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Comment by asab | Hacker News Reader

I’ve used Inkscape for about 10 hours, and found it tough to use. Do you automate or script any of this process?

That program is a Rorschach test for how people’s brains work. It’s either delightfully clunky and you totally get how it’s going to function, or is the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever touched and it is confusing why anyone would recommend it. I am highly skeptical there is much middle ground.

Illustrator has a lot of this too despite many different UI decisions. I tend to describe it as “designed for aliens and people who think like aliens”.

Which includes me, it’s been my main art tool for twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of people scream about how terrible it is that it doesn’t work like Photoshop.

So really I think that “a serious vector editor” is just gonna be hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.

> Illustrator has a lot of this too despite many different UI decisions... I’ve seen a lot of people scream about how terrible it is that it doesn’t work like Photoshop.

Try sK1[0], Scribus[1] & AzPainter[2] ;)

[0] https://sk1project.net/sk1/

[1] https://www.scribus.net/

[2] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter

It's also interesting that the two editors seem to work for different people. I learned with Illustrator many years ago and can still use it decently well, though I rarely do so. At work I've attempted to use Inkscape, not having an Illustrator license, and completely failed every time I try.

You'd think one lightly-used (so no deep muscle memory, etc.) vector graphics program would be much the same as another... nope.

> It’s either delightfully clunky and you totally get how it’s going to function, or is the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever touched and it is confusing why anyone would recommend it.

It is merely a domain-specific program and requires specific training to use effectively.

This is true of Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, Illustrator, AutoCAD, Altium, etc.

I taught myself photoshop, GIMP, autocad, solidworks, and Altium, all to reasonable proficiency. Personally couldn’t figure the first thing out with Inkscape.

Another comment nailed it, they made literally alien UI choices.

As someone prone to the same failings I don't think they made alien UI choices, I think they made programmer UI choices where the programmers were struggling to make a reasonable UI choice, like the programmer's initial idea is to just make a text box and write a value but then they realize that is bad so they need to make some sort of interface to do it and they don't really have any taste about how any of the stuff should be laid out but they have looked at other graphical editors of course so they have sort of an idea of what is wanted.

It does not feel designed, it feels laid out by a programmer mimicking some other graphical editor from memory on an ad hoc basis.

Go talk about Vim someplace else

I last used Inkscape in anger about 4 years ago. I had gotten pretty effective with it. Lately I’ve found it to have slowed down dramatically. I can’t understand why they would’ve allowed its performance to regress so dramatically. It’s become unbearable to use for seemingly no difference in functionality.

Having said all that, it still makes sense to me, for the most part. I watched a lot of tutorials when I learned it back in the day, however.

Are there ways to make inkscape work more... symbolically/logically?

I tried making an SVG manually, using real basic integer coordinates.

Then I wondered if inkscape could do better, and imported it.

It took my nice shapes, like a rectangle from 0,0 to 50,100 and mangled all the coordinates into floating point numbers like 0.0123,0.00456 49.9998,100.00123 (not exactly, but you get the idea)

I work in inkscape a lot, and aesthetically like to keep things aligned on integers where possible. Makes it easier to edit by hand if needed, keeps things aligned, and keeps files small.

You have to be careful about when you move, scale, group, ungroup, etc. But I have found it pretty reasonable to stay on nice round numbers with inkscape. I feel like inkspace is BETTER for that than say illustrator.

Worst case you can export as "Optimized SVG" and reduce the number of decimals. Make sure you check it after though since it can change the design when rounding.

Inkscape includes the border width in the displayed object size and position. So an SVG file with a 100 units square and a 1 unit border will be a 101 units square in Inkscape. And if you change the stroke width the object size changes. This causes the coordinate mangling you saw.

Consequently, I find it impossible to do precise CAD style diagrams in Inkscape. Of course, it's not designed for that.

It used to be rock-solid, too, but recently it's becoming quite buggy (at least on Windows).

I don't know exactly when/which version, but some time in the last 12-18 months.

Since it's "just SVG" the beauty of it is you can use any XML tool or just a text editor.

Inkscape needs some getting used to for sure but still is a very capable vector graphics editor and I'm glad it exists. Not sure we'd be able to put in the effort into a new tool of this depth if we were to start today (same with GIMP).

I noticed some regression on Ubuntu 18/20 though: the integrated XML editor crashed, and the weird property dialog sometimes doesn't pan into view. Don't know if that has something to do with Ubuntu or gtk/gnome specifically, but Ubuntu Studio appears to have moved to KDE (or alternatively XFCE) recently. And switching to a KDE-based distro such as OpenSuse or Manjaro (or Studio) is what I'm planning to do anyway.

> I’ve used Inkscape for about 10 hours, and found it tough to use. Do you automate or script any of this process?

You mean converting scanned drawings image into scale drawings vector form?

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