Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Some of these features look useful, but their example animations make me feel inadequate.

A fun thing they show in the animations is how you can do basic arithmetic in the size fields. So if you've setup your document in millimetres (I do this for woodworking designs) and you have a shape with width 5mm you can do this:

    5.000 + 2mm

Or:

    5.000 + 0.2cm

I don't know when Inkscape started doing this, but I just gave it a go one day because it felt like something I would put in (and to their credit, they did).

its been there for a very long time

> I do this for woodworking designs

Can you talk more about it? What kind of things are you designing? How detailed are the designs?

Nothing professional; just sketches for personal projects in and around the house. Usually fairly detailed, but mostly useful to get a sense of proportion and to design the basic layout of things like built-in closets.

Inkscape's snapping, aligning, and layering features make it a good tool for this as long as you need nothing more than 2D views.

I also use Inkscape to prepare the (plywood, MDF) sheet sawing instructions for the lumber yard. They love it when customers present them with a clear overview for the cuts (and I love it when wood I order is cut correctly). For me it's useful to use a single sheet as economically as possible.

Deepnest.io is great for...nesting. Its also great for figuring the best layout of various size panels from full sheets.

That's awesome, thank you. Built-in closets and simple shelves is what I'm looking for. And maybe a french cleat system for organizing tools. A 2D view should be enough.

I'm using draw.io for floor plans to get a basic sense of spacing for bigger projects. Inkscape looks like a good fit for smaller ones.

I implemented it as part of a GSoC project a decade ago, which was first included in the 0.91 release in 2015.

Most of them seem fine but that first one is pure "chip away at everything that doesn't look like David."[1]

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/

Is it, though? It looks like they drew the dolphin with circles. They aren't just randomly placed circles.

They're not randomly placed but I have no idea how one would do that. Or why -- you have a pen tool and bezier curves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com