Wonderful to hear that it is now a native application in macOS that does not require XQuartz!
Perhaps related: Inkscape has always felt quite laggy for me, even with my extremely basic needs. I pretty much just make text in boxes and connect them with arrows. So together with all these new lovely features, I hope that performance is improved in this release also.
The 1.0 version for macOS is a preview release and it still has performance issues, but performance fixes are coming, according to the macOS download page. Honestly, I'm so blown away with the beautiful native macOS support that I'm perfectly content to wait a bit longer for better performance.
Are you sure? I was at 1.0.0rc yesterday, and the brew bumped me up to 1.0.0. Or maybe you are saying that macOS 1.0 version is still sort of "beta"?
Either way, I love Inkscape. I draw all of our apps icons as acts with it and then use it to create all of our pdf icons of iOS and convert to drawables for Android.
Yes, early on I was trying to use Inkscape on Mac OS. I finally switched to Affinity Desginer and was much happier. Hopefully, they fix the performance so that Inkscape can finally be a reasonable option on Mac OS.
I started using inkscape recently for editing a few svg's and was impressed at how much this free program can do while also being easy to use.
I've been using gimp for a long time now and still get lost in it's poorly laid out UI, with inkscape I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first try.
I'm relatively a power user and can mostly work my way through most any software and regularly help people with software I've never used before, but I just can't wrap my head around Gimp for some reason, everything seems way too complicated. When I Google the solution to something I can do in 3 minutes in Paint.NET, it often turns out to require lots of unintuitive steps, I hit edge cases, look up bug reports and feature requests and then just decide to use Pinta instead. And other people seem to work fine with it, so it must be that people are just wired differntly or something.
Gimp is also technically very capable, especially when combined with G'mic plugins. I've used both software for different projects and I think I could switch permanently to Gimp if it could get better in two ways:
- Non-destructive filters, AKA "layer effects" or "smart filters" (I've read it's supposed do come in some distant future when the GEGL overhaul is finished). A node-based nondestructive filter system would be awesome
- Smarter selection tools. Current tools create little to no gradient in the mask they create, and it's a pain to refine a selection after creating it. Sure there are workarounds, but it feels repetitive and inefficient.
Sure the interface is a bit all over the place but it's not so bad, and it's free!
Same here - Photoshop is full of confusing idioms that make it hard for me to get things done, whereas I find Gimp is simple and straightforward. I suspect a lot of people who think Gimp is hard to use haven't used it in the last 5-10 years (it's been improved significantly in that time).
That's surprising in some ways and very unsurprising in others.
Gimp is primarily a raster graphics tool (pixels), where inkscape is vector graphics (lines and points).
If you've been using gimp to do flat graphicy design stuff with its pathing tool suite, it's unsurprising that you found inkscape a better fit.
What is surprising, is that gimp is a ridiculously simple program, and inkscape is slightly notorious for having a questionably intuitive interface, and vectors are also less intuitive than raster.
Inkscape/CorelDraw/Illustrator/etc. are drawing programs. They deal with vector images.
Gimp/Photoshop/Paintshop Pro/etc. are painting programs. They deal with bitmaps.
They're fundamentally different paradigms. Very little intuition from one carries over to the other. Of course, they've been adding some bridge functionality (Photoshop smartobjects, etc.), if people want to nitpick, but the core UX is designed for something fundamentally different.
I don't think this is true: Both are editing programs. The main subject being edited is a single file (as opposed to multi-file projects, like an IDE does). Both therefore need a UI for file handling (load/save their "native" format that exactly represents their internal model), import/export of other formats, undo/redo, etc.
For both there is the question how editing multiple files at the same time is being dealt with, i.e. how processes and windows relate to files. Both have to arrange many tools and helpers together with the main view on the file being edited. Both want to have help and documentation. The files being edited support meta-data.
Both raster images and vector images are visual and can therefore be exported to other visual representations, and especially both can be printed. So both programs have to deal with printing, page setup etc.
The whole topic of colors and color spaces applies to both raster images and vector images.
I could go on, but the above should give a hint how much these programs conceptually have in common.
I agree they don't do the same thing, but I agree with dest that the Inkscape UI is much better than GIMP. I've used GIMP way more than Inkscape, so I should be more comfortable with it. But I end up feeling like GIMP is fighting me in ways that Inkscape would like me to get things done.
