Inkscape 1.2 released
inkscape.org
inkscape.org
There is a feature count/learning curve price for this, I will readily admit. Sometimes, untenably so. My claim is simply that FOSS tools are important as a backstop/foundation.
I feel that any problem solved exclusively by proprietary software is only solved temporarily and for a tiny percentage of the world population. If the company goes away or the IP otherwise becomes inactive, that's it. Especially with cloud software. With FOSS, the software never really goes away. The problem mostly stays solved, and anyone can resume the work if they are willing and able. I'd imagine a forked FOSS version of Win2k, VB6, or maybe the late-2000s Google indexer (bit of a stretch) would be quite successful today, for example. Guess I'll never be sure of that.
Just musing after a beer and some Red Vines - I welcome any criticism or kindred spirits.
Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial.
So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it. I don’t see how that’s anyone else’s business.
If you're looking for FOSS DTP, try Scribus.
FOSS isn't about it being free though. You've already stated the issue:
> FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources
That doesn't mean FOSS is has as a moral to not charge for software.
1. No, you won't. Unless you think almost no software is worth it, or you're a billionaire. And most people don't have the money to be any of the software they would find useful (e.g. an office suite, an operating system).
2. The issue isn't whether you would pay for it or not. The issue - well, the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software. I would say 'no'.
I think you'r interpreting what I said as buying all rights to the software outright or something. I'm not quite sure. I meant buy as in pay for the right to use it.
>the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software
It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances, for periods of time. I think it's legitimate to extend those protections to software.
I understand you disagree on that, but for me there's both a moral and an economic dimension to the question. Some forms of information should be shareable and in the open, where that is in the public interest, sure. Political speech for example. However where there's a creative or economic value, as with a novel or software, the fact is treating sharing it as a free speech right would be economically catastrophic.
Investment in media production including software development, writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse. I know technically there are theoretically alternate funding models, and even a very few examples of successful projects, but the barriers to entry and risks of such models are in practice so severe that it would still be economically and culturally devastating. That's why you're not going to get public support for such a change.
I meant the same thing. You don't have the money for it. Ok, maybe if you mortgaged your house, you might.
> It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
One can debate what powers have actually been legitimately delegated, if any (also depends on where in the world you live.) I argue people have certainly not delegated the power to government to prevent them from sharing copies of files and running those files.
> Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances
If you mean that Queen Anne decided to prop up the printers' guild, then yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
> Investment in ... software development
This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software, and by now it's completely bunk.
> Investment in ... writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse.
Not only would this not collapse, it would barely be impacted, seeing how people copy all of this stuff already - albeit not necessarily legally - and there are public libraries for books.
As for democratic legitimacy, I think your position is absurd. There is clearly no real public appetite to change the status quo on copyright law. If there were it would be an electoral issue, and it just isn’t.
> This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software,…
Free software covers some basic commodity software and infrastructure needs and that’s about it. The first areas to be covered were tools and applications needed by software developers, text editors, compilers and such.
Beyond that the development of FOSS applications was very slow and incomplete. Meanwhile commercial software saw massive investment and the development of a plethora of both general and niche applications, including in many areas no FOSS applications even exist to this day.
The commercial software industry consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in software globally very year. It employs many tens of millions of developers, but also artists, designers, researchers, QA testers, trainers, and domain experts in almost every field of human endeavour that contribute to the refinement of the software. The FOSS ecosystem is pitifully tiny in comparison and it’s finding Morris can’t hope to come close to providing a viable alternative.
I’ll give two example from personal experience. In one job I worked for an independent software vendor that developed an application for designing cellular radio networks. It used terrain data and radio propagation modelling formulas to calculate signal strength and interference maps to help cellular network companies optimise their antenna placement and orientation. This was in the late 90s. No FOSS solutions exist in this space even today, developing the software took the input from a team of radio engineers as well as developers. The company also employed professional technical writers, application support personnel, trainers, a whole ecosystem of professionals.
The next job I worked at was an ISV developing derivatives trading applications for banks, pension funds and such. The software included front ends for traders, order routing servers, and interface gateways that connected to derivatives markets all over the world. Again the input from domain experts in trading was key, software developers on their own needed help to understand what traders needed, and how markets work.
Again, no open source solutions like that exist, and I don’t see any funding model coming along to address a need like this.
