to market it as well as new JS features). From the outside as a user of SVG it looks like all major browser vendors have given up improving their SVG support, since it's almost complete in all of them and there's mostly feature parity between them.

In a way the same happens to the canvas 2D context, but admittedly, there's little to improve or change in an immediate-mode raster graphics API since those have been mostly the same since at least the 80s, so I guess there isn't a newer specification to implement in contrast to SVG.

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¹ At work we still regularly stumble over things browser vendors broke in their latest update when it comes to SVG (we use it to build an interactive graph editing component) that apparently weren't noticed when testing on the top 1000 sites or so. It can be frustrating.

if you use Mac OS or Windows, check out Affinity Designer. Its a very polished vector drawing program as powerful as Adobe Illustrator but only $50 and it included some image editing tools. it works with SVG, PDF, and other format. It pairs well with Affinity Photo which gives Photoshop a run for its money (and is also $50)

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