I absolutely love this program. Few times per year I need a vector tool. After some toying with proprietary vector tools (Illustrator), I learned Inkscape (as it was readily available in my Linux envs).
I never looked back. It does the job. I never have to look for cracked software in order to open my old files or use my acquired skills.
I just wish designers were more familiar with the SVG format and its caveats. Several times I've wanted to do some quick change in an SVG that was exported from Adobe Whatever and Inkscape was incapable of rendering it correctly, if at all. I'm pretty sure Adobe has been pushing the boundaries of SVG in the last years, while other tools stick to the basics.
Adobe is a W3C member and played a lead role in drafting the 1.0 spec, which was edited by Adobe’s Jon Ferrailo.
If you are going to even hint that an Adobe product produces non-compliant SVG, please detail your claim so others can assess it.
To not do so would be the first step towards a rumour, and might invite FUD that might devalue SVG’s status as an open standard supported enthusiastically in web and vector graphics ecosystems.
The last I heard there wasn't a single rendering engine that passes the entire W3C test suite, let alone any two renderers that have the same coverage. I'm not sure if that is still the case.
In my experience using SVG for portability is a minefield.
Affinity Designer is a great tool for those of us willing to use commercial/non-free software (and who hate Adobe). It's relatively inexpensive, and the company tries very hard to make users happy.
I've used it for numerous projects requiring vector output, ranging from bespoke posters to feeding the laser cutter.
It will output a lot of formats, but in combination with Inkscape, you can convert the output to pretty much anything you would need.
They shouldn't really matter, except for file size. They won't magically use different SVG markup. All Plain SVG does is strip away Inkscape's XML namespaces and custom attributes/elements. There's a fair number of SVG features that are poorly-supported, broken or with a number of gotchas in various renderers, however and you're kinda expected to work around those yourself.
For icons and similar you can often go back to the most basic things: Filled paths with solid colors and gradients. That should render pretty much everywhere where there's at least some SVG support.
Inkscape is the only tool pushing the SVG standard forward right now. Mesh gradients, SVG2.0 text flow, and much more besides. None of it supported by Adobe, Chrome, Firefox or librsvg. Only found in Inkscape and it's not like Inkscape broke the standards, we went to the w3c and got involved in setting the spec and then implemented it.
For me it's the opposite. Things just are so much harder than they need to be. Rotating and moving stuff ends up with lots of transforms in the svg. Copying something in from another file wreaks havoc if both files used classes to style things. So many surprises all the time. I want to like it and Gimp, but end up with paid options every time.
Inkscape is slow as molasses on macOS for many people, and has been as long as I can remember. It's faster to run it remote on my Linux server (SSH tunnel + X11 forwarding) than native on macOS. It's a shame because it's very responsive on native Linux.
I have an M1 mac and on standard configuration it’s unusably slow. I’m talking about 1 FPS. In low resolution mode (removing the high res flag from the manifest) it’s just usable (and still painful).
I have yet to try it, but maybe there’s a way of going through XQuartz, which might help. I hear they recently switched to GTK’s direct Quartz backend, which I can imagine is causing the problems.
Yeah. I have absolutely no right to complain for the price, and even without dividing by zero Inkscape is still extraordinary, but it doesn't work for my workflow. I like to snap pictures of things (mechanical assemblies or circuit boards, typically) and annotate them. Inkscape chugs hard with even a modest image in the background, so I stick with an old CS6 illustrator license or iPad apps.
The rendering chugs, I mean -- evidently, it's still entirely CPU-side and doesn't do so great with camera-sized images. I should also specify that I'm on Windows, but have tried Linux too. I think it's probably just a matter of putting enough dev time into the GPU renderer.
The performance is great on Windows. The main issue with Inkscape in the past was lack of proper CYMK support. I'd do all the work in Inkscape then bring into Illustrator.
Adobe software these days is just slow and painful to use.
Do you have a good reason to be using newer versions of Adobe software? After all, the old ones do still exist, and most of the interchange formats haven't changed in a while.
