Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

I moved from Inkscape to Affinity Designer. The interface for Affinity Designer is orders of magnitude better but I do like that Inkscape lets you load + save to SVG files instead of being geared towards a proprietary forward. However, after a while, I kept finding when I would Google "how to X in Affinity Designer" and find a feature I thought was obvious was missing with no plans to implement it.

I ended up switching to Sketch and it's orders of magnitude again better for me. I primarily draw icons, logos and interface mockups. Sketch gives you lots of ways for quickly iterating over lots of mockups that I couldn't find in Affinity Designer so I'm much happier now.

Either way, they're both good for different use cases and both have free trials.

I'm considering Figma now because I don't like being tied to using a Mac and want something that might work on a Chromebook. You can run Inkscape on Chromebooks now but I'm pretty sure sure I can't go back to the interface. Are there any alternatives I haven't considered?

Yes! I ran into exactly the same thing with Inkscape, aftering purchasing Affinity thinking that it was going to be the 'pro' version of Inkscape. Now I'm regularly going back to Inkscape for features that Affinity doesn't consider to be important:

1) Auto-trace (come on - I could write this myself, not implemented yet?)

2) Provide option to preserve aspect-ratio in exported SVGs

Makes me wonder whether it's worth the continued investment in learning.

Also, I am not sure 'personas' is the best choice. After trying both, I somewhat prefer Inkscape's single UI which balances the needs of any sort of editing.

I find it quite jarring to go looking for a control for 10 seconds until I realize I'm in the wrong persona. Maybe I just need more practice though.

3) Gradient mesh fill

4) Flexible guide lines for free 3D perspective drawing

5) Things are rasterized, which are for sure supported in SVG or PDF (well done, inkscape)

6) (optional) TeX export

I don’t know much about Inkscape’s press capabilities, but Affinity Designer’s are what make it so valuable for me. The first illustration app good enough for me to move off of Adobe. The proprietary format may be necessary to support features for press/Adobe compatibility.

Anyway, with all these graphics tools like Affinity and Pixelmator that are an order of magnitude less than what came before, I don’t mind holes in feature sets—they’re just a set of tools to pick between for each job.

I remember being a super satisfied user of Sketch many years ago, and was then burned with the amount of bugs when they moved from version 2 to 3 (if my memory serves). I actually bought Affinity Designer then, on the spot (again, if memory serves that was 7 years ago or so). So far for my low-level use case it has been excellent, and have eventually added the full suite (Photo, Publisher, Designer) to my computer (or my partner's). I no longer need to edit complex things, so Affinity is a great tool. Although Inkscape has its place still, as a "just in case SVG editor".

Affinity Designer - File - Export PDF EPS SVG

You can directly open these files. The .afdesign format of course is proprietary, and support for import and export of these formats does what I need.

> Affinity Designer - File - Export PDF EPS SVG

What if I want to open an existing SVG file, quickly tweak it and save it in place though? The only way I know involves way too much clumsy clicking. That's what I meant by "geared towards" their own format - they don't make it easy to stick to just SVG.

I use SVG for the majority of my work with Affinity Designer. I save an .afdesign file. But what I'm shipping is the SVG. I just realized that Affinity Designer can directly open PDF files, so the only reason I ever opened Inkscape is gone now!

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