Inkscape 1.4

https://inkscape.org/news/2024/10/13/inkscape-launches-version-14-powerful-new-accessib/

by s1291 • 2 years ago

561 124 2 years ago

omoikane2• 2 years ago

The one new feature in 1.4 that I appreciated the most is the ability to disable anti-aliasing when exporting from the command line:

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167

Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.

billfruit3• 2 years ago

Have they added any method of setting a tool style before drawing, rather than adjusting style after drawing?

ants_everywhere2• 2 years ago

It's always fun to set up your font, then write some text and realize it's in the wrong font and all your work was lost

fourteenfour2• 2 years ago

I just installed 1.4 to check and it now appears to keep the font you've chosen.

msarnoff• 2 years ago

I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.

thot_experiment2• 2 years ago

Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.

Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.

EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.

wg02• 2 years ago

Can't say about Windows but on Linux - it works flawlessly since ages.

exe34• 2 years ago

$ nix-shell -p inkscape

[nix-shell:~]$ inkscape --version Inkscape 1.3.2 (091e20ef0f, 2023-11-25)

[nix-shell:~]$ nixos-version 24.05.3787.a781ff33ae25 (Uakari)

Seems flawless for me. simple example I made: https://imgur.com/a/wi0kXbm

__mharrison__• 2 years ago

Never had issues on Linux...

fourteenfour2• 2 years ago

Strange. I've been using Inkscape to make vector art on Windows and Ubuntu with various hardware for years and while I don't think it's ever running at 100+ fps it's totally usable and hasn't been laggy. [edit: unless you are using filters or editing a very complex file, it does bog down then.]

inferiorhuman• 2 years ago

1.3.2 works fine on MacOS (M2 Pro) for me. There's a bit of lag following the mouse cursor especially when moving stuff quickly but the UI widgets are performant and there are no visual artifacts.

allenu• 2 years ago

I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.

For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.

ltlnx5• 2 years ago

Inkscape has a lot of additional problems on MacOS, like dialogs appearing below the main window making it look like it's frozen, occasional text rendering issues, interference with input methods (on Windows too), and other problems that cannot be reproduced on Linux. To be fair a big part of it can be attributed to GTK, the underlying UI toolkit.

smitelli• 2 years ago

They’ve historically been quite open about needing help on the macOS front. For example, https://inkscape.org/news/2021/06/22/seeking-macos-dev-contr...

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

I’d imagine there just isn’t a huge group of people who work on foss software, and use Mac.

I’ve noticed that just in general foss apps which work great on Linux, are often broken on macOS.

gennarro• 2 years ago

Came here to say the same. The app is very useful for me (pen plotters etc) but it’s awful on my Mac. Barely useable despite being required for some of my workflows.

pilaf3• 2 years ago

For me it's gotten a lot better since one or two versions ago. There's still some lagginess, but it's nowhere near the horror show that it used to be, and they fixed some excruciating screen resolution issues as well. I used to avoid Inkscape on macOS like the plague, now I can use it fairly comfortably.

sprucevoid• 2 years ago

Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.

tetris11• 2 years ago

The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.

urban_alien• 2 years ago

Care to elaborate? I'm curious.

AlienRobot3• 2 years ago

From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.

Almost everything you need to create vector art, SVG doesn't support.

Multiple outlines in a single shape? No. Varying thickness in an outline? No. Rounded corners on arbitrary vertices? No. Non-destructive boolean operations? No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.

Many of these Inkscape implements as live filters, which are saved as SVG extensions in the XML .svg file that nobody but Inkscape can properly load.

SVG is ridiculously bad as a creation format. It's a good format to export to, but as a backend and it's just insane. It's like using a single PNG file as a backend for your multi-layer 128bpp raster project.

I use Inkscape a lot but I can't help but notice that the best vector art illustration come from Affinity Designer, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. If you compare the quality of artwork made with proprietary tools to those made with Inkscape, it's very clear that Inkscape severely limits what artists can achieve. You can easily create complex illustrations in other tools that would be a nightmare to manage in Inkscape. Just compare how you clip something in Inkscape to how you do it in Affinity. It's ridiculous how different the two workflows are.

n3storm• 2 years ago

Are you creatively crippled by not being able to create multiple outlines on a single shape on a file format that can be viewed in almost any device from here to eternity at no cost? Cause you know Michelangelo didn't use procreate in a iPad...do you?

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

There is Cenon:

https://cenon.info/

which runs well in Mac OS and Linux and for the basics has the basic vector editing capabilities which folks would expect.

anthk2• 2 years ago

Use Krita for art.

bbkane• 2 years ago

You might look into https://graphite.rs/ . MS Paint is about my digital art interface complexity limit, but I do read Graphite's blog posts and their app sounds really attractive for more serious artists

sourcepluck• 2 years ago

I'm very ignorant in these areas, but if you don't mind me asking - how would using a proprietary format solve issues for Inkscape, or an imagined alternative to Inkscape?