Even when FOSS does address a market need for applications, it often lags decades behind commercial applications, and is highly derivative of them, simply copying commercial application designs. People simply can’t wait half a lifetime for FOSS developers to get around to addressing a requirement, when commercial vendors can marshal Millions of dollars of investment to get useful applications to market in just a year or two.
So, you're rich, or you magically avoid the expensive software. Just as an example: Suppose I live in Peru and make the median income of ~3800 USD/year. Just a license for photoshop sets me back 252 USD/yes, or over 6.6% of my gross annual income. If you consider my taxes and very modest expenses, this becomes more like 10-15% of my free gross annual income. For a single application. Now suppose I want to buy a hundred apps or so (some subscription-based, some one-off). I won't be able to repay the debt before I'm dead.
I would add than in my opinion, Inkscape specifically has a remarkably easy learning curve and great documentation. So little learning allowed me to accomplish so much.
Admittedly, I don't use polar arrangements.
It did make me read your whole post without skimming, so kudos on that.
It's not even clear how FOSS would even work in this market or how it would benefit the user when it would be hosted all on someone else's server with self hosting diminishing the ease of collaboration.
It just seems that people who work on FOSS value privacy, ownership and freedom more than braindead ease of use and monetization.
Design is a very collaborative process, especially with remote work which has made having everyone see and edit the same thing at once critical. It's not "braindead" to work in a team, its a requirement. I really want to see FOSS succeed but its hard to see how the open source benefits translate over to this kind of software where you no longer run the software locally and consistency is needed so others have the same version of the tool as you.
There are some open source movers in this space too: https://penpot.app/
For the hobbyist/small business though these regular desktop tools are still a godsend
What does your TV or car boot?
Design space ... what do you use day to day - I'd love to see your blog/show piece?
A while ago it was common for Photoshop or illustrator to be used for UI designs and then it would be thrown over the wall to you as a PNG which you had to make sure you had the latest version of. These days everywhere I have worked has used a tool like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, and gives out a link which is always up to date, which you can fiddle with, write comments on, etc.
The market is rapidly shifting and I'm just not sure how FOSS is going to stay relevant in this space.
It does require someone to maintain and pay for the cloud hosting. That shouldn't be unsolvable; that's not really any fundamentally different than hosting a download site for traditional FOSS. Donation-supported FOSS can work.
But I think the biggest barrier is most FOSS enthusiasts consider web apps and collaboration to be anti user malware.
1. A generic CRDT library, preferably in C or something that exposes a C interface. This is probably very hard or even impossible, depending on how much must be abstracted and how much work the developer must do to express edits in terms of the CRDT.
2. A P2P backend for said library for streaming edits.
3. A networked data store, maybe as-a-service, for versioning and persistence.
2 and 3 might even be made transparent to non-CRDT-aware applications through FUSE, but that's not a hard requirement.
It was removed because no one wanted to maintain it.
It's not impossible to imagine it being added back in though. Maybe with updated technology.
How realistic is it to expect FOSS tools to directly compete head-to-head with these incredibly well-funded privately owned tools? The whole point of these companies is to solve the "hard" problems in order to gain a functional and competitive advantage in the market. FOSS OTOH deals with table scraps in terms of funding and technical talent. And let's face it, who are some of the biggest contributors to open source? These very same companies. They're happy to help keep the specific libs that matter to them up to date, but they're certainly not going to give away the entire product for free.
> Offline desktop tools have rapidly started to become obsolete. Products like Office had to scramble to pivot because Google Docs was replacing them. Its been a while now since I have been emailed an actual office file instead of being sent a link to the live version.
Just because the market moves in a particular direction doesn't mean it's the right decision for end users, all it means is that it's the right decision for the business. Take the mobile phone manufacturers removing the headphone jack. No customers asked for that, it was purely a move to drive sales of bluetooth peripherals.
There may come a time when running software locally becomes in-vogue again, who knows? It's companies that get to dictate the platforms because they own them. And as others have pointed out, it's not like these online collab tools aren't without their own issues. I guess I just don't understand why people think that FOSS can deliver polished end-user products on the scale that companies do.
When I call for help in say Krita or Samba on the mailing lists, I often get the actual programmers responding. Not all the time but quite often.