So far as I can tell, the primary good reason to maintain a modern version of Adobe products is so that they can interoperate with other people's modern version of Adobe products. (Though I understand Photoshop has released some nice new features recently.) Indeed, you could even have a recent version when needed and a faster, leaner, older version for quotidian work.
Ah, that's a bit of a shame. That said, if people are willing to pay the premium to run Macs, they should probably expect to need to keep upgrading their machines to maintain a level of stability. (It's not good, but it is how the cookie crumbles)
I just have always had a lot of problems in general with GTK programs on Mac (well, admittedly I've used just GIMP and Inkscape) that involve scrolling and zooming with Magic Mouse. The action is just not smooth and jumpy, which makes things imprecise, which is incredible frustrating for graphics programs. Not to mention it isn't a good user experience.
I've seen an open ticket that puts points the finger at refresh rates being out of sync. Don't know if a traditional scroll wheel would fix it, but I really like my Magic Mouse.
There is an alpha version of inkscape that runs natively on Mac (without requiring XQuartz). Not without bugs (text seems to give it trouble for some reason, among a few other things), but it works pretty well IMO. Definitely excited to see this moving forward.
I am so happy this was finally released. This update fixed a few major memory leaks they were having in the last release. I love Inkscape but that was unbearable. There was a problem with the color droplet tool, simply moving it around increased your memory usage by folds. A smaller one that became annoying overtime was simply dragging objects around on the grid. The nightly build had that one fixed awhile back but my OS didn't seem to want to play ball with it so I just ended up having to deal with these issues, now I hopefully don't have to.
if you want to print, I'd recommend adding Scribus to the toolchain, it has cmyk support and you can replace inkscapes rgb colors inside scribus with cmyk ones.
I adore Inkscape. If you haven't tried it, painting with the marker tool and a pressure sensitive tablet is really fun. Drawn look but infinitely scalable. Good for "cell" style art.
It's a little tedious, but I prefer to do one color per layer. After drawing a color, select everything in the layer and then do a union and remove all the interior points. That makes the file much smaller. Otherwise, you have overlapping "brush strokes" that have hundreds of points each.
Inkscape is fantastic. It, Blender and Krita has completely freed me from paying subscription fees for creative tools. I used to be an Adobe Suite (PS, AI, AE, PP) user, but I've yet to encounter a situation where I've felt limited by not having access to those "premium" applications any more.
There are issues of course - memory leaks and odd GUI handling on Windows in particular - but I've had the same sort of issues with Adobe products as well.
A really awesome thing about Inkscape for me is how it uses standard SVG as its default file format. It makes a lot of sense and makes the raw artwork highly exportable and flexible.
darktable + Hugin have me covered for photography. I just want better Wayland support. Specifically I'm waiting for Wayland to get color management merged--even if it only supports standard definition and old ICC profile formats as a stop-gap.
Never had seen Hugin before, I was wondering how people did that open source recently.
And with respect to color management and Wayland with the rumored next release of nvidia drivers potentially supporting Wayland that's about the only thing that would stop me from switching on all my machines. I know there is an open issue for working on that in both the Wayland official protocols and wl-roots so hopefully soon.
Hugin has gotten me great results in the past. My most popular panorama (https://flic.kr/p/2gw93QX), you can't even find the seams despite being quite wide at 5 × 3 shots. It handled 16-shot panoramas well too (https://flic.kr/p/GLsDNh), even though Flickr won't render those resolutions. I've even used it for focus stacking (https://flic.kr/p/27kMsrX) to keep a narrow depth-of-field on an object that needed 2 focus points to stay sharp.
Admittedly I'm only dabbling on a hobby level when it comes to video editing and composition. For what I've been doing Blender has been more than sufficient. It has a pretty good track editor a la Premiere and you can use the composition pipeline to enhance visuals.
Of course Blender also provides everything you'd need for visual effects, tracking and separate passes since it's a full 3D suite as well.
https://shotcut.org - has done fairly well for me. I believe `DaVinci - Resolve` is a paid tool which also has a free linux version (with restrictions).