I personally find GIMP more intuitive than Inkscape. I think most of it depends on what you're using the tool for, though, and I think I just do more GIMPy takss than Inkscapey tasks right now.
Try using Inkscape to cut a person out of a photo, adjust contrast/white balance, and add a vignette...
On the other hand, try making a beautiful invoice template in gimp, with a nicely laid out table, and nicely typeset text....
It's kind of like comparing Word to PowerPoint. Both can place text on pages, and it's possible to write an essay in PowerPoint, or make a presentation in Word, but you'll be hurting to do it.
Right. But somebody who uses both word processors and slide programs can definitely cross-compare in terms of UI quality and polish.
To pick a more obvious dimension, if somebody said, "Word is buggier than Powerpoint", nobody would say, "You can't compare them because they don't do the same thing." Bugginess is an abstractable quality across kinds of product.
The same thing is true about UI quality. It goes well beyond intuitiveness. You can look at fit-and-finish details. You can look at number of unnecessary actions. You can look at difficulty for novices completing common tasks. You can compare utility of error messages. How much are key concepts related to a task obvious vs hidden? Et cetera, et cetera.
In my experience, Inkscape is better in that dimension. I think this even though I have used GIMP a lot more, and so normally would be biased the other way, because familiarity makes its UI issues less obvious to me.
Paint Shop Pro in particular did a good job of combining bitmap and vector objects. Not sure if it still does, it's undergone many changes since I was familiar with it. There was also an associated editor dedicated to SVG, but I think they gave up on that long ago.
Gimp is hard to reason about until you start using masks and realize that hitting either ctl or shift turns your regular paintbrush into a line. Then it stopped being quite as obnoxious.
The filters are phenomenal though, I've been using Gimp for fifteen years and find it's good enough even though I still find the UI difficult.
For me the weirdest part is that clicking on the X on the toolbar closes only the toolbar instead of it realizing that probably if I click an X anywhere I mean to close at least the currently open project. I get the logic with multiple windows open, it's just the one weird thing that I will never get used to. I'm sure we all have those stories.
Edit: Didn't even need to look that far, was in an obvious menu (good UI!) and was just unchecked probably since upgrading didn't switch the option by default. Can't really argue with that but boy is the single window mode less painful to look at! Thanks again!
Very importantly, Inkscape is also a very successful free software project, which ensures, that Inkscape's functionality will remain free for as long as its license is enforced.
Adobe Illustrator already implemented it years ago.
I used AI a lot for creating cartoons. But then at some point I completely moved away from MS-Windows, which meant that I couldn't use AI any longer. I've been missing the calligraphic strokes option ever since (including the ability to convert these strokes to paths).
For more information about why calligraphic strokes are essential for drawing/inking cartoons:
How do calligraphic strokes differ from the built in calligraphy pen tool that lets you set a bunch of params to be controlled by your input device (tilt, pressure, etc.)? Is the idea that you make something that looks like similar pen input but in a more bezier-like way?
The idea is that you start with a path (say a rectangle), and then you select (probably in the stroke properties box) a calligraphic pen profile (usually an ellipse under an angle) and then the entire path (the rectangle in this case) will be drawn with that specific calligraphic stroke.
This would work for any path. And you could change the Bezier points after you applied the calligraphic pen to the stroke.
Inkscape is outstanding. Thanks for all the hard work.
My one and only complaint is, for very large drawings, selecting a large number of elements and moving them is very slooooooow. It would be great if, going forward, performance improvements can be made.
Hopefully since this is such a sudden and severe regression in canvas performance, it is related to a shallow bug rather than an architectural misadventure.
Congratulations to everyone who have made this possible.
Inkscape may not be perfect and perhaps it's not the best tool for graphics professionals but, as a person who is really bad at anything having to do with graphic design, drawing, layout design and graphics programs, it's the only vector graphics program I have been able to learn at a relatively decent level, allowing me to make effective diagrams for slides, papers, etc. With every other vector graphics editor I've tried, the learning curve felt to me like climbing a vertical ice wall.
So kudos for how intuitive it is, and hoping for many new versions to come.
Congrats on a v1.0 and thank you for all the hard work. I've used Inkscape & Gimp & script-fu as a professional-grade Adobe CS replacement for a some time, and it works very well. There are some bumps and a lot of DIY, but the experience gets better every year. I am also in the process of teaching my daughter to use Inkscape and Gimp.
