Inkscape 1.2.2 | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape 1.2.2

inkscape.org

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I am so happy for the continued development of desktop-first, offline, and free content tools. Inkscape, Blender, Godot, Krita, and (still, hopefully not spyware?) Audacity [0]. Without the commercial treadmill, I see these all being solid alternatives rather than the broke-student option.

While I am no artist, I have produced several icons and schematics in Inkscape over the years. A true boon that has let me sketch out some ideas for presentations or images for internal applications.

[0] I have given up on Gimp.

Shoutout to Ardour [0] which has been at an impressive level of functionality and polish for a very long time.

[0] ardour.org

I've been using Ardour to edit a podcast for about 5 years now and it's been great. After setting some custom keybindings I ended up with a fairly optimized workflow, especially with the ability to edit at 1.5x playback speed, which not many other DAWs can do apparently.

It's not without its few glitches and occasional crashes, but it doesn't happen often enough to become big problem for me. I've been happily donating monthly to the project.

You've given up on Gimp? What's wrong? Did I miss some news?

I think it's fair to say (speaking as someone who repeatedly defends GIMP from criticism on this website) that GIMP is a flawed tool with several missing features. It works well for a range of things, but doesn't for others.

There are people who have hoped it would find the resources and developers to go to the next level, like Ardour, Blender, and Krita have in their respective fields. GIMP has shown no sign of this happening. It's been "good" for 15 years now, but never great, and not really making the strides you'd want to see if it was going to become "great". It's chronically underfunded and just doesn't get the necessary development time, and I have little doubt that keeping a project like this running for so long has accrued a fair amount of technical debt. I say all this without putting any blame on the developers, who have kept at a mostly thankless task for years now.

If you need a Photoshop replacement - something that can do graphic design work or generate documents appropriate for use by professional printers - GIMP is not and probably won't ever achieve that. (Some people also think GIMP should be a drawing tool, but I think it's better to let Krita handle that.) What GIMP is quite good at is quick edits of photos with proper color management and high bit depth support. It's also pretty good as a general purpose tool for a lot of things. (I've used it to manually debug QR codes.) But the high expectations some had for it have not been met, by a long shot.

But gimp was never intended as a drawing tool

Not OP, but Krita works better on hidpi displays for me.

Link for the lazy: https://krita.org/en/

I hadn’t heard of it before

I recently learned an interesting little fact about Inkscape when looking for an SVG to PNG "converter". First, I knew that, in theory, SVG has a similar complexity to HTML. I didn't know that it is quite difficult to find a high quality standalone-ish (not and appendage of a HTML engine) renderer / engine for the format. Well, Inkscape has one of the most complete around, even implementing some not yet standardized features.

For reference: https://inkscape.org/develop/about-svg/ section "How does Inkscape implement SVG?"

You can also include JavaScript in SVG. That is used e.g. by the flamegraphs generated with Brendan Gregg’s Flamegraph.pl script. Consequently, when you open them in a classic image viewer, they’re static, but when you open them in a web browser, they’re interactive. I don’t think Inkscape supports JavaScript.

"I don’t think Inkscape supports JavaScript."

It does, but only to attach it, not to run it in Inkscape as far as I know.

One less well known feature is the ability to query dimensions and render subsets of the SVG by element ID. That makes it possible to assemble say a drawing of some UI elements all together on one sheet that illustrates use and then programmatically extract bitmaps as needed for use in an app.

My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[0], uses EchoSVG[1], which fixes numerous issues with Apache Batik[2]. KeenWrite takes SVG rasterization a little further by also making a text-to-diagram layer available. That is, text is transformed via Kroki[3] to SVG, then rasterized using EchoSVG. (Along the way, variables are interpolated and inserted, shown in the first screenshot.)

[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/docs/scree...

[1]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[2]: https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/

[3]: https://kroki.io/

also check out https://github.com/RazrFalcon/resvg

> with the goal to support the whole SVG spec.

> resvg aims to only support the static SVG subset; i.e. no a, script, view or cursor elements, no events and no animations.

Looks like a good library, but it's pretty funny that they had to walk that goal back because no, it's just not reasonable to support the whole stupid SVG spec.

FWIW, not supporting animations is very common. Most SVG files use SVG as a vector image format, and images in a strict sense don't move.

This app works in production for me. It's good. Can recommend.

rsvg-convert from https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/librsvg is what I use. They've been refactoring it in Rust for the last 5 years. It fit my needs, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to compile and get a fully static build.

maybe this will help - I pulled it together using instructions from Linux From Scratch, to build a static RSVG Convert that run run inside barebones AWS Linux 2 (on Lambda). https://github.com/serverlesspub/rsvg-convert-aws-lambda-bin...

If anyone is interested to keep updated with Inkscape Development, I highly recommend the Youtube channel [0] of Martin Owens. Martin is an Inkscape developer who added the multipage support, finalized the shape builder tool, and much more.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@doctormo

With the recent-ish addition of multi-page documents, Inkscape is now a full replacement for Adobe Illustrator for my use case (with the exception of CMYK support, but I do print stuff < once a year these days). Congrats to the team!

Thanks! Inkscape is a wonderful project, I've used it for years - I started around the time those jerks at Adobe took CS into the cloud, and unlike GIMP, I found the UI fairly intuitive if you've studied graphic design AND it played well with the OSX windowing system instead of trying to use GTK or KDE or whatever the hell... the stuff I see when I open up GIMP to slap impact font text onto the images I take with my personal cell phone.

I've been using inkscape since I learned about it on sourceforge around 2006 or so. Not only for uni in my studies on graphic design but for all my professional career, which has been almost my de facto tool for all things vector (the other being MetaPost), so I literally owe my career to inkscape.

I agree Inkscape is super intuitive and love that is keyboard oriented so it lets you have a quick workflow you cannot reach with any other similar software, and it should be the paradigm for how design and gui apps should be done - and considering pretty much all other GTK apps aren't as complex and not as easy to use as Inkscape, makes it even more underrated.

Glad to donate to it so it can keep growing, and boy it has grown so much.

From the link:

"Note for macOS users:

Do not update to macOS Ventura if you rely on Inkscape! There is an unresolved issue that currently affects all GTK3 based apps on macOS Ventura, making the app unresponsive to certain mouse events."

Issue report: "widgets not reacting to mouse hover/click on macOS Ventura" https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5305

I found pinch zoom to be rather bonky on my current Monterey, so I hope they fixed that. I'll wait until they get GTK3 fixed. I used brew to install 1.2.1.

Sorry I might be mixing it up with a different app - they may have been just… easy to switch from adobe in terms of the the ui making sense.

Sorry I misspoke it’s also been years since I made a vector logo :-)

No need to be sorry–I believe you're generally correct above. It's just that this particular moment in time is a bad one for Ventura users testing the waters.

I looked back at an old diary - I was using it in Linux because my office had a Linux desktop. I never bothered installing it on my laptop because I tried to keep anything from work off my personal devices.

(Both it and GIMP should make macOS native clients like how the KeePass ppl did KeePassXC)

I learned Inkscape before I learned Adobe products and I found Inkscape to be more intuitive.

Needs layer previews like Affinity but still, love Inkscape.

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