Inkscape 1.2 | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape 1.2

inkscape.org

224 pointsmarcodiego63 comments

Previous discussion (228 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31403532

I loved using Inkscape when I was running Linux, but since switching to a Mac it’s one of the programs I found to be running a lot worse on that platform compared to what I remembered.

I get that it’s a GTK application so not running with native UI components, but is there something that can be configured or installed to make it more responsive? Just opening Inkscape with a blank document and resizing the window is incredibly laggy, maybe redrawing the window only once or twice a second as I resize it.

edit: I should have installed version 1.2 before posting this comment. I've now tried it and it's much more responsive than it's ever been on macOS. Really great work from the Inkscape team!

Good to hear.

Current version isn't slow/buggy for me on Macos but it crashes constantly

I would call that buggy

Slow i can handle but crashing constantly I just can't handle, so definitely a bug.

Seeing your edit: Then please consider dropping a kind word to the dev: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/7050

It is slow for me on both Linux and Windows on very recent hardware. It takes seconds to open. Moving around and resizing drawings lags pretty badly.

With that said, Inkscape is a really good software.

Inkscape is one of those programs that I have a love/hate relationship with.

I’m not a heavy user; when I use it, I’m coming at as a novice, usually with a specific task in mind and I find that I might as well have Inkscape open on half the screen and Google open on the other half as I have to search for how to do anything. Once I find it, it works fine, but the UI seems the exact opposite of approachable for me. (It feels in many regards like Gimp was 10 years ago; I have no idea if Gimp got better because I gave up on it with enough good alternatives. Inkscape is better than that, but it gives me the same feeling of “does this really need to be this hard to import a multi-color SVG and make a slight touch up?”)

What are the alternatives to Gimp that you like?

Not OP but I have been loving Krita. More intuitive interface with many of the same features.

Krita is good. I like that there are so many eraser buttons.

Also works great on android.

I should give it a try on Android again. I tried loading it up on my phone once and wasn't able to access some of the menus. I'm sure it's better-suited for a tablet

Krita is nice, but not as mature as GIMP, and it can be a bit crashy.

FWIW, I can't recall Krita ever crashing on me this past year. I do agree it's a younger/less mature project though.

It crashes a lot on me on both the latest macOS and on Ubuntu 18.04.

That said, I'm not one to lose patience on FOSS and know it can and will improve.

Don't really know about macOS, but Ubuntu 18.04 is a distro with, what, 6 years old packages ? There have been a lot of bugfixes to the whole stack since then which will never make it to older Ubuntus - remember than the "stable" in linux distros means "does not change", not "does not crash".

That's poor reasoning for multiple reasons:

- Krita also crashed on me when Ubuntu 18.04 was recent.

- Most Krita crashes are on startup, before I do anything.

- GIMP never crashes on me with heavy usage. In fact, few graphics manipulation apps crash on me.

- Finally, like I said, Krita crashes often on the latest macOS.

I think the "blame" is entirely on Krita. That said, I'm patient and understand software has bugs; Krita will be stabilized eventually.

you should try it with flatpak on a distro that old. Old distros are fine for servers but I would never use something that old as a desktop.

sigh

Why? Krita never worked right, even in macOS latest or in Ubuntu 18.04 when it was new.

My Ubuntu 18.04 is extremely stable, nothing else crashes (not regularly anyway, there's no OS in the world where apps won't occassionally crash). And I game with Steam on it and use it for mostly everything, and it's an extremely stable, pleasant environment.

Finally, there's a complete logical disconnect here: OSes don't magically become unstable as they age. That's magical thinking. If anything, newer, less proven versions are more likely to be unstable.

And finally finally, other people in this thread are complaining about Krita's instability, so I'm not an outlier.

Please, address what I actually wrote. Thanks.

I think that maybe the previous poster was trying to say that recent versions of Krita are more stable, i.e. they crash less often. This has been my experience. Should you try Krita again, I recommend installing a recent release (5+), even if it's not yet available through Ubuntu's official packages yet. Hopefully you'll have a more pleasant experience!

Yeah, the crashing on Krita gets me.

For simple stuff there's Pinta, for complex stuff Krita.

On windows there's also Paint.NET which is Pinta on steroids.

I have the same feeling. Using a SVG editor shouldn't be that hard (drawling lines, filling shapes etc.) but somehow doing anything in Inkscape is so confusing I was never able to do even the simplest task with it.

> I have no idea if Gimp got better because I gave up on it with enough good alternatives.

It didn't. I upgraded back to 2.6 and stopped updating when 2.8 broke saving files, and going by hearsay, it's continued to get worse since.

I'm a huge fan of inkscape, but I find the layers in 1.2 really annoying, and a backwards step. That the visibility "eye" only appears when a layer is not visible seems pretty counter intuitive to me, and that clicking anywhere else on the layer opens it up to reveal the elements inside is also a backwards step to me. Being able to see them is a great idea, but this move makes it much harder to manage documents with multiple layers.