I'd love to see the wiki back up, and more v1.0 examples of scripting. Ideally there would be a Inkscape specific Scheme-based language for scripting, with scripts not needing to be packaged as extensions but loaded into a directory. Insert 'I'd do it myself, but..' lame excuses here. I'd love to, but other projects occupy my time.
There are some absolutely huge changes in here. And they fixed my (least) favourite bug, which is that Line Height basically didn't work. Not to mention HiDPI. As a Surface Pro user, it's well worth the upgrade.
I love Inkscape, and all I wish for it is to take hints from modern design tools like Sketch and Figma, so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005.
Sketch has so many small life-improving tidbits, that combined they make me 50 times more productive when drawing anything, than in Inkscape.
I did a lot of tasks in inkscape for a while and switched to Google slides oddly enough. Of course it's a significantly smaller subset of features, but once you get good with it, it's very powerful. That said, I would be happy to switch back for a lot of things now that native macOS support is on the table. I think the big advantages I saw in slides is the collaboration and iteration (you just make another slide and hack) instead of cluttering a workspace and then having to collaborate or be a gate keeper on a local file. Super excited to give this a whirl though!
> so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005
Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.
Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.
I wasn't talking about visual gimmicks at all, but about capabilities to point the line to center of a pixel, mask layers, grouping, repeat-modes, automatic rulers, etc. Things you don't even see but without which it is damn hard to live without.
I just downloaded 1.0, and it's so much better now on mac. With a few tweaks it looks quite nice: turn off border and shadow of default document, change default color palette to something less... 1997, maybe switch icons to "tango" - and it looks pretty clean.
The performance is janky, but I think that's a "known issue" since switching away from quartz - but I'm excited for Inkscape again!
Inkscape is one of the most impressive examples of free/libre open-source software (FLOSS). It's developed by a friendly, transparent, well-run community of developers, writers and translators, testers, and designers.
As someone who has used Inkscape for well over a decade on desktop Linux, I continue to be impressed at how nice it is, how well it works, and how much it does. It's really a shining example of not-for-profit software development.
I may be misguided but it was also low on the radar of big graphical applications in the linux world. For years all I saw was gimp gimp gimp then one day a few people started to mention inkscape. Since then it has been a constant improvement.
They are very different in nature, and by their nature, Gimp is much more used/needed, hence its popularity. Think Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is much much more popular in brand than Illustrator. And actually, Gimp is to Photoshop as Inkscape is to Illustrator, so the analogy is perfect.
There is also Potrace [1], which is embedded in Inkscape. But if you want to call it via a cli you have to use Inkscape commands, which seems difficult for me. They are probably worth knowing, but I couldn't quickly find a full reference manual.
Instead, you can call Potrace directly from the command line. So the components within Inkscape are also worth understanding individually.
I've used Potrace to vectorise raster images of text that was pixelated.
Inkscape is one of my go-to examples when people say FLOSS cannot compete against commercial software. I use it daily for my research publications and it works great. The other astounding example of FLOSS is IMHO QGIS (Quantum GIS). It's one of these softwares that every time you use it you can't stop being surprised it's free.
I expect it to be the leader 3D software in a few years. Blender is in the right path. Next version will add some of the tools that made Sketchup popular. Their bet in Python was also fortunate and they are starting to cash in.
I recently started learning Blender for 2D animation with the new and improved Grease Pencil. It's very cool technology! I can't wait to get the hang of it. Blender is an amazing program.
I think the real killer is going to be the constant improvements to the video editing and mixed 2D animation facilities. I recently used Blender for some casual video editing, and there were a couple things about the experience that really stunk (like not having proper control over framerates, while editing a 15fps video, needing to render to 30fps), but there is also a lot of promise with its tight integration with the Blender renderers and animation system.
I think it's time for a mixed-content VFX BOMP with all the sequences composited and edited in Blender, end to end.
I know people love gimp, but I never cared for the way it is developed and how input / feedback was handled. I hope it is better now, because its interface is as weird as Blender was in its early days.
Not mentioned in that blog post is Ted Gould, who started the project. If you've ever met him, it's not hard to see how he'd set a tone that would ensure the community would grow in to what it is.