I've been running an IT company for 22 years. I have a fair idea about what the market is up to. It turns out that a wanky LDAP n Kerberos combo will still be available next year, as it has for the last ... (when did Windows NT domains morph into AD? What a bloody nonsense)
Also, from a dev perspective having designs updates without some process is undesirable.
So were toilets once upon a time.
I am not a fan of webapps, but this line of argument doesn't hold water
—-
real-time collab is not exclusive to webapps.
Sure, but once you make the effort required to build a real time app, there are vanishingly few reasons why not to have it as a web app. Some of them provide a desktop app as well but they all provide a web app.
As a designer, you can just send a link to your design to anyone, end users, clients, developers, managers. And they just click it and it shows up and works. No need for installing software, setting up accounts, etc. A lot of these web apps are actually C++ and then compiled to web assembly so they are quite fast.
It's obviously not just "two clicks", it's "Text copy 2 final final alt reviewed.doc" and then you get a new person email their suggested updates to you as "Text copy 2 final 2.doc" and you have to somehow merge those suggestions in with the head version.
With Word at least there's the ability to do suggestions rather than direct edits to let you collaborate against nonsynced docs at all, but with Inkscape when that happens you'll literally just get a different svg and you can't actually merge at all, instead you'd need to conceptually understand what edits were made and then make them again manually to the "head" version, which is completely redundant work.
Same effort as reviewing the file history
Copy + PasteGit helps by forcing the deltas to be knowable, but at the expense of a complex management tool and only really working on text based source. All other modern software now solves this problem by being online collaborative which eliminates the problem entirely, and that benefit dwarfs any other feature for most corporate/organizational usecases.
Inkscape is great software, but it's not acceptable software if you're going to collaborate with multiple other people who will all be making edits to the same document.
The majority are not good employees.
Good employees can collaborate well with LaTeX as well. Yet over 99% of workplaces will not use LaTeX.
The point is that even in places where about half the employees know how to collaborate with these tools, it is not done because you need the other employees to function.
Now, many people tried Gimp (which is far from Photoshop) and they wrongly think that Inkscape is another Gimp.
I do like gimp as a bit of a Swiss army knife program, it can do a lot of utility jobs like resizing, outlining, etc which can be hard in some of the more intuitive modern apps, but most of my work now is done on an app like Procreate and then I'll move to gimp for the final edits.
There are other photo editing tools with better UI, but poorer features, sadly. It would take a ton of work to catch up in terms of features.
You might find that fact to be on the ageing side :) Unified Transform tool has been available for many years now. It's all three (and more) tools in one.
Ecosystem is limited unfortunately, eg hard to find someone on fiverr to deliver penpot files instead of figma
It’s not capable of creating precise or maintainable documents (e.g. no styles as others have mentioned), which is a very common need that it’s adjacent enough to that lots of people use it for and then it fails.
That is, I should be able to define a "Code block" style that should appear in the same dropdown where google docs lets you select heading levels. When I select that "Code block" style, the app should format the selected bit of text according to the syte's definition. For instance: use a monospace typeface, apply some margins to this paragraph and paint a gray background on it.
Likewise, I should be able to update the style definition and all code blocks should update accordingly.
This is very basic functionality that has existed in word processors since... forever. Large and/or more complex documents are simply much much more painful to maintain/evolve without this feature.
I wasn't aware that Google has a different one. I have never used more than simple sums and differences in Google sheets. Can you give an example where Google offers better, incompatible functionality?
[1]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343
But working on large files is ridiculously painful. It's just not as as good as a native app. I don't want to give up my ability to work on large files in a performant fashion, which I do all the time, in exchange for collaboration support I do occasionally but a worse overall experience and frustrating lag compared to a native application.
I don’t really use either Word or LibreOffice much as my needs are really simple, (I mostly get away with just plaintext tools).
What is it that separates these two for you?
Is it some specific missing features you rely on or something to do with UX?
It's a common problem with Open Source: who does the slog work of testing, tracking down, and fixing the simple bugs and perf issues? Evidently, LibreOffice doesn't have enough maintainer cycles to have good coverage of common setups. It's unfortunate and as a developer I feel for them, but as a user it makes paying Microsoft an easy choice.
As a reasonably serious user of Office 365 and someone who's desperately wanted to like LibreOffice, I'm not sure what you could mean by "properly use styles". I'm guessing this is specifically a critique of the Word web app, but the native Office apps also do "online, live collaboration", and it all generally just works. Even Apple's overlooked suite feels more mature (and offers a dramatically better user experience) than LibreOffice.
