Inkscape 1.4.4

https://inkscape.org/doc/release_notes/1.4.4/Inkscape_1.4.4.html

by s1291 • 3 months ago

355 107 3 months ago

tasuki2• 3 months ago

Ah, the tool I love and hate. Mostly love though. Let me tell you about the single thing I hate:

I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" button.

Literally everything else about Inkscape is amazing! Congrats to the team!

~~~

Maybe this is also the right time & place to plug my favourite SVG path editor? https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ - free as in both beer and freedom, a tool to craft minimalistic well-behaved SVG paths.

elaus• 3 months ago

I too love the SVG Path Editor, used it many times to create SVGs that had "nice code". Nobody really appreciates it, but it just felt good.

Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.

But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)

phoronixrly• 3 months ago

There are options to simplify and optimize SVGs on 'Save as'. Apart from the Plain SVG, there is Optimised SVG that you might find useful since you're into editing manually.

omoikane2• 3 months ago

a simple hand-crafted SVG

I have also had trouble with some generated SVGs, for example:

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/5317

Part of the problem is that Inkscape is too good, and the file format it uses mostly conforms to standards, so I have the expectation that opening arbitrary SVGs would just work. With other programs that use proprietary formats, I wouldn't have tried to generate drawings at all. It's a bummer when I run into what seem to be corner cases of Inkscape's SVG handling, but fortunately the set of corner cases seem to be shrinking.

cycomanic• 3 months ago

Have you tried saving in one of the different SVG formats. I forgot what inkscape calls them, but IMO there are 2 or 3 different SVG formats one can choose when saving. I know I needed that a long time ago, because chrome could not deal with the advanced features in regular inkscape SVG.

driggs• 3 months ago

That's a pretty absurd complaint.

Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?

SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.

(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)

2ndorderthought7• 3 months ago

Well duh the inkscape team should write this feature just for them. For free of course lol. My god

tasuki2• 3 months ago

You are of course correct.

Running `tidy` is of not enough help. I handle the situation by saving into a new file, then copy-paste the changed bits into my hand-crafted SVG and clean them up.

Ideally I try to avoid Inkscape altogether. Which is hard, as it's just too good.

ctippett• 3 months ago

I have zero expectation that any design tool will export concise and optimal SVG markup.

I highly recommend using SVGO (https://svgo.dev/).

simonbw• 3 months ago

There is actually one tool I've dealt with that works nicely with hand-crafted SVG's: https://boxy-svg.com/

nicbou• 3 months ago

I feed all my svgs to svgomg before out using them on the web. It works wonders.

thot_experiment• 3 months ago

Wow, I think they finally fixed the awful lag just in time for me to have completely moved my practice to https://graphite.art/

0x69420• 3 months ago

inkscape has had a long and quiet ascent from quintessentially janky foss creative software to genuinely pleasant to use. i still wish it were a little easier to edit the individual portions of deeply nested clip/mask operations, but if you need to crank out some icons, you can use inkscape and not hate your life, which is something i'd have called someone insane for telling me a decade ago.

jszymborski• 3 months ago

Pre-1.0, I remember hating and wrestling with UI. It was so jank.

1.0 and after, and it's been truly a dream. I now use it to make all my figures for my research publications and presentations. Inkscape has gone from compromise I begrudge to my tool of choice in relatively little time. This is a good reminder that I should probably send them a donation.

throwa356262• 3 months ago

I love Inkscape.

But their UX is getting worse with each release. I think they need another Blender-style overhaul

WillAdams3• 3 months ago

I wish they would consider Freehand/Virtuoso as an exemplar

ltlnx6• 3 months ago

What features of Freehand or Virtuoso would you like to see in Inkscape?

thenthenthen2• 3 months ago

In my experience Blender seemed to change the UI and naming of UI elements and options with almost any release making many tutorials incomprehensible thus almost obsolete, making it super hard to get into

_carbyau_• 3 months ago

I love Blender. After years of using it I am a basic user as I only use it for 3D printed models.

But Blender is just hard to get into. It's not just the updates, though they may not help.

What helped me most was setting aside the time to do a series of ~3 minute videos going back to the absolute basics.

IE how to: rearrange your workspace, use viewport, vertices-edges-faces, transforms-Grab, Rotate, Scale. And more.

AND THEN learning all the keyboard shortcut keys for them.

Blender is so much easier once you learn the common keyboard shortcuts that YOU use all the time. So take those notes.

Bit of exploration of the Blender documentation, which is fantastic but probably 99% used by the automated cognitive tools you asked a query of.

After THAT, you watch/do the tutorials to build basic donut/sword/gadget whatever of interest.

Then you are on your own to do what you want and then the inevitable forum/AI queries about specifics to try to solve the issue you are having.

In my early days, I spent over a week making a game model plane into something I could print. Now I understand the concepts and a few blender tools, it might take me 30 minutes.