Do all the others (AD, CD, AI) use some proprietary format that makes their life easier? Is there no better alternative to SVG on the open source side of things?

omoikane2• 2 years ago

proprietary format

I also used CorelDraw for many years before moving on to Inkscape, and there were definitely some features that I still miss (e.g. better power clip behavior, blend shapes, etc). But I have came to appreciate Inkscape using SVGs because it allowed me to build my own tooling around it, I only needed libraries that can read and write XML.

SVG is maybe not the best format and Inkscape has many extensions that made their SVGs nonstandard (e.g. mesh gradient), but it is a fairly accessible format. I am not sure the gains promised by a proprietary format would be worth losing out on various SVG/XML tools.

billfruit3• 2 years ago

How is clipping different in Affinity and in Inkskape? Having used only Inkscape and not Affinity, I don't find the workflow Inkskape is using problematic.

wraptile• 2 years ago

All of the things you mentioned can be done in SVG and I've done all of these things before.

For multiple lines just duplicate your shapes and group or even join them. For varying thickness you can duplicate your shape and layer them. Rounded corners are supported on every vertice so I'm not sure where are you geting that.

vasvir• 2 years ago

No. I'm not even sure SVG supports paragraphs.

SVG 1.1 does not support wrapping (textflow). There are posts in stack-overflow on how to use a foreignObject (HTML) inside SVG to do the line wrapping.

SVG 1.2 apparently supports but I have never used it so I don't know.

justinclift• 2 years ago

From the little I know about SVG, I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.

Maybe Flash will become popular again at some point, so a well heeled enthusiast (or group of) could buy the source for the Flash Authoring tool from Adobe then release it as OSS. :)

(not holding my breath though)

latexr• 2 years ago

I wish there was an open source alternative to Inkscape that didn't support standard SVG but used a proprietary format instead.

It didn’t need be a proprietary format, it could just as well be a new open format. Inkscape could itself create an open format that they saved to by default and supported many features SVG does not. They they publish the specification for it. Done.

A format doesn’t need to be popular, in widespread use, or proprietary to be useful.

lightedman• 2 years ago

"Multiple outlines in a single shape? No."

Copy/paste/recenter/resize. No live filter needed. So good even EZCad does it and it can barely do any sort of SVG editing or creation.

account423• 2 years ago

So you are asking for an authoring tool that has a format that can do what SVG can't and then show examples of how Inkscape can do that? What exactly are you missing then? Is the problem that Inkscape SVG has SVG in the name?

melagonster• 2 years ago

Yes, it is very important for learning Inkscape to understand that Inkscape is a SVG editor, but not for common graph editor.

prmoustache5• 2 years ago

Speaking of SVG spec, is there a guide on how to create SVG files with Inkscape that will render well on most web browsers supporting SVG?

I have failed a number of times producing an SVG file that would render the same on browsers and in Inkscape editor window. This is frustrating.

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

fwiw I make everything a path, make it small and edit > crop to selection, then save as optimized svg - open with a Webbrowser - Show source - copy - paste into html - remove width and height (handled in the css) add the title etc and done I think.

yay for Inkscape but please make dialog modals when multiple tabs are open come to the front and show themselves on macOS - don’t be shy

neves• 2 years ago

I've just bought a Surface Pro tablet. Does Inkscape interface work well in a tablet or with a pen?

janci2• 2 years ago

Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

It can be a bit fussy, but works well --- unfortunately, there hasn't really been a vector drawing program focused specifically on stylus use since Futurewave Smartsketch (which became Flash by way of Futuresplash Animator).

As noted elsethread:

Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash: https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

If you're willing to consider a commercial option, Serif's Affinity Designer may suit.

ltlnx5• 2 years ago

I really hope it does, but for now it lacks in the basics such as panning (Krita can hold down a button + move pen to pan the canvas), button support (I don't think there's a way to map pen buttons to specific functions, let alone switch between them), and the drawing tools are still really basic. They are focusing on UX for the next release though, and UX issues can be discussed in the Inkscape UX Gitlab repo.

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

Also check out the HyVector app mentioned elsethread:

https://hyvector.com/

bityard2• 2 years ago

Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...

prmoustache5• 2 years ago

I am always surprised to see people recreating the faded/worn out branding of stuff they own when restoring them.