That said, AbiWord is a serious lightweight contender to Writer.
However, it's far, far better than any browser-based one I've used.
If I just want to make notes, I'll use Org or Markdown in plain text. These can also be converted to HTML for web.
If I want to print something with lots of text, nothing beats LaTeX.
If I am making something design intensive, I'll use Scribus or some other desktop publishing software.
I guess regular people think of word processors as the Swiss army knife here: does everything, not particularly well, but worth only having to learn one software?
Microsoft in my opinion is a company that writes good core logic followed by trainwreck UI/UX teams only eclipsed in their destructive cabability by the user hostile marketing and profit department who keep trying to get me to do stuff like upload sensitive documents to OneDrive through some absolutely intended bad UI, or default to the most expensive resource selection in Azure every time you hit the back button on their forms.
Unfortunately, the problem is companies powered by ad revenue have a lot more money to throw at usability than FOSS folks do.
A huge issue is that the gatekeepers of "open source" don't believe making it financially viable is something they need to address. So it's gonna end up being the best we can do in our spare time for the love of progress.
It doesn't help that Sandstorm focuses on apps that are architected with a devops-heavy mindset. Many apps don't really need anything more complicated than PUT and DELETE (no POST special handling required), esp. since they're already doing so much on the client, anyway. This really calls for an auth-protected document store more than it does what Sandstorm tries to provide; the difficulties of "getting people a server" probably starts with assuming/insisting that that's what you need to do in the first place.
Those kinds of architectures are only necessary when you really do need some way to offload computation to a remote, high-availability machine, but things like online image and document editors aren't that. (Even then, what you really want for that is some sort of mobile code architecture that lets you squirt lightweight payloads at some sort of fleet of faceless workers, preferably in the same/similar form to the kind of code that you write for doing useful work on the client...)
I, for one, am glad that Free/Libre software like inkscape continues to be heading strong, and find that it far outpaces any of the proprietary malware SAAS applications out there.
In what way do you find Inkscape to outpace e.g. Figma? That would be interesting to hear.
Now imagine you are part of a team that wants to solve BIG problem, over a LONG timescale. Suddenly the picture becomes more nuanced as software features aren't the only thing that matters anymore. Would you really want to make the success of your project dependent on a third-party software company whose objectives aren't aligned with yours and that can take the tools you use away from you on a whim? FOSS makes a very strong point there. The interface may not make you cry and melt your eyes with shiny buttons, but you can be sure that years down the road the software will still be there and you can read your old files no matter what, as the file formats are open. You can depend on the software, and,.more importantly, you can assess and proactively mitigate the failure modes in advance! (E.g. the tex files from the 90s that you can find on some researchers website can still be compiled today; I imagine the entire research community would be significantly hindered if they would have to deal with the zoo of formats of proprietary software, rtf, doc, docx etc. In this sense FOSS can even act as the catalyst for establishing a standard, as is the case for tex files in domains of science.)
Though I agree that for image editing specifically, typically projects are probably not longer than you few months, so in this you case I imagine you could go without issues with the flow of new and proprietary software.
[1]Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:
I understand the current situation as a result from evolving business models, that lead to better profits when the control is taken away from the user and they have to get into subscriptions for continuous use. Basically the Adobe CS story. This manifesto doesn’t touch the business aspect at all, so I’m not sure what to take from it.
In particular, this is small anecdotal case study on how a calendar booking/rental system can work with Git [1]. For me this is a wonderful example of application for Local-First software albeit a simple one.
[1]Ask HN: Why hasn't Git been adopted outside of software engineering?
And to be honest the only FOSS content creation software that actually competes at the professional level (i.e not just simple edits) with proprietary tools is Blender: As in, would people use this software, if all the (currently proprietary) alternatives were also FOSS? But inkscape doesn't need to compete. So I don't think it's getting left behind in the dust.
I'm sure too that most inkscape users would much rather have a lot other improvements, than moving to the web.
Does Inkscape have GPU rendering yet or does it still slog down on anything more complicated than a minimalist icon?
And thank god for that.
Users literally hate the Adobe model, but aren't given a choice.
Please remember what the 'F' in FOSS stands for. Hint: it's not about money.
They might complain but at the end of the day they are very happy to pay adobe for the best in class tools.