Honestly, video editing can be crashy and resource-intensive so don't be afraid to pay for something.
And only $300. Once. Resolve is amazing. It replaced both Premiere and AE in my studio. Not bad for something that used to cost about $600k. You can get away with a hell of a lot in the free version as well.
Two years ago, I tried video editing for the first time. It was a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations. I tried the 3 major FOSS video editors at the time, OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which one was more appropriate for me. I also watched some tutorial videos on each of the video editors. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and UI, although it crashed the most out of the three.
However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and have been using Davinci Resolve, where even the free basic version was light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I was a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there was between FOSS and commercial video editors. I haven't looked at the FOSS versions since then, perhaps they have improved.
I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, but I wish there was a decent open-source 2d Vector animation software that could compete with Flash/Animate.
I know Krita has a decent animation tool, but it's only raster, and I haven't encountered a really good vector tool yet.
Oh my, I haven't looked at Synfig in nearly a decade! I found it pretty unusable and clunky back then, but ten years might as well be a century for OSS. I'll give it a try.
I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I wish there was an easy tool for svg animations. Essentially I want simple translations, transforms and attribute changes (opacity mainly) on my inkscape drawn svgs. At the moment the best solution I have found is to manually edit the svgs.
As someone else mentioned, Blender is actually quite decent for vector animation. You might need to modify your workflow slightly, but using grease pencil, bone skinning and curve tools is enough for very decent 2D animations. A nice bonus is that everything is technically still in 3D space as well, so you can easily add true layering, DoF, lighting and particle systems for instance.
The biggest downside to Blender is that the UI can be a bit intimidating since it covers so many aspects of CGI.
Looking at a few videos, it definitely looks pretty sweet. I guess in my mind I've always just thought of everything in Blender outside of 3d modeling as "tacked on", which really isn't fair.
I know exactly what you mean. Blender has a sort of reverse identity crisis. It does so many things really well, yet these things are overshadowed by its even more excellent 3D capabilities.
It's by far the most powerful and versatile piece of OSS I've ever used. I'd heavily recommend getting into it if you're a creative in general. It also has a really nice community to help out when you inevitably get lost in the menus.
Possibly yes, I was a big fan of Flash 8, but of course the older it gets, the more out of date it is, not to mention that I do not believe that Flash 8 will even work on modern Macs anymore (because of Apple dropping 32 bit support).
Right now, I have a couple-year-old permanent license to Toon Boom, which is very good, but of course it is very much not open source (and I do not believe they even let you do permanent licenses anymore). I'm not an animator, I just play with stuff occasionally, so I can't really justify ongoing costs, which is part of why I would prefer an OSS version.
Never heard of that one, but it's also very recently open-sourced. It's NodeJS with a browser-based GUI? Nice they're not going Electron. I wish there was a Flatpak but will definitely try out.
---
This code was open-sourced in August 2021 when Haiku shut down the commercial collaboration/storage services connected to Haiku Animator.
I've been building out some backend stuff lately so there's a bunch of new features waiting to go in. https://github.com/Logicalshift/flo_draw has some demonstrations of the sort of procedural animation features I'm planning on adding, for instance.
Krita has been a perfectly adequate replacement for me as a bitmap editor. It's more stable and more refined than Gimp in my experience. It's obviously not a carbon copy of PS, so if you depend on certain PS features ymmv.
It is my favourite vector tool on Linux and Mac. Once you get the hang of the alignment tooling and the export formats, you can get very professional results.
Interested to know where somebody here has experience contributing to the project with code, on how friendly is the project and team?
Does anyone have a solution for HiDPI scaling on Windows, without making the icons huge?
The UI is either too small, or it kind of looks ok except that the icons on the toolbars become huge and make the toolbars themselves take up a third or even half of the screen :-(
Inkscape is such a great tool. I loved it before getting to know SVG, on its merit as an editor alone; but after digging into the SVG format because of web-related stuff, I appreciate inkscape so much more. It exposes many of the more technical aspects of SVG without making things too complicated.
It's nice to see all the new features that are being added; they really feel like the project might be going from niche tool for SVG fanboys to actually usable by a wide variety of graphics people.
