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Comment by Endlessly | Hacker News Reader

Initial release was 16 years ago, long time coming.

What is Inkscape? “Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor. This software can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos, icons and complex paintings. Inkscape's primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG); however, many other formats can be imported and exported.”

SOURCE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape

Adobe Illustrator, is Inkscape’s main non-open-source pay-to-use competition and is 33 years old:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator

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Use both, they’re both great products depending on your needs.

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And before there was Sodipodi, still to be found in the svg files created with Inkscape

And Sodipodi started as a fork of Gill: https://www.levien.com/svg/

Here is the “Secret Origin of SVG” per the W3C: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Secret_Origin_of_SVG

Elaborate on differences? When do you use which?

Adobe is much easier to learn & use and works well with Adobe’s other 30-50 products depending on what is being done. Professionals tend to use it, so if you need to work with others, likely the best choice.

Inkscape is free, open-source, and not cloud based — and is less user friendly, has a much higher learning curve. GIMP, which is comparable to Photoshop, works okay with Inkscape, but is not comparable to the ways Adobe’s products work together.

Personally, I enjoy using Inkscape because I value the freedom it provides. Including knowing that if I create an digital asset with it and backup the build used it create it (OS, Inkscape, etc) - very likely I’ll be able to edit the file as it was when I created it; same is not likely true for Adobe products, especially over long time periods.

Highly recommend if you’re using either that you also understand the SVG file format and stick to it as much as possible.

If you have any additional more specific questions, happy to try and answer them. Love vector based graphics.

Why wouldn't Inkscape work with other tools/people as well, it uses SVG after all.

SVG is a specification, how it’s rendered and what’s supported vary from application to application, version to version, etc. Personally, seen some very nasty bugs related to moving from one rendering engine to another. If you’re working with professionals, I assure you few if any would want the additional over head of a teammate using another tool.

Beyond that, as I mentioned, GIMP is not comparable to Photoshop. If you’re going to be using Photoshop with vector based digital assets, not aware of any reasonable justification not to use Adobe’s vector application over Inkscape.

Beyond that, Adobe’s asset management and workflow management applications don’t compare to anything that’s available to anything that’s available within Inkscape.

If you’re aware of any counter claims, would welcome any more specific thoughts you have on topic.

Just another perspective but I find illustrator CC to be inscrutable. Maybe older versions were more reasonable, but I definitely and wholeheartedly prefer inkscape and use it almost exclusively. The last time I tried to use illustrator it was a total mess. I could barely create a new document without a tutorial.

Inkscape was the only free, viable vector image (svg) application in Linux that I could find a few years ago. On the other hand, GIMP is the Linux go-to for raster imaging (everything else) but AFAIK GIMP only works with vector images by converting them to raster.

I use Illustrator professionally. Some of these things may have changed since I last looked at Inkscape but I found it to be lacking in these features that are core to my workflow:

* support for CMYK work, as well as spot colors, and the whole dark art of color profiles - last I checked Inkscape was RGB-only and there are things involved in professional printing that you simply cannot do without CMYK and spot support

* global color swatches (change the swatch, everything you drew with it changes to match)

Also having 20y of Illustrator files on my hard drive that I regularly pull elements and appearance stacks out of for reuse is a compelling argument for me to stick with AI.

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