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Comment by jeppester | Hacker News Reader

As a mostly web/app programmer Inkscape is a great tool to do minor alterations to icons, logos etc.

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.

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> dynamic snapping

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...

Great! I did see there was some mention of snapping but didn't dare to believe that it would be exactly the thing I was missing.

> For web/app design there are a lot of shortcomings though. There's no dynamic snapping,

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.

> what do you mean by dynamic snapping. Inkscape had snap to objects, corners, grids ... since forever. Is there anything else to dynamic snapping?

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.

Usually I make the final document in scribus, once text blocks with more than one line are involved. Similar to how AI users reach out for ID when it gets text-heavy, I guess.

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