I mean as a consumer I see it as a mark of disrespect from the manufacturer to plaster its logo everywhere. I am paying for the product, not to be an advertising billboard ffs! If you want me to advertise your product, let me negociate the terms and my retribution. This was particularly annoying on road bicycles in the early 2000's where most bike manufacturers would put as many are 7 or 8 logos on the frame and every single component maker would also do the same with loud bright on black logos for every single other part.

see this example of a cannodale supersix of that era: https://files.bikeindex.org/uploads/Pu/582923/large_BRD28952...

Bottom line: when I am restoring a bicycle, motorbike, whatever, the first thing to go are usually the branding and logos.

criddell• 2 years ago

If you were restoring a classic Lamborghini, you wouldn't keep the bull logo?

Most things are ugly though. The stuff people restore (like classic motorcycles) often have pretty great aesthetics and that's part of why they want to restore the object.

https://classictwowheels.com.au/1973-norton-850-commando/

bityard2• 2 years ago

I guess I don't consider my motorcycles to be art projects. I want to experience the machine as it was originally designed, as much as I can. Once I've done that with this one, I'll move on to another. But I don't care to "make it mine." Car nuts who restore old Mustangs or Corvettes are the same way, just on a somewhat bigger scale.

There are of course a large number of people who do the opposite. They take vintage bikes and chop them up into cafe racers or whatever. And that's fine too. Just not what I'm interested in.

anthk2• 2 years ago

Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players. And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.

If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.

jgalt2122• 2 years ago

It would be nice if Inkscape supported SVG P/S. We need that for BIMI, and now have to pay someone who has access to Adobe.

Cyphase• 2 years ago

For anyone in a similar boat, I just heard of someone using Adobe Illustrator's 7-day trial to generate their BIMI logo file.

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-996-notes.pdf (page 18) https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/996

jgalt2122• 2 years ago

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

fractallyte• 2 years ago

You could just hand-edit Inkscape's plain or optimized SVG file: https://bimigroup.org/creating-bimi-svg-logo-files/

(It's really not too difficult.)

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

That sort of thing makes me wonder if Inkscape shouldn't have a configurable "Post-processor" option like to that used for G-code, possibly on a per-file basis (add the editing commands needed after saving to a user-editable pane).

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

That site has links to tools at github.

Dwedit• 2 years ago

We really need a vector editor that has some of the features of Flash's UI. I haven't seen them in other programs.

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

Wick Editor implements some aspects of the vector drawing from Flash:

https://www.wickeditor.com/#/

wwweston• 2 years ago

They were called Fireworks and Freehand. Sadly, they didn't survive Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.

WillAdams7• 2 years ago

Serif's Affinity Designer was consciously modeled on Freehand, and Quasado became GraviT which likewise was inspired by Freehand.

sgdfhijfgsdfgds2• 2 years ago

It can open Affinity Designer files!? That’s something of a buried lede.

That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.

Jerry2• 2 years ago

I love Inkscape so much. I use it every other week to make presentations, slides or just simple graphics when I need it. I illustrated my thesis with it.

Another piece of 2D vector software that I use and recommend is Graphite [1]. It too is open source. Graphite has nodes and can be procedural in nature. Have them both in your graphics toolbox.

[1] https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite

sirsinsalot• 2 years ago

If you've not, please donate x

smartmic• 2 years ago

Another gem in my graphics toolbox is edraw [1], an embedded vector drawing tool for Emacs. I use it to make quick sketches in Orgmode files, and it is highly recommended for any Emacs enthusiast.

[1] https://github.com/misohena/el-easydraw

zelphirkalt• 2 years ago

That is truly impressive. I have a hunch though, that it is not well suitable for proper diagrams, due to all the things like wrapping text that is too long for a line inside a shape, inside the shape onto more lines. Dynamically wrapping text when a node's size changes. Moving edges when nodes are moved. All those things one takes for granted in an actual diagramming tool.

weinzierl• 2 years ago

Inkscape has been a staple in my toolbox for decades. The only gripe I have is that it could have been a bit more stable at times.

teleforce• 2 years ago

Is there any open source hybrid vector and bitmap drawing tool?

I used to use Xara Extreme and it's very fast, intuitive and handy mainly due its hybrid features. It's also used to be open source but not anymore:

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Krita is the big one.

mkl• 2 years ago

Xara was never fully open source. They kept the renderer proprietary, so it never really had a chance.

lavela• 2 years ago

Graphite has raster editing in their roadmap[1], but afaik it's not really there yet.

[1] https://graphite.rs/features/

bubblesnort4• 2 years ago

Thank you. This is the first time I've heard of the Graphite editor.

I think it could benefit from availability in package reposirories and looking at the license, it appears the program itself is free under the Apache license but the artwork is non-free. It cannot be modified and commercial use is prohibited.

When combined, Graphite as a whole is non-free so I won't be compiling this until the artwork is gone. I'll look into providing some dummy files and see where it goes.