I've used and evangelised for inkscape for many years, but I wish I had the skills to contribute to it in a meaningful way for areas like this.

I think you're one of the few people I've seen complain about the merged layers/objects view... Do you use Inkscape frequently & as an artist, or is it in a different capacity? Is it the principle that annoys you, or just the bugs you mentioned?

I personally welcome the idea a lot, as I don't have to travel 70% of screen distance to swap between layers and objects. In fact, I was using the XML window because of how annoying the old UI was. Also, now its much much easier to organise larger projects into something structured. Previously half the time I would spam send below/above commands on a select object until it popped into place. Now I don't even think about it, it almost just happens because I'm already "in" the place I want my object to be.

take this as a first iteration we need to fix and polish this dialog in next releases. Hover state on row should help with maching rows icons

Congrats to the team! One really interesting hidden aspect here is that Patreon is helping Martin Owens bring a lot of new Inkscape features to life as "your Inkscape Programmer".

His latest update--"What You Want Me to Work On" (Posted 4 June):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWSOmxV9rWI

"I am your Inkscape Programmer" intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXsHqxYfY_k

https://www.patreon.com/doctormo

Recently downloaded it for the first time in a long time to make a dxf file.

Inkskape finally removed the atrocious "adds a tiny offset (sometimes) when you copy paste".

Congrats inkscape team! The software is fantastic (always was quite good) and usable by me now!

hmm this was never a feature as long i remeber (0.92) so this sounds like a bug that got randomly fixed for you :D

Such a wonderful program. I have used Inkscape for decades! I love it.

THe only problem I have is that when I use it heavily, I get proficient with the UX, then I dont touch it for an extended period and have to re-learn a bunch of stuff each time.

Anyone switch to Krita? I have Krita, but I always go back to Inkscape.

I did all the documentation for the LucasFilm, San Francisco General Hospital, Brocade and others in a combination of Visio and Inkscape.

I switched from Inkscape to Affinity Designer and never looked back.

Sold me. Frick.

I still love you Inkscape.

EDIT: $55 is not Free as in INKSCAPE.

Still looks dope AF.

If you do anything serious (aka make money with it) then $55 is a steal as long as you don't mind it being proprietary. Seems a lot of people tired of PS use it on mac

agreed.

I dont make money with it currently

No libre OS support, for those wondering. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/98932-faq-...

Clarifying the parent comment: Affinity Designer is only available for macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. It is not available on Linux.

I use Krita for painting, but for illustrations I tend to use Inkscape. Sometimes I'll sketch in Krita and then redraw it Inkscape. I wouldn't really use Kira for vector graphics (you can, but it's not really that ergonomic).

Krita is a pixel editor. I mostly replaced GIMP with krita, but Inkscape is necessary for vector files.

Why I can't close About window? :)

https://i.imgur.com/XcQZsrx.gif

Good question. How did you get it in that state? Welcome screen and about screen at the same time?

I’d guess there’s a menu item to open the about screen, and that macOS’s global menus thus allow you to execute various commands before it would be possible to on any other platform.

Exactly!

Wow, these features really fix a lot of pain points with the UI. At this pace, I won't be surprised if I can drop Affinity Designer from my Windows partition sometime soon!

I wish it had variable width lines. I know that SVG doesn't support it natively, but it could be transformed to a filled area when exporting with a strict SVG format.

There's a live path effect for this.

Inkscape does how this feature. ux is not the best we should convert it to tool at some point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKHOm-EQsA4

My wife uses and loves the InkStitch plug in. Thank you Inkscape.

That said, the UI performance is dire on the Mac now vs. pre-1.0.

Inkscape is awesome!

I wrote a plugin for Inkscape that exports anything below rectangles as png images. I use this all the time for creating marketing material.

I also used Inkscape for creating images for my recent book, Effective Pandas. (Actually scripted the images with SVG then used Inkscape to convert to png).

Does anyone know if it supports a work flow which involves setting a style and then drawing lines, shapes etc with that style, instead of drawing a shape and then tweaking its style as is normally done in Inkscape?

yes you can set this in preferences/ tools and set last used style for every tool you want this. or reset your preferences we set this as defoult behaiviour from 1.1

I love Inkscape, but I really wish it could work with CMYK colors natively (and not simply transform them into RGB internally).

Does it fully support HiDPI on Windows? In older versions I either got minuscule icons or huge ones, but nothing in between.

gtk3 supports HiDPI BUT just a whole numbers no fractals (100,200,300percent)

Any open source alternative to Adobe's paywalled hegemony is a win in my book.

Does anyone here use this program for recreational art?

Isn't that more what people use krita for, especially if you're using a drawing pad

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