[0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever
You've obviously not tried to replace Adobe Illustrator with Inkscape ;)
(edit: a flippant comment backed by much frustration. If you're creating SVGs for laser cutting then the inability to nicely use mm as a unit of measure is infuriating.)
Pretty much every time I’m working with vectors, my shapes have borders, and I want to control whether the borders are inside, on top of, or outside the shape (similar to eg box-sizing in CSS terms). As far as I can tell, inkscape still doesn’t support that :(
I do this all the time (for my mechanical plotter).
InkScape is an incredibly useful tool that can do some things that Illustrator chokes on (doesn't always load standards compliant SVG correctly and/or does weird proprietary shit) -- and vice versa, but I think there could actually be reason to install and use both.
Something like Affinity Photo is the other end of the spectrum, with nice and intuitive UI for almost everything... Though it stills falls short of old Corel Photopaint's nice and intuitive UIs
They may try to revamp ergonomics and performance. But that's their choice.
This takes a few lines of calls to imagemagick/gm or ~10 lines of python + Pillow.
Do you have any resources how to do this in GIMP?
After googling for a good while, I could not for the life of me figure out how to even get started with this.
I don't want to write an extension for GIMP - I want to use GIMP like I would an image manipulation library.
I'm sure I could get any other lib to produce the same results, but only after an hour of tweaking. That is what I ended up doing after all, because learning how to automate GIMP was harder.
Do you have some tips / links that could help me improve the dithering even further?
For my use case (a digital picture frame), I've simply rejected images that looked very bad after dithering, and that's very often
- (a) generally dark images,
- (b) very gradient-based images (banding appears) and
- (c) art with a color spectrum that's very narrow in lightness, but wide in value (i.e. most colors map to the same level of gray after converting to grayscale)
Besides using Floyd-Steinberg dithering, I have not tried anything fancy.
As I mentioned above, the exact quality of differing varies by a large amount depending on the tool. I would recommend comparing the quality of GIMP vs. other tools on a single example image.