The good news for FOSS is that hosting costs just keep getting cheaper, so providing free SaaS is increasingly feasible.
There’s also the “third way” of FOSS with a hosted option available. Wordpress is a good example of that. If deploying such projects on the cloud eventually becomes trivial, then you could imagine a FOSS desktop in the future might have a cloud component (or be entirely remotely hosted). That might sound odd, but consider you still need to buy hardware to run your FOSS on, so renting that hardware instead isn’t a great leap.
On the other hand, editing vector graphics has no intrinsic need to be hosted. Just because a cloud-based FOSS desktop in the future could be imagined doesn't make it a reasonable idea. What would be the point, other than massively increasing complexity and points of failure in terms of reliability and security?
Snarkiness aside, being able to "deploy a single version of software" is itself incompatible with the ability to self-host, making it a moot point for FOSS (let alone for FOSS that has no practical reason to be SaaS in the first place).
Sure, but another user might have another version installed. That might be because their package manager is behind the latest release, for example.
Self-hosting means it's still FOSS and you don't need them if you really want to have your own install.
SaaS deployment means it's easier to maintain for the majority who don't care.
I think the opposite will eventually be true, a browser is no space for complex documents.
> Even a lot of the big name proprietary tools are finding themselves becoming rapidly obsolete in a world where people want to IM a link and just have it reflect the latest version rather than attaching files back and forth.
O365 has worked like this for years and it works well.
Why not? What UX paradigms can you do in a desktop that can't be done in a browser?
The real pivot window is before you gain traction, unfortunately.
TeXmacs has an online collaboration tool, although as far as I know it is still experimental :-)
As a proof of concept about the possibility of a design tool with the potential to share information in this way it's intriguing.
I'll also add that a major pain point of FL/OSS tools for me is that so many of them HEAVILY depend on local file descriptors which makes remote storage access a PITA.
Oh, but it does: https://penpot.app/
> Layers and objects dialog merged
> Redesigned Export dialog with preview and ability to select objects/layers/pages and even multiple file formats to export to
Is it my birthday? Holy moly, those are like three of my biggest dream changes to Inkscape. I think I might need to start donating.
Happy to see that work is still being done.
I genuinely do not understand this idea of doing "UX[sic] refreshes" on productivity software. Do people do design refreshes on hammers and screwdrivers?
So understandable. So depressing.
FOSS is supposed to serve people, if your system can easily accommodate that, I see absolutely no reason not to other than some ideological desire to be different.
If someone that has been using Illustrator for years tries Inkscape and goes "Why the hell would it work like that, that's insane", then gives up, that doesn't serve that user nor FOSS, and they go back to paying Adobe.
Not a problem since 1.1
I have a copy of illustrator as well (which I pay for), but it mostly serves to export things to something inkscape is happy with, or for helping me identify fonts.
Inkscape blows it out of the water with its UI. Illustrator is confusing and it seems like everything useful is hidden behind a few layers of menus. I hate it.
I make a zines and print them myself. Often a picture runs across the gutter.
Hopefully this will address two page spreads automatically.
Finally!
The whole point for me is that the vector image scales. Mostly there is no pre-defined size. So the page dimensions are meaningless. Why would you want multiple of those?
I make slides on Inkscape and until now had to resort to clunky solutions to generate multipage PDF files.
> Do people print them?
Yes. People print PDFs.
> Mostly there is no pre-defined size. So the page dimensions are meaningless.
That’s not true if, for example, you need to render vector graphics on a screen. Since it’s physically impossible to show the entire Cartesian plane, you need to constrain it somehow.
What I would expect is that you design maybe to have your graphics fit some area (box, circle, whatever), then you save, and then when you use the graphics (on a web page, in a presentation, etc.), you scale it to whatever desired dimensions. While you are editing, you zoom in and out as needed.
Screens are a good example actually. They have different dimensions, pixel densities, aspect ratios, etc. So web design tends to use relative units (em, rem, px, etc.). Also, is a screen a page? Or just a rectangle with some aspect ratio.
Take icons for example. Which is probably a core use case for Inkscape. You'd design some logo to fit square dimensions. And then you'd export bitmaps in various pixel sizes. Does that square have any meaningful dimensions? IMHO it doesn't. Certainly almost never actual paper sizes.