So far I've used inkscape for almost anything, from animated web graphics to 3D-Printing (OpenSCAD lets you import SVG files directly and extrude them into 3D). I'd almost like to call it "the blender of 2D"
Doing image editing and design isn't what I'm making a living from, but for what I do it does cover everything I need from vector-based editing. Thank you to all contributors :)
One feature I missed in earlier versions was the ability to define styles (like line styles) and select the style before drawing an element, rather than draw an element then setting its style afterwards. If that was possible I could select a line style and draw like any number of elements of that style, instead of going to each drawn element and changing its style.
Is it possible to use that workflow in present versions?
Another nice feature would have been to have an integrated library of shapes, to use in your own diagrams.
Can anyone recommend a good training course for Inkscape? I'm normally okay at teaching myself things but for some reason art software is just not grokable for me unless I have a teacher or some lesson plan.
Sadly, neither Inkscape nor GIMP still supports CMYK color space natively which makes these tools difficult to use for commercial printing purpose. Beside that Inkspace is pretty cool piece of software.
I love Inkscape, but I wish it's interface wasn't stuck in 2005. Since that time a lot of apps appeared that did greatly improve user interfaces, making the user 100x more productive using them.
Of course, I'm talking mostly about Sketch that pioneered an approach with a lot of tiny things done right. When transitioning to Sketch from tools like fireworks or Inkscape, I was amazed how right they did the work with coordinates, half-pixels and masks, and various copy-duplicate mechanics. Guys, it is OK to steal interface innovations from Sketch! Figma did it all the time, and so can you!
`rlottie` is used in Discord and telegram for animated stickers and `thorvg` is the work-in-progress next generation animated vector / static vectors technology.
Hope that animated vectors is important to more people.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadI never looked back. It does the job. I never have to look for cracked software in order to open my old files or use my acquired skills.
It just works.
Not nice, but there you have it. It would be great if there was an Adobe SVG format in those cases perhaps.
If you are going to even hint that an Adobe product produces non-compliant SVG, please detail your claim so others can assess it.
To not do so would be the first step towards a rumour, and might invite FUD that might devalue SVG’s status as an open standard supported enthusiastically in web and vector graphics ecosystems.
We don’t want that, do we?
In my experience using SVG for portability is a minefield.
The solution was Affinity Designer. Too bad, but at least it's an easy purchase rather than a subscription.
For icons and similar you can often go back to the most basic things: Filled paths with solid colors and gradients. That should render pretty much everywhere where there's at least some SVG support.
Inkscape is the only tool pushing the SVG standard forward right now. Mesh gradients, SVG2.0 text flow, and much more besides. None of it supported by Adobe, Chrome, Firefox or librsvg. Only found in Inkscape and it's not like Inkscape broke the standards, we went to the w3c and got involved in setting the spec and then implemented it.
If you have broken svg files, report them to https://inkscape.org/report
Probably is not their fault or main target OS, but is so hard to find a free or open source alternative with the same functionality for mac.
I have yet to try it, but maybe there’s a way of going through XQuartz, which might help. I hear they recently switched to GTK’s direct Quartz backend, which I can imagine is causing the problems.
Is that using a native build or via Rosetta?
That's downright impressive!
Adobe software these days is just slow and painful to use.
So far as I can tell, the primary good reason to maintain a modern version of Adobe products is so that they can interoperate with other people's modern version of Adobe products. (Though I understand Photoshop has released some nice new features recently.) Indeed, you could even have a recent version when needed and a faster, leaner, older version for quotidian work.
I've seen an open ticket that puts points the finger at refresh rates being out of sync. Don't know if a traditional scroll wheel would fix it, but I really like my Magic Mouse.
https://nostarch.com/inkscape2E
There are issues of course - memory leaks and odd GUI handling on Windows in particular - but I've had the same sort of issues with Adobe products as well.
A really awesome thing about Inkscape for me is how it uses standard SVG as its default file format. It makes a lot of sense and makes the raw artwork highly exportable and flexible.