This right here, I am in the exact same boat. Much better than making them in powerpoint. And even though we have a (sort of) lab adobe CS key, all of my computers run linux and we only have like 5 keys which makes the process quite silly.
Now I just need to finish the figures for this paper so I can update to this newest version. But everyone in my lab is quite excited about it.
I use Inkscape from a long time, and it's generally a very good experience. The only thing I tried to do recently that didn't work was to open an .eps file provided by Google (the official Google Play button - they do not have .svg files, but even Apple has for their App Store). It couldn't directly open the file, I searched for tools to convert it but nothing worked. The only program that could open it was Adobe Illustrator, from there I could export it to .svg. I'd hope Inkscape could open .eps files AND Google to provide a open standard format for their vector files.
Congratulations! I've been using you for at least a decade, been more user friendly for me than Illustrator with as many features and only getting better. Thanks!
From what I've looked into it, and now I'm a novice is it's build more for illustrations. I think of inkscape more as a graphics designer software for making images and logos and things which you might use for a company logo. Where as Krita is more artistic in nature so like paintings and things (web comics). At least that has been my thoughts from my minimal exposure to both. Though I'm sure you can easily do all in either.
You can use Krita if you want to create illustrations or drawings not by modifying vectors (like in Inkscape) but by drawing with a digital brush. It’s pixel based like GIMP, which can also do digital drawing but with less ease and sophistication I imagine than in Krita. Whether it’s useful to you really depends on your illustration style, it’s probably less suited for a flat and vectory look. It’s more for things like storyboarding or other forms of digital painting.
Inkscape is a fantastic product and it can be used for some many unexpected things: editing a PDF, vectorizing an image, creating a pixel perfect resume...
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Perhaps related: Inkscape has always felt quite laggy for me, even with my extremely basic needs. I pretty much just make text in boxes and connect them with arrows. So together with all these new lovely features, I hope that performance is improved in this release also.
Either way, I love Inkscape. I draw all of our apps icons as acts with it and then use it to create all of our pdf icons of iOS and convert to drawables for Android.
I started using inkscape recently for editing a few svg's and was impressed at how much this free program can do while also being easy to use.
I've been using gimp for a long time now and still get lost in it's poorly laid out UI, with inkscape I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first try.
- Non-destructive filters, AKA "layer effects" or "smart filters" (I've read it's supposed do come in some distant future when the GEGL overhaul is finished). A node-based nondestructive filter system would be awesome
- Smarter selection tools. Current tools create little to no gradient in the mask they create, and it's a pain to refine a selection after creating it. Sure there are workarounds, but it feels repetitive and inefficient.
Sure the interface is a bit all over the place but it's not so bad, and it's free!
Gimp is primarily a raster graphics tool (pixels), where inkscape is vector graphics (lines and points).
If you've been using gimp to do flat graphicy design stuff with its pathing tool suite, it's unsurprising that you found inkscape a better fit.
What is surprising, is that gimp is a ridiculously simple program, and inkscape is slightly notorious for having a questionably intuitive interface, and vectors are also less intuitive than raster.
What were your use cases?
Inkscape/CorelDraw/Illustrator/etc. are drawing programs. They deal with vector images.
Gimp/Photoshop/Paintshop Pro/etc. are painting programs. They deal with bitmaps.
They're fundamentally different paradigms. Very little intuition from one carries over to the other. Of course, they've been adding some bridge functionality (Photoshop smartobjects, etc.), if people want to nitpick, but the core UX is designed for something fundamentally different.
For both there is the question how editing multiple files at the same time is being dealt with, i.e. how processes and windows relate to files. Both have to arrange many tools and helpers together with the main view on the file being edited. Both want to have help and documentation. The files being edited support meta-data.
Both raster images and vector images are visual and can therefore be exported to other visual representations, and especially both can be printed. So both programs have to deal with printing, page setup etc.
The whole topic of colors and color spaces applies to both raster images and vector images.
I could go on, but the above should give a hint how much these programs conceptually have in common.
Try using Inkscape to cut a person out of a photo, adjust contrast/white balance, and add a vignette...
On the other hand, try making a beautiful invoice template in gimp, with a nicely laid out table, and nicely typeset text....
It's kind of like comparing Word to PowerPoint. Both can place text on pages, and it's possible to write an essay in PowerPoint, or make a presentation in Word, but you'll be hurting to do it.
