Inkscape 1.1.1 Is Released
inkscape.org
inkscape.org
There are issues of course - memory leaks and odd GUI handling on Windows in particular - but I've had the same sort of issues with Adobe products as well.
A really awesome thing about Inkscape for me is how it uses standard SVG as its default file format. It makes a lot of sense and makes the raw artwork highly exportable and flexible.
And with respect to color management and Wayland with the rumored next release of nvidia drivers potentially supporting Wayland that's about the only thing that would stop me from switching on all my machines. I know there is an open issue for working on that in both the Wayland official protocols and wl-roots so hopefully soon.
Of course Blender also provides everything you'd need for visual effects, tracking and separate passes since it's a full 3D suite as well.
Honestly, video editing can be crashy and resource-intensive so don't be afraid to pay for something.
And only $300. Once. Resolve is amazing. It replaced both Premiere and AE in my studio. Not bad for something that used to cost about $600k. You can get away with a hell of a lot in the free version as well.
History of Resolve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvP5_HFQSk
However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and have been using Davinci Resolve, where even the free basic version was light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I was a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there was between FOSS and commercial video editors. I haven't looked at the FOSS versions since then, perhaps they have improved.
I know Krita has a decent animation tool, but it's only raster, and I haven't encountered a really good vector tool yet.
The biggest downside to Blender is that the UI can be a bit intimidating since it covers so many aspects of CGI.
It's by far the most powerful and versatile piece of OSS I've ever used. I'd heavily recommend getting into it if you're a creative in general. It also has a really nice community to help out when you inevitably get lost in the menus.
Right now, I have a couple-year-old permanent license to Toon Boom, which is very good, but of course it is very much not open source (and I do not believe they even let you do permanent licenses anymore). I'm not an animator, I just play with stuff occasionally, so I can't really justify ongoing costs, which is part of why I would prefer an OSS version.
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This code was open-sourced in August 2021 when Haiku shut down the commercial collaboration/storage services connected to Haiku Animator.
What limitations does https://www.synfig.org have?
Usecase: export to Discord / Telegram animated stickers and my Godot Engine extension module for lottie.
I've been building out some backend stuff lately so there's a bunch of new features waiting to go in. https://github.com/Logicalshift/flo_draw has some demonstrations of the sort of procedural animation features I'm planning on adding, for instance.
As for After Effects / Premiere Pro I've been using DaVinci Resolve / HitFilm.
I never looked back. It does the job. I never have to look for cracked software in order to open my old files or use my acquired skills.
It just works.
Not nice, but there you have it. It would be great if there was an Adobe SVG format in those cases perhaps.
In my experience using SVG for portability is a minefield.
The solution was Affinity Designer. Too bad, but at least it's an easy purchase rather than a subscription.
For icons and similar you can often go back to the most basic things: Filled paths with solid colors and gradients. That should render pretty much everywhere where there's at least some SVG support.
Inkscape is the only tool pushing the SVG standard forward right now. Mesh gradients, SVG2.0 text flow, and much more besides. None of it supported by Adobe, Chrome, Firefox or librsvg. Only found in Inkscape and it's not like Inkscape broke the standards, we went to the w3c and got involved in setting the spec and then implemented it.
If you have broken svg files, report them to https://inkscape.org/report
Probably is not their fault or main target OS, but is so hard to find a free or open source alternative with the same functionality for mac.
I have yet to try it, but maybe there’s a way of going through XQuartz, which might help. I hear they recently switched to GTK’s direct Quartz backend, which I can imagine is causing the problems.
Is that using a native build or via Rosetta?
That's downright impressive!
Adobe software these days is just slow and painful to use.
So far as I can tell, the primary good reason to maintain a modern version of Adobe products is so that they can interoperate with other people's modern version of Adobe products. (Though I understand Photoshop has released some nice new features recently.) Indeed, you could even have a recent version when needed and a faster, leaner, older version for quotidian work.
I've seen an open ticket that puts points the finger at refresh rates being out of sync. Don't know if a traditional scroll wheel would fix it, but I really like my Magic Mouse.
One feature I missed in earlier versions was the ability to define styles (like line styles) and select the style before drawing an element, rather than draw an element then setting its style afterwards. If that was possible I could select a line style and draw like any number of elements of that style, instead of going to each drawn element and changing its style. Is it possible to use that workflow in present versions?
Another nice feature would have been to have an integrated library of shapes, to use in your own diagrams.
Inkscape has Symbol libraries. (from the menu : Object > symbols).
You can create you own library. PS: there is also this project: https://github.com/PanderMusubi/inkscape-open-symbols
Interested to know where somebody here has experience contributing to the project with code, on how friendly is the project and team?
I see the sources are at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
It's nice to see all the new features that are being added; they really feel like the project might be going from niche tool for SVG fanboys to actually usable by a wide variety of graphics people.
So far I've used inkscape for almost anything, from animated web graphics to 3D-Printing (OpenSCAD lets you import SVG files directly and extrude them into 3D). I'd almost like to call it "the blender of 2D"
Of course, I'm talking mostly about Sketch that pioneered an approach with a lot of tiny things done right. When transitioning to Sketch from tools like fireworks or Inkscape, I was amazed how right they did the work with coordinates, half-pixels and masks, and various copy-duplicate mechanics. Guys, it is OK to steal interface innovations from Sketch! Figma did it all the time, and so can you!
Was amazing contributing as an open source contributor to the Samsung team at https://github.com/Samsung/thorvg and https://github.com/Samsung/rlottie.
`rlottie` is used in Discord and telegram for animated stickers and `thorvg` is the work-in-progress next generation animated vector / static vectors technology.
Hope that animated vectors is important to more people.
If Inkscape is useful to you, or you like the idea of it being available free of charge for others, please consider donating to the contributors.
Inkscape has information here https://inkscape.org/support-us/fund-contributors/
I click and drag and nothing happens for at least 1 second.
The UI is either too small, or it kind of looks ok except that the icons on the toolbars become huge and make the toolbars themselves take up a third or even half of the screen :-(
Hope they keep up the good work.