What baffles me as a rather casual user is that when I need to do some vector work for an icon (typically) and the first thing I'm confronted with is paper dimensions.
Change an icon to use fills instead of strokes? No problem. Change colours? No problem. Align the image in the middle of viewport? Remove excessive spacing? Make icons from different sources the same size? Grab a logo from a PDF? No problem.
Though my days as an aspiring graphics designer are long past, I would think that Inkscape is also a good tool for creating logos and icons. The node editor really is quite good.
For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping, filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows), reusable components. The text editor is also very basic and counter-intuitive.
what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping?
> filters on groups (e.g. drop shadows),
I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago.
> The text editor is also very basic and counter-intuitive.
I agree text handling isn't great, especially exported text paragraphs still sometimes cause issues (they essentially don't show up in exported PDFs). That said I'm not sure what you mean by the text editor is basic, sure it's not a word processor, but other programs in this space have very similar editors.
Luckily it appears that it has actually been implemented in this new version. It's the feature called "Alignment and Distribution snapping".
> I think there were multiple extensions that could do e.g. drop shadows on groups when I looked at doing that several years ago.
While that's nice and all, I think it should be built-in functionality, with the same level of stability and user friendliness as the rest of the application.
This release adds alignment and distribution snapping, it's mentioned in the full release notes:
https://media.inkscape.org/media/doc/release_notes/1.2/Inksc...
Using it on Windows or Linux is a pleasure.
Anyone have some inkscape-specific links or resources to share on best practices and workflows? E.g. using layers, creating custom shapes, mirroring curves, exact measurements, etc...
They do use cairo for rendering to a CGContext via cairo_quartz_surface_t which has traditionally not been all that great on macOS. Additionally they're dealing with colorspace transforms on more recent macOS along with some bugs in macOS that were causing non-native applications to do considerable damage/redraws.
If/when Inkscape moves to GTK 4, a lot of this will just go away. The new macOS backend (which I wrote) is considerably faster and defaults to using the OpenGL renderer (which I also write a large portion of) but is also considerably faster when using Cairo by removing Quartz/CGContext from the equation and using Pixman directly with IOSurface.
When using OpenGL, however, we have to emulate something like eglSwapBuffersWithDamage() to keep the compositor from over-compositing, but that was done with tessellation just fine.
Does this port support the native macOS window decorations, or are they client-drawn?
I have some blog posts from the effort to write the new backends which gives some additional details.
https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/02/14/modernizing-gtks...
https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2020/12/15/gtk-4-got-a-new-...
https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2021/02/24/gtk-4-ngl-render...
That said, I already wrote GLyphy integration for GTK 4 and it may land before 4.8. It can significantly improve font rendering quality by drawing the glyphs on the GPU rather than from CPU drawings uploaded into an atlas which is pixel boundary bound.
But honestly, it doesn't matter. Apple just shipped a new OpenGL for M systems and every major browser is using GL more than ever. It's not going anywhere. And even if it did, we have a Vulkan backend that can target MoltenVK as well as Mesa's Zink already supporting at least OpenGL 4.6 which could also be run on MoltenVK with very little overhead.
Case in point: https://twitter.com/realdoctormo/status/1514742125132455937
Unless I see a direct quote, I'm likely to suspect that what he actually said was along the lines of "We do not have developers using macOS, so we barely support that platform. Would you like to help us?".
> ...and then blocked me
I don't really know you at all, but I know Martin a little. He can take a punch, so blocking someone means he had serious reasons to be annoyed. OTOH, I'd rather not take sides here, that's between you and him.
Why do you think that is? What makes them popular?
Figma, canva etc are all really popular. Google docs is popular. They are all easy to use. For basic tasks we really dont need a huge expanse of menus and options all laid out like an aircraft cockpit. I would argue for a normal person that is far worse than some empty screen, which maybe hides a bit, but puts the more common or important tools visually first.
Maybe it could just be a toggle in a menu somewhere, "pro mode". These FOSS tools could learn what was good about modern design and try to iterate on the good take aways.
I'm guessing there are other programs free through expensive that meet your basic-tasks use case. Be mindful, these are volunteers.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
imean i really like inkscape but it seems obvious to me that being able to organize a focused, coherent, and powerful interface is a rare and subtle skill, and most people with it would not also happen to find themselves successfully herding the cats required for effective implementation in an OSS project
Sure it can be improved, but dumbed-down and flat is not in the top 100 things I'd ask for.
