Krita 4.4.2 Released
krita.org
krita.org
I think the biggest hurdle to clear is that it needs a custom color widget, the OS widgets are not suitable due to assuming a 0...1 range.
Krita's a great piece of software and I readily admit I'm jus shamelessly trying to get someone to fix my pet peeve. But I also really do think this one feature is mostly what stands in the way of ditching Photoshop and using Krita for VFX work. In many other ways, including OpencolorIO support natively, Krita is already way ahead of Adobe's offering.
It sounds like maintaining print functionality took significant effort, and they decided it was a better use of man hours to put more time into the core functionality and suggest people use a different application to print their output if they need to do that.
I love the classic response here:
- This FOSS is missing a critical feature X
- You should do Y instead, and you are incorrect for wanting to use X in the first place!
For anyone wondering, literally every other graphics software has a print feature, from MSPaint to (yes) GIMP and Inkscape.
If having a print button and a janky pre-print dialog box is worth 200$/year to you then by all means, move your entire workflow to Adobe. Or better yet - put those 200$ on a bug bounty to implement it - I'm sure somebody would jump on it.
> I love the classic response here:
This is the exact same response as you'd get from Adobe if you requested a feature from them. If a request doesn't carry a direct profit incentive for a company, they will completely ignore it - and if you worked a lot with Adobe software you would be very familiar with that.
Yet somehow, people get more mad when small FOSS dev teams don't jump on their pet peeves immediately than when multi-million-dollar companies that they pay hundreds of $ ignore years of pleading by even rather large players in the industry to implement some pretty basic things.
It's free software, not free dev time.
https://krita-foundation.tumblr.com/post/621253203762331648/...
Getting a cross platform UI to work consistency is an impressive challenge to meet.
Getting cross platform press-quality print support working reliably, seems like another one of those terribly hard problems.
I just installed Krita after getting a 2-in-1 with active pen support, hoping to get into digital painting.
I've used GIMP and Inkscape extensively over the years, and used the printing functionality a lot.
In fact, whenever I want to print something of exact size, I'd use Inkscape.
I searched for any more information in the issue tracker. The closest I could find was https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 , which might be a concern but not really for desktop printing.
We actually removed PDF export because there's no good libraries to handle PDF cmyk support.
So I think this touches a core problem of open source: The average hobbyist does not feel this itch, hence can't scratch it. You need someone with good understanding of the printing industry, maybe access to professional printing hardware. Hard to do on hobby time or as a lone programmer. This is an example of a whole class of problems where OSS tends to do worse than the industry average.
BTW, it pains me to say this as a regular user, krita is very good software.
Like, one every two, three years.
But I happen to have a personal stake in this discussion. I'll cite my post from 3 days before this about a little project I was doing:
I took screenshots [...] cleaned them up with krita.
About every parent at our school prints a lot of little things for the kids, to color or play. As computer nerd I get questions about good program for X, and recommend e.g. paint.net, photopea, gimp, ... For my public, not printing seems a blocker.
So if you get these requests once every 2-3 years, some part of your potential audience seems missing.
This isn't one of those "FOSS devs sticking to the UNIX philosophy to a fault, usability be damned" situations. Printing is the kind of thing that is either done so rarely that the literally only two extra clicks aren't going to matter or so frequently that you want to be using a batch workflow anyways.
No offense if it just didn't occur to you at the time (I've been there), but "I'll just save the image and print that" is something that I image the vast, vast majority of computer users could figure out in no time and is surely not a significant factor in Adobe's market dominance.
> Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
- concept art - texture and matte painters - illustrations and comics