The other packing problem is that there's already a server monitoring program also named Graphite. But given the above, a change of name and new icons would solve both problems.

bobajeff2• 2 years ago

For those who are confused I believe you're referring to the application logo and branding. So basically the Firefox > Iceweasel case again. While the art you create with it is still yours.

erellsworth• 2 years ago

Graphite looks pretty cool. Thanks for sharing!

o1o1o1• 2 years ago

Inkscape is one of the best and most important tools in my arsenal. From creating and editing vectors for use with a laser cutter to designing icons when tools like Illustrator are too expensive and alternatives like ChatGPT fall short, Inkscape never ceases to amaze me with its capabilities. It's remarkable how well this open-source, free application performs. Thank you, Inkscape, for being one of the most reliable and impressive apps I know!

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

I did a lot of strange things in old Inkscape to achieve the same result as given by this new:

  Shape Builder

  You can now tackle quick edits on raster (pixel) images within Inkscape using the Shape Builder tool. Load an image and select sections that you want to isolate.

user3939382• 2 years ago

The prospect of discarding 25 years of muscle memory in Adobe Illustrator is unfathomable to me, as much as I loathe what Adobe has become.

ltlnx5• 2 years ago

It does have Ai shortcuts to choose from in the settings, if there's problems or inaccuracies with it you can also open an issue at https://inkscape.org/report/ .

rullopat• 2 years ago

Is it only me that, when I open Inkspace, I really cannot get anything done without watching a tutorial or reading docs / blog posts?

Kuinox• 2 years ago

Same for me, if I want to get something done, I need illustrator (which i don't know well too, but it's way more intuitive)

ltlnx5• 2 years ago

Do you have prior experience with other vector editors? For me it's pretty intuitive (save for some papercuts), but that may be due to my lack of experience with other editors.

gattr• 2 years ago

I like Inkscape very much and use it for all my (usually quite simple) vector drawing needs. From the get go, it was quite intuitive to use - my first vector editor experience was with CorelDRAW 3 in the early 90s.

bubblesnort4• 2 years ago

There's an obscured close button in the top right corner. If you want to skip the welcome dialog just click that.

The second time it appears, you can uncheck "Show this every time" in the lower left corner and then click "New Document".

...or you could click Save on the first dialog and then click " Thanks!". You'll get the same dialog as above when you'd have closed it with the button in the corner.

Suppafly• 2 years ago

I think they are implying they can't figure out how to use the program, not complaining about the helpful start screen.

Fluorescence• 2 years ago

Not too bad for me. You likely face the universal problem with more complex software when you don't use them regularly. It's a real skill that requires significant use over time to bed down some lasting neural paths. I have much more difficulty with e.g. Blender, Reaper etc. when every few years I use them. I too have start from tutorials again but I still think they are good tools despite not retaining anything between my rare uses. I bought Affinity, learned to use it but when I returned to it after some time, nothing remained in my head and I had to use inkscape instead.

For inkscape, some of the more sophisticated generative things were "use and forget" for me but they have actually improved to be much more intuitive. The main thing I lose is some of the natural touch that makes it so fast to use. I do love when I use it regularly because it's so quick to pump about svgs at the speed of thought.

Getting really good at a vector tool is such a valuable life skill for explaining all manner of tricky things whether it's for UI mockups, software architecture or graphic design stuff like logos/t-shirt/marketing designs. I live for the "how on earth have you done this?" reaction when I can create a quality diagram while on a call with people. It can really enrich the quality of interactions and reduce cycle time to create designs in real time.

I also use it for all sorts of personal stuff like interior design, DIY, scaffolding etc. I've even submitted official architectural plans I made with it. It's as valuable as a spreadsheet.

ho_schi• 2 years ago

Woo-ha!

    … bug fixes and setting the stage for the arrival of GTK 4.

Gtk4. Meanwhile at Gimp? Puh. Maybe they will manage to port to the 14 year old Gtk3 soon. I hope it at least. I’m sure the Gimp developers doing their best and will benefit soon from Wayland and HiDPI.

fullstop• 2 years ago

The funny part is what the G in GTK initially represented.

dustypotato• 2 years ago

Woah . I googled to make sure I read right. It's true!

account423• 2 years ago

Good. I hope Gimp stays on GTK 3 for as long as possible so I don't have to use GTK 4.

pxoe• 2 years ago

Calligraphy pen is still unusable, laggy and jaggy. Too slow, not enough setting increments to fine tune it, awfully, almost absurdly angular on even slightly fast motions. 0.92 remains the most responsive version. Welp, i don't know what i expected, since every time i'd check latest version it'd still be like this. Celebrating 4 years of Inkscape breaking calligraphy tool and never fixing it since.

Inkscape 1.4

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