Inkscape 1.0.1 | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape 1.0.1

inkscape.org

136 pointsconstantinum37 comments

I absolutely love Inkscape for complex artwork, however I wish it would try to implement better conversion to the official web spec. After saving, I find myself manually optimizing the SVG and sometimes redoing it completely to remove a lot of fluff that isn't needed.

Just save as plain svg or optimised svg then?

Save As > Plain SVG or Optimized SVG should remove the things you don't need. You tend to have control over everything else directly in Inkscape.

that'll still generate a ton of unnecessary inline styles

Don't know if these work, but iirc there are several svg optimization/simplifiers available as JS libraries on npm and github. Is there something there that would help, perhaps?

Svgo helps a lot, I always use it to reduce the size of my SVG files, otherwise a couple of plaintext substitution get rid of all inline styles in a swift Vim macro

You might want to try Boxy SVG [1]. Its UI is heavily inspired by Inkscape.

It tries to use as little non-standard namespaces as possible, e.g. check [2] for a comparison of the markup you get after creating a new file and drawing a single rectangle.

The app uses Chromium rendering engine under the hood, so most files should render the same way as when opened with Chrome.

[1] https://boxy-svg.com

[2] https://gist.github.com/jarek-foksa/8f5bdef732827bc2a3bf49e3...

Can confirm Boxy is well worth its minuscule price. It’s also very fast.

Some of the operations are unbearably slow if images become more complex. It seems to be using paper.js, which works but is not really famous for high performance with complex paths.

And on the Web it is a classical example of "Works only on Chrome", oh well.

It works on the latest version of any Chromium-based browser such as Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, etc.

Chromium is Chrome with another book cover.

All of these are just skins over Google's code.

Does even Microsoft make any meaningful contribution to Chromium?

They do. Microsoft people were largely responsible for the improved default focus ring and input elements. There have been other notable contributions.

Well, I just tried to run one of their on-line demos and was greeted by a message from the past:

   Unsupported browser

   Please install the latest version of one
   of the following browsers to continue.

   Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Opera

"This site best viewed in Internet Explorer" is dead, long live "This site only works on the Blink engine".

Well, ghee, thanks, but I'll just go somewhere else then shall I? While I do have Vivaldi and Chromium installed I only use these to test sites, not for general-purpose browsing. Here's to hoping Mozilla either gets inspired and kicks out 75% of its administrative staff to concentrate on their actual mission or some of those developers decide to be inspired by their forefathers who started the Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox project to get rid of all that legacy cruft. Make Mozilla Great Again!

Aren't you the original developer of Gravit? I am wondering what happened to this awesome project. Did you sell it to Corel?

Gravit project was started by a different person (Alexander Adam), it is now owned and developed by Corel.

Thanks. I saw that you posted about Gravit in the past, so I was curious. Good luck with your project.

Agreed. I love Inkscape but I can't use it without svgo.

Jake Archibald has a great tool to clean SVGs https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

I like Inscape but I wish they added GPU acceleration, at least for moving things. It's unbearably slow on macOS.

Have they finally started shipping builds for Mac that don't depend on X11 to run? Because that'd be a prerequisite for performing halfway decently on macOS.

Inkscape is (speaking generally here, not just about performance) pretty good on Linux, tolerable on Windows, and awful on Mac. That's kind of a hole that a lot of cross-platform apps get stuck in, though-- especially GTK apps (which, historically, haven't supported the Mac well at all), but even QT (which at least tries to automatically adapt to macOS idioms) doesn't quite get it right. MacOS UI conventions are just too far away from Windows and Linux conventions to expect to be able to get them for free.

What are the problems with Qt on Mac?

I can confirm that the Mac version doesn't require X11.

Would it be possible to ship something like Inkscape with a web/browser interface?

Yes, browsers (especially Chrome) are capable of doing this. There are a few browser based vector editors (Gravit, Method Draw, Vectr, Janvas, Boxy). None of them is perfect, some are slow, and especially when it comes to complex drawings or advanced features like boolean operations and path offsetting, most of them run into serious issues. But you can expect to see a browser based Inkscape replacement within the next two years.

you can also try to launch Inkscape with GDK_BACKEND=broadway and open it in a browser

It seems very doable with flutter, as it GPU accelerated by default and can compile to web.

It didn't require x11 last time I checked, but startup was startup and some operations were quiet slow.

Yeah, removal of the X11 dependency on Mac was one of the major features of the v1.0 release a few months ago IIRC.

FWIW, at some point last year, I switched away from Illustrator to using Inkscape, for better native SVG support. On my wacom-enabled Coffee Lake Thinkpad, I've yet to find an app in either Windows or MacOS that's as responsive to pen input as Inkscape is under Linux.

It's just a shame that Gnome support for mobile Intel graphics sucks so badly.

Performance on the first non-X11 release was unbearable (compared to merely slow for the previous release). I don't know if that's been fixed -- I'm still on the old X11 release.

Its also single core...

There was a GSoC project for it this year, but I can't find any actual code: https://linkmauve.fr/blog/2020/06/12/bringing-gpu-accelerati...

Do they even have MacOS packages for the newer versions?

yes

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/jobs

Didn't even know it hit v1. A lot of work went into a patch release though, including features. Seems a little nonstandard, but good job.

It's had plenty of coverage here!

Inkscape 1.0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089820 (533 points/4 months ago/123 comments)

Inkscape 1.0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071185 (98 points/4 months ago/6 comments)

Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855357 (710 points/5 months ago/156 comments)

Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969 (603 points/12 months ago/165 comments)

Inkscape launches versions 0.92.4 and 1.0 alpha – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940568 (299 points/2 years ago/68 comments)

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