And with respect to color management and Wayland with the rumored next release of nvidia drivers potentially supporting Wayland that's about the only thing that would stop me from switching on all my machines. I know there is an open issue for working on that in both the Wayland official protocols and wl-roots so hopefully soon.
Of course Blender also provides everything you'd need for visual effects, tracking and separate passes since it's a full 3D suite as well.
Honestly, video editing can be crashy and resource-intensive so don't be afraid to pay for something.
And only $300. Once. Resolve is amazing. It replaced both Premiere and AE in my studio. Not bad for something that used to cost about $600k. You can get away with a hell of a lot in the free version as well.
History of Resolve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvP5_HFQSk
However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and have been using Davinci Resolve, where even the free basic version was light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I was a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there was between FOSS and commercial video editors. I haven't looked at the FOSS versions since then, perhaps they have improved.
I know Krita has a decent animation tool, but it's only raster, and I haven't encountered a really good vector tool yet.
https://www.blender.org/features/grease-pencil/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jrvfmhI9h8
The biggest downside to Blender is that the UI can be a bit intimidating since it covers so many aspects of CGI.
It's by far the most powerful and versatile piece of OSS I've ever used. I'd heavily recommend getting into it if you're a creative in general. It also has a really nice community to help out when you inevitably get lost in the menus.
Right now, I have a couple-year-old permanent license to Toon Boom, which is very good, but of course it is very much not open source (and I do not believe they even let you do permanent licenses anymore). I'm not an animator, I just play with stuff occasionally, so I can't really justify ongoing costs, which is part of why I would prefer an OSS version.
---
This code was open-sourced in August 2021 when Haiku shut down the commercial collaboration/storage services connected to Haiku Animator.
What limitations does https://www.synfig.org have?
Usecase: export to Discord / Telegram animated stickers and my Godot Engine extension module for lottie.
I've been building out some backend stuff lately so there's a bunch of new features waiting to go in. https://github.com/Logicalshift/flo_draw has some demonstrations of the sort of procedural animation features I'm planning on adding, for instance.
As for After Effects / Premiere Pro I've been using DaVinci Resolve / HitFilm.
Interested to know where somebody here has experience contributing to the project with code, on how friendly is the project and team?
I see the sources are at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
The UI is either too small, or it kind of looks ok except that the icons on the toolbars become huge and make the toolbars themselves take up a third or even half of the screen :-(
It's nice to see all the new features that are being added; they really feel like the project might be going from niche tool for SVG fanboys to actually usable by a wide variety of graphics people.
So far I've used inkscape for almost anything, from animated web graphics to 3D-Printing (OpenSCAD lets you import SVG files directly and extrude them into 3D). I'd almost like to call it "the blender of 2D"
Hope they keep up the good work.
One feature I missed in earlier versions was the ability to define styles (like line styles) and select the style before drawing an element, rather than draw an element then setting its style afterwards. If that was possible I could select a line style and draw like any number of elements of that style, instead of going to each drawn element and changing its style. Is it possible to use that workflow in present versions?
Another nice feature would have been to have an integrated library of shapes, to use in your own diagrams.
Inkscape has Symbol libraries. (from the menu : Object > symbols).
You can create you own library. PS: there is also this project: https://github.com/PanderMusubi/inkscape-open-symbols
Of course, I'm talking mostly about Sketch that pioneered an approach with a lot of tiny things done right. When transitioning to Sketch from tools like fireworks or Inkscape, I was amazed how right they did the work with coordinates, half-pixels and masks, and various copy-duplicate mechanics. Guys, it is OK to steal interface innovations from Sketch! Figma did it all the time, and so can you!
I click and drag and nothing happens for at least 1 second.
Was amazing contributing as an open source contributor to the Samsung team at https://github.com/Samsung/thorvg and https://github.com/Samsung/rlottie.
`rlottie` is used in Discord and telegram for animated stickers and `thorvg` is the work-in-progress next generation animated vector / static vectors technology.
Hope that animated vectors is important to more people.
If Inkscape is useful to you, or