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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.

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I've found that Inkscape, GIMP, and Krita pretty much fill all my graphics-creation needs, and have never felt the need to use a commercial application instead.

If you have a specific need that you can't figure out how to achieve in Inkscape, then asking how to do that specific thing would be much more productive.

Slap in Hugin and Darktable (or Rawtherapee) for photography and I would say I've not had issues ditching Adobe after CS6 and switching to Linux.

(With a massive exception for no color management in Wayland)

What OS do you use?

As an iOS dev for a living and a mainly MacOS user I have unfortunately found the UI/UX experience of Inkscape and GIMP (especially) to be kinda rough to use, I feel like maybe it’s better on Linux?

I am an artist. Illustrator is my main tool, and has been for about twenty years now. And I've never felt much desire to switch when I look at Inkscape's features.

Apparently it still doesn't do CMYK, never mind deal with spot inks: https://inkscape.org/learn/faq/#how-create-graphics-cmyk-col... - that was a deal-killer the last time I looked at it, probably something like a decade ago, and it's still a deal-killer for me now.

I dunno if that's me saying "it's not any good" or not but it sure isn't me saying I'm willing to spend a few days fucking around with something that can't do something my work requires on a regular basis.

Is CMYK used anywhere except printing still? Nowadays print media become rare, thus the need for its support is less. Just my non-expert opinion.

CMYK is only for print - but a pro artist is gonna send a lot of stuff to print. Even in this age of a lot of digital distribution:

Someone's gotta do the packaging for almost everything you buy at stores.

Go to a convention: someone designed all the signage for the con, the badges, as well as the individual booths and any amount of what they may be selling. Plus all the fliers and stickers whatnot people want to hand out.

Gotten anything shipped lately? Did it come in a box with more than one color on it? Those are probably a couple of spot inks, rather than CMYK. That's a thing where instead of mixing a color from little dots of the primaries, you load up a tank in the printer with ink mixed to a very specific color.

Got a collection of Pokemon cards? Pull out those extra-rare ones with the foil and gloss and stuff. The precise process for actually putting those on the card varies and may not involve anything resembling "ink" at all but a lot of those are specified as spot inks too.

I could probably come up with more examples but there is a cat milling about my ankles who is very vocal about her need for some playtime. :)

Automated RGB-to-CMYK translation has gotten better over the years but if you are a pro, you will probably have had enough nasty surprises when that fails that you know how to do it yourself, maybe you're even like me and work in CMYK to begin with as a rule so that you never have to fuck around with finessing that translation.

(And yeah, I drifted from CMYK to spot inks, basically there is a whole world of Printing Process that an RGB-only program is unable to do, and while you can come up with workarounds they are all a ton of hassle.)

Another barrier is the stark difference in UX paradigms.

Illustrator and Inkscape have very different paradigms. Inkscape draws from the Corel Draw camp, and the barrier to use for anyone skilled in one or the other goes way back.

I have moderate skill using Illustrator and am adept at Inkscape, and that goes right back to Corel being totally capable enough and cheap, and because I basically had licenses bought for me, Corel has always been free.

As Inkscape really began to be robust, I found it simple to step off the Corel train, rarely missing a beat.

I use it for lots of stuff, but I have to say, at least the Mac version gets unusably slow in some situations - not even highly complex ones (large hi dpi imported bitmap graphics, etc).

But is it good? Hell yeah. Learn the keys and the quirks its like the vi of vector graphics - your fingers can dance on the keyboard and work at twice the pace you get from mouse driven point and click type workflow. You will note nearly all the "complainers" are people saying "I tried it for 5 minutes and gave up because of X" - if that's you then, yeah. But you probably wouldnt like vi either.

I've used it for years as a go-to solution whenever anythhing vector based was needed. It's a solid tool.

It's by far the best open source vector editor out there. Whatever that means varies from person to person. I don't do vectors for publishing so CMYK support is never on my mind. But other people do and if and how this works in Inkscape can be a no-starter.

I use it a lot. Plenty good for me

For our friends the "is it good enough for me to use, oh and BTW what I mean is can you name a selection of random impressive graphics people, because even better if they use this tool at work" software meta-evaluators out there--I really recommend tightening up the spec a bit and figuring out what kind of project or workplace you want to see it used in to determine whether it's "good" for example.

You could even send out free evaluation copies and see if it sticks in your favorite impressive industry. :-)

It's shot on 4k-8k resolutions even with the most basic vector documents.

Maybe on Mac. Works great on Linux at 4k+ with an nvidia.

Have you donated? Made a merge request? Bluntly, there’s your answer. ;-)

Why would I donate or contribute to something that I don't use? I'm not even an artist.

Indeed, why even comment for that matter?

I was curious about it, so I asked. Why is that a problem?

Software quality is a function of the effort put into it. A generic “is it good yet?” question is not especially useful. It depends on a lot of things.

Don’t take it personally, I probably read the same question at slashdot in ‘97.

That might have been me also.

i use it for all my icon creation needs, i like it just fine. it's not what i would call intuitive in terms of workflow but i get the feeling that vector graphics in general just aren't

I've used it for well over a decade, I'm very happy with it.

It is far away from the "Blender of vector graphics" status, and I think that only clunky UI is stopping it to become that.

Color management i.e. CMYK and spots weren't working last time I checked. You can use Scribus to convert colors based on a profile, but color should be handled from the beginning.

If its color management was good and it imports from/exports to pdf well, I wouldn't need Illustrator anymore. I honestly hate illustrator, would be glad to switch, but I'm more likely to move to Affinity than to Inkscape.

I use Krita if I need CMYK, but I don't do much print work anymore. (Both work great on Linux.)

I remember using inkscape for laser cutting, something that, I think, should be basic - a few lines a circles, some red, some black. It would crash like every two hours.

I have no real arts skills and this was on Windows, but I walked away with an inpression that it's not a tool I would want to use proffeshionally. That was about 2 years ago

"It would crash like every two hours."

You'd hope Adobe was better than this too.

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