To pick a more obvious dimension, if somebody said, "Word is buggier than Powerpoint", nobody would say, "You can't compare them because they don't do the same thing." Bugginess is an abstractable quality across kinds of product.
The same thing is true about UI quality. It goes well beyond intuitiveness. You can look at fit-and-finish details. You can look at number of unnecessary actions. You can look at difficulty for novices completing common tasks. You can compare utility of error messages. How much are key concepts related to a task obvious vs hidden? Et cetera, et cetera.
In my experience, Inkscape is better in that dimension. I think this even though I have used GIMP a lot more, and so normally would be biased the other way, because familiarity makes its UI issues less obvious to me.
I just wish it wasn't so expensive.
The filters are phenomenal though, I've been using Gimp for fifteen years and find it's good enough even though I still find the UI difficult.
For me the weirdest part is that clicking on the X on the toolbar closes only the toolbar instead of it realizing that probably if I click an X anywhere I mean to close at least the currently open project. I get the logic with multiple windows open, it's just the one weird thing that I will never get used to. I'm sure we all have those stories.
Thanks, I'll look into that.
Edit: Didn't even need to look that far, was in an obvious menu (good UI!) and was just unchecked probably since upgrading didn't switch the option by default. Can't really argue with that but boy is the single window mode less painful to look at! Thanks again!
https://imgur.com/a/wFxf3jl
*twitches.
Inkscape is for vectors (almost anything created primarily on a computer) while Gimp is for rasters (when your input consists of pixels - eg a photo).
Some features I'd like to see in upcoming releases:
- Calligraphic strokes, and the possibility to convert them to paths.
- Better UX for filters (e.g. adding a drop shadow and changing the parameters could be simpler)
I used AI a lot for creating cartoons. But then at some point I completely moved away from MS-Windows, which meant that I couldn't use AI any longer. I've been missing the calligraphic strokes option ever since (including the ability to convert these strokes to paths).
For more information about why calligraphic strokes are essential for drawing/inking cartoons:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/150671191X
This would work for any path. And you could change the Bezier points after you applied the calligraphic pen to the stroke.
My one and only complaint is, for very large drawings, selecting a large number of elements and moving them is very slooooooow. It would be great if, going forward, performance improvements can be made.
Inkscape may not be perfect and perhaps it's not the best tool for graphics professionals but, as a person who is really bad at anything having to do with graphic design, drawing, layout design and graphics programs, it's the only vector graphics program I have been able to learn at a relatively decent level, allowing me to make effective diagrams for slides, papers, etc. With every other vector graphics editor I've tried, the learning curve felt to me like climbing a vertical ice wall.
So kudos for how intuitive it is, and hoping for many new versions to come.
I'd love to see the wiki back up, and more v1.0 examples of scripting. Ideally there would be a Inkscape specific Scheme-based language for scripting, with scripts not needing to be packaged as extensions but loaded into a directory. Insert 'I'd do it myself, but..' lame excuses here. I'd love to, but other projects occupy my time.
Sketch has so many small life-improving tidbits, that combined they make me 50 times more productive when drawing anything, than in Inkscape.
Inkscape isn't "it". It's "us".
Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.
Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.
The performance is janky, but I think that's a "known issue" since switching away from quartz - but I'm excited for Inkscape again!
As someone who has used Inkscape for well over a decade on desktop Linux, I continue to be impressed at how nice it is, how well it works, and how much it does. It's really a shining example of not-for-profit software development.
FYI, a short essay on the history of the project was just posted on its website: https://inkscape.org/news/2020/05/04/roots-and-shoots-inksca...
That said community problems can impede quality obviously.
Instead, you can call Potrace directly from the command line. So the components within Inkscape are also worth understanding individually.
I've used Potrace to vectorise raster images of text that was pixelated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrace
I think it's time for a mixed-content VFX BOMP with all the sequences composited and edited in Blender, end to end.
https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/images/2.10-update-ui.jpg
[1] https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_3.0
[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/4368
https://wiki.debian.org/Python/2Removal
Now I just need to finish the figures for this paper so I can update to this newest version. But everyone in my lab is quite excited about it.
I am curious - does anyone here use Krita? How does it compare to either? What is its place in the graphics toolbox?
I'm amazed it just reached v1.