Easy? No. It does require a concerted effort. It's not something you just "pick up on the side" like basic photo edits.

But damn, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities...

AlienRobot• 3 months ago

The only problem I have with it is GTK-style bulkiness. I feel like every open source software is developed for 4k quad-monitors in mind, or tablets. Everything is thicker and taller than it needs to be.

aborsy• 3 months ago

Is there a reason to consider Inkscape instead of Tikz?

It seems to me Tikz does the same but programmatically.

oblio• 3 months ago

Is there a reason to consider a Toyota Corolla instead of a Caterpillar excavator?

It seems to me the Caterpillar does the same but with better offroad capabilities.

cptskippy• 3 months ago

Is there a reason to advertise Tikz like this?

echoangle• 3 months ago

but programmatically.

That’s one reason to use Inkscape. If I want to draw a design, I have a shape in mind I then try to draw by editing the points as I see them, with instant visual feedback. I don’t want to code in points and have to modify coordinates.

It’s like asking why people use a parametric CAD suite like NX if they could just use OpenSCAD. If you want to model something, seeing it and editing it in the 3D view can be much nicer than editing code.

refset• 3 months ago

Fixed a crash when starting Inkscape with a graphics tablet plugged in

Great news! Having to reconnect the USB cable each time is no fun.

uzidil• 3 months ago

I love Inkscape! My game Enalim was made with Inkscape. (https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim)

I'm glad this project keeps going.

idle_zealot• 3 months ago

You use Inkscape for pixel art? How does that workflow go?

omoikane2• 3 months ago

I also use Inkscape for pixel art. There are two settings under document properties that make it easier to draw in screen pixel units:

- Set display units to "px"

- Set scale (px per user unit) to 1.0

I have a script that converts SVGs to PNGs as part of my build process:

https://github.com/uguu-org/sor6/blob/master/data/svg_to_png...

poulpy1232• 3 months ago

the art style really made me think of Ultima VII

robinsonb5• 3 months ago

Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.

It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.

I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)

s1291• 3 months ago

CMYK support is currently in active development. Martin has been working working on it for about two years, and he regularly posts update videos about inkscape [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiW1cCXOK3s

pugworthy• 3 months ago

Some of the plugins for it are pretty interesting. We have a Brother embroidery machine in our work Makerspace, and it ends up there's an Inkscape plugin (called Inkstitch) to create command files for the machine. It's like working with a slicer for 3d printing, but more about changing thread than filament, plus how stitches should be oriented and such.

bityard• 3 months ago

Yes! I use an Inkscape extension to send my own designs to a vinyl cutter that works perfectly well but has LONG since stopped being supported by its manufacturer or any other closed-source tools.

The extension is inkscape-silhouette (https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette) and is apparently being maintained by a makerspace in Germany.

sen2• 3 months ago

I'll have to see if I can get this working with our vevor vinyl plotter, as ink cut hasn't worked for a long time now and there doesn't seem to be any way to use the aliexpress/vevor vinyl plotters without paid proprietary software currently.

foobiekr• 3 months ago

My wife makes extensive use of inkstitch and loves it.

Beijinger• 3 months ago

Inkscape is great but I wish Xara Xtreme for Linux had not died.

brcmthrowaway• 3 months ago

Where is the Inkscape MCP?

pxoe4• 3 months ago

Calligraphy pen/tool is still unusable, messy and less responsive (lower resolution, more angular, etc), much worse than in 0.92, and it's been this way ever since 1.0. It also now requires windows ink to be on, and they removed devices panel so you can't even tell if your device is recognized properly. It's bad with a tablet, but it's still just as bad and much worse in comparison even with the mouse. It's kinda disappointing to see this bad of a regression to just linger there for years. Here's the issue for this problem on their gitlab https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/1473#note_...

nathanmills2• 3 months ago

Keep in mind that it's FREE and OPEN SOURCE software

simonh• 3 months ago

Firstly developers and designers of OSS need honest feedback from users as well, not just commercial developers.

Secondly, how does being OSS justify significant regressions?

2ndorderthought7• 3 months ago

I remember my car broke down, it was trash worth maybe 200 in scrap metal at the time. The tow to the yard was like 100 or something. I was screwed and couldn't get rides to work. My buddy lent me a car he had for free. I did not complain once to anyone about the things wrong with that car, and I never will. I even fixed some small issues with it to return the favor. The guy and that car saved my livelihood at the time.

I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.

If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.

nkrisc• 3 months ago

Potential users like honest reviews and criticisms of open source software. It helps us decide if it’s worth using or not.

bowsamic2• 3 months ago

Inkscape is the only software that I see people get so defensive about when criticised. I even had the lead dev appear in my mentions and try and start fighting me on twitter when I complained on my own timeline about the performance on macOS. Weird culture

pxoe4• 3 months ago