I have a concrete questions:
Why can’t a lot of FOSS projects try and distill what is good about modern UI or ideas instead of looking like a program from 10 years ago.
What is the obstruction in the community getting people to work on this? Hostile power user attitudes?
Simultaneously if free software advocates want it to be adopted why don’t they cater a bit to the good things about modern design?
Saltily remarking “you get what you pay for”, is hostile. Fine I’ll use the modern web and tools, and they can lament on HN wondering where everyone went.
Not to mention "modern design" is often worse in a number of ways.
Inkscape is an incredible achievement with the amount of resources it has had available. If you can do better, do so. I'm willing to bet a comparable program is 1000x more work than you anticipate.
This poster gets it:
And the improvements in this release reflect a lot of that work.
This is usually accompanied by someone eagerly pointing out "Don't you feel salty!"
I've seen that use rising among cryptobros lately, specifically to deflect critics as secretly jealous that they missed out on something. I'll allow it as long as they don't co-opt jawn as well.
My understanding is that in this particular case, it's built in a very modular way. E.g. it uses an embedded version of potrace to do autotracing. It's hard to make a good and consistent UI when you're unifying so many pieces.
Maybe people are just different, but Inkscape's (G)UI has been serving me well enough ever since.
Inkscape is truly the Swiss Army knife of the open source graphics ecosystem, I use it more often than any other application.
I have a lot of complaints about inkscape, but this wasn't one of them.
Despite being "infinitely" scalable, SVGs still have a "native" scale and coordinste system, so it would be far more disorienting and error-prone to present the user with a blank infinite canvas instead. The default being paper size is a bit unusual since Inkscape isn't very suitable for print work (color spaces and all that), but these days you can pick a starting size in the launcher anyway, so most of the time when starting new projects you don't even see thr default.
When I researched it last time, Inkscape was the only reasonable way to do programmatically edit arbitrary SVGs. Other tools always had some troubles with some weird edge-cases, Inkscape knew how to edit everything I threw at it. Including really weird CSS inside SVG.
It was pretty annoying that I needed to install all the graphical layers in Docker just to do that, but hey, it worked.
It also doesn't look atrocious on Mac anymore, that's great.
That being said, I am still not used to the "corel draw-like" UX, I prefer the "illustrator" UX. So with that said I prefer Affinity tools.
He has been consistently putting out videos on his process and has been a (the?) main driving force behind the new pages addition.
He's also on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/doctormo
I’ll be … gentle in my criticism but, I found Inkscape hard to use. I eventually found my way to do what I needed to do. But it was like relearning Adobe tools with subtly different confusions almost every step of the way. If I recall, it’s structurally very close to 1:1 with the SVG output. Which might be what users want! It might even produce better SVGs. But I found myself thinking “can I bail out to the text editor like I’m using an HTML WYSIWYG?” fairly often.
I’m sure if I used it more and got more familiar I’d know or develop instincts for where to look for … everything. But if Inkscape devs are here and want (I promise, this is intended as constructive) feedback, the learning curve was pretty steep for me.
Sometimes I do colored circles or something else easy at one of the free online sites but I just can't spare the time or mental energy.
It's a shame too, I have a laser engraver, SVG is made for that.
Some of these things render fine on the display, and cut just fine with the inkcut extension. Some render but do not cut. Some things get cut multiple times, which causes the knife to overpenetrate and destroy the backing. And for years of attempts, I can't seem to understand the distinction, or how to discern what my drawing actually consists of.
Inkscape must be good for something; a lot of people seem to care about it. And it looks pretty neat. But either I'm missing a fundamental concept, or it's just not good for what I want to do with it.
If you look at the status bar at the bottom of the window, it always tells you the type(s) of the object(s) you have selected on your screen. So you can quickly tell whether something is a path, or an object, or a text, or whatever. There's also outline mode which hides your stroke and fill styles, so you only see the paths. Paths are what my laser cutter will follow, completely ignoring those stroke widths or fill colors or what have you, so outline view shows exactly what it will cut.
Anyway, I love Inkscape, and it is my go-to software for any vector graphic needs.
It also appears they're running a 50% off sale:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
(No affiliation. I just notice it comes up in a lot of conversations here about Inkscape)
But there’s probably many reasons against choosing Designer over Inkscape too.