Yeah, I'm keeping it in mind. 0.92 still works great. There's basically nothing that's so severely lacking in 0.92, or anything that would be so enticing in 1.x, so there's no pressure to switch at all, and it may as well stay broken forever.

It's a little odd to me that the tool regressed so badly in 1.x and stayed the same for five years though, even despite some apparent attempts to fix it, for something that i assume is a core tool (it's right there on the toolbar), though maybe not so much if it's so low priority that it stays unaddressed. It's not a situation where people are asking for something new to be added, it's a feature that worked fine before that got broken years ago and stayed broken. It's frankly bizarre to see hot new releases get touted year after year, while a part of core experience just stays broken.

But again, it's kinda fine because the old version is just there, it just makes for a bit of an odd caveat when recommending it to people, for them to stick with the old version because it works better (well, actually works at all). It's a little unfortunate for the new users that might not know that and will just get the latest version and won't experience a feature properly though. (like, if I was a new user to it and picked up any 1.x version and tried the tool there, it would be clear that it's unusable for drawing and it'd be immediately dismissed, even though it actually works pretty great in older versions)

ltlnx6• 3 months ago

Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.

Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.

pxoe4• 3 months ago

One thing about pen tool that can be kind of tricky to adjust even in 0.92 is Mass parameter, where even in that version there's not enough granularity literally just between 0, 1 and 2 (it honestly could use about a 100 levels to adjust between just 0 and 2), and the lack of granularity and pen control is made even more severe in 1.x where there's not enough granularity even between just 0 and 1, and even 1 already feels much slower than higher settings in 0.92. Though I'm not sure if fixing that would even be that pressing at all if it was just brought up to 0.92 level of performance.

I don't know if anything is solved in 1.5 dev build yet, but the calligraphy pen there seems to be even worse than before and worse than even in 1.4.4. It's frankly impressive. I take it nobody actually uses that tool for drawing at all (which would explain a lot really), otherwise the issues with it would be immediately glaring a while ago.

fragmede2• 3 months ago

In this day and age, why not fork it and use Codex or Claude to fix the specific problems you're hitting?

michaelmrose2• 3 months ago

You are drastically underestimating how hard this is to do if they don't code and the time cost which would be spent actual using the tool.

Also either the difficulty either upstreaming changes or porting these changes to every subsequent version.

transitorykris• 3 months ago

Love inkscape and wish it could get some engineering love around MacOS. For quick work I'll use it on MacOS, but anything deep I switch to Windows.

sen2• 3 months ago

What issues do you have? I use Inkscape on Mac almost every day and lately hit very few bugs. I think a lot of them have been fixed in the last year or so.

It used to be almost unusable with all the UI bugs (can't close tabs when you open them, can't resize the window without panes bugging out or the app crashing, etc).

I get the occasional crash where it just closes completely for no reason, but very rarely in the last year.

JayDustheadz2• 3 months ago

My top 2 picks: 1) The fact that dialog windows almost always open on the wrong display if you have two displays and the external is the main one, 2) The fact that windows' positions/sizes are not remembered, There are a few other things (for example, occasional performance issues) but these two annoy me the most.

Aside from that, I absolutely LOVE Inkscape - there are no better tools if you want to have granular control over the SVG.

Edit: here's another one, not sure if macOS related tho - auto-selecting the parent when clicking the path underneath it. Because of that, I can't use a hotkey to switch the visibility of the selected path on/off (Inkscape switches the visibility of the parent layer instead, affecting everything that's inside).

amelius• 3 months ago

I wish Inkscape would add constraints, as found in CAD tools.

daniel_reetz• 3 months ago

This is what I'm looking for. This would replace Corel Draw for me.

There is a plugin for blender that allows CAD style sketching. It may be a way forward.

darknavi3• 3 months ago

I have my first contribution to Inkscape in this release I think. It's quite a minor feature though, so I don't see it in the changelog. It allows the user to set their default saved file name. I was tired of drawing.svg :)

bizzyskillet• 3 months ago

Nice! :)

enneff• 3 months ago

Haha thank you! This had been mildly bothering me for a while actually.

NewsaHackO• 3 months ago

Good job!

throwaway85825• 3 months ago

That's how it starts.

lagniappe2• 3 months ago

Thank you :)

JayDustheadz2• 3 months ago

Nicely done, thank you! It's "small" features like this that make software really nice and pleasant to use. Don't stop there!

therealdrag0• 3 months ago

What default would you change it to,

darknavi3• 3 months ago

I normally change mine to `project.svg` but that's just my preference.

__mharrison__• 3 months ago

Congrats from another contributor.

I made a slicing plugin years ago that lets you create a layer that defines named rectangles. Each area under the rectangle is saved as an image.

chrismorgan2• 3 months ago

Just updated to 1.4.4 and it still looks to be drawing.svg.

darknavi3• 3 months ago

It allows the user to change the default from drawning.svg, but that is still the default out of the box.

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7801

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

If it just defaults to the last filename I used for a new document, I would be happy.

(Best of both worlds if I don't have to discover a setting somewhere to get this behavior.)

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

Inkscape is really good for products with no budget for designers. Let me explain why.

One of the apps I am working on hit 10,000+ active users (per Playstore dashboard), and Inkscape has a role to play in this.

Since the app is free and doesn't even have a backend, there is no budget for the designer.

I looked for a few tools online, but most of them failed to generate icons/logos.

I ended up using Inkscape to make logos for my app.

Without Inkscape, this workflow is difficult.

Though I am not able to intuitively use it well from the GUI. The thing is, you don't even need the GUI anymore!

But Claude or Codex is able to write SVG line by line (so you can make changes incrementally) and use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.

Here's my app for those who are curious: https://macrocodex.app/

I am pretty sure some designer will come and say "you did a bad job at this," which is fine. My experience is in writing backends, not mobile apps or design.

Every app is saying they use "AI for smart recommendation,” while I went the opposite route, of “no, our product does not use AI for any suggestion.“ It’s entirely deterministic.

Leftium• 3 months ago

Next time, perhaps my quick logo generator can help: https://logo.leftium.com/logo

The defaults are tuned to aesthetics of my personal logo, but it's quite configurable. (You can even copy your own SVG into the icon input)

Example logos:

- https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css

- https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense

- https://github.com/Leftium/multi-launch

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

That looks neat! Thanks for sharing, I’ll try to use it next time I need a logo. :D

SOLAR_FIELDS• 3 months ago

I'm no Jony Ive, also a design stunted engineer but I'd say that looks decent given the constraints. My only obvious complaint is the kerning of the text "Get it on Google Play" and "Download on the App Store" (italics emphasis mine, what's in italics is what looks terrible on my laptop screen

david422• 3 months ago

use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.

I do the same thing. How many icon sizes does Apple require now? I create one SVG vector, and then dump them all out with a script. Need to change something? Update the SVG and instantly regenerate the icons.

timonoko• 3 months ago

Inkscape = Press random buttons until something good happens.

In this case the "Good" is that it makes Gcode for lasercutter. Everytime it takes atleast 30 minutes, even when I have recorded instructions. Always some weird thing happens, and I have to do it again, step-by-step. There is zero clue what paths, edges, layers, backgrounds, vectors etc might actually mean.

But no more. Gemini AI made me a total solution. It takes a picture, checks it for "isolated islands" (which drop off and need bridges) and then generates perfect silhouette of Mannerheim or Mussolini.

nine_k• 3 months ago

Inkscape is an indispensable tool for me. I use it for quick drawing and drafting, for presentation slides, illustrations, small-scale print works, and even just pictures for fun. It allows to combine freehand drawing and moving things around with very precise, CAD-like handling of shapes, sizes, coordinates, etc.

There are few tools that are very ingrained in my daily operations, stay for years, and would be hard to replace, like Emacs or Firefox; Inkscape is among them.

Tommix11• 3 months ago

I use 0.92 for extracting HPGL data from cutting machine software and converting it to better vector formats sometimes. I use that version because I think HPGL support was removed in newer versions. Inkscape is a great program, keep up the good work. Kind Regards A user

sprucevoid2• 3 months ago

Inkscape has many good features but also many rough edges. Fixing the command palette (shortcut key ?) would go a long way. On Windows it takes around 5 seconds for the palette search box to appear after a clean start of Inkscape 1.4.4. Typing is lagging and results are wildly irrelevant. That's a shame because Inkscape has so many powerful features tucked away in menus and side panes. A well working command palette makes it quick and easy for the user to use tools without exploring menu hierarchies or memorizing keyboard shortcuts.

For example if I type "rectangle" in Inkscape command palette I would expect the draw rectangle tool as a top match. Instead the top matches are:

  Create a Slicer Rectangle
  Create a Slicer Rectangle (No preferences)
  Triangle (No preferences)
  Clone original path (LPE)
  Lightness-Contrast (No preferences)
  Refractive Glass (No preferences)
  Refractive Gel A (No preferences)

There are dozens of more matches in the scrollable list but the draw rectangle tool does not appear to be one of them.

There have been several issue tracker issues about the command palette. Here is one from 2022 and still ongoing about the slow start https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/3227

poulpy1232• 3 months ago

Inkscape is one one my favorite open source software. Myabe it is not as powerful than proprietary software but it does anything I need

sylware• 3 months ago

I wish it was written in plain and simple C.

Anything new from AI assisted port from c++ to plain and simple C?

Inkscape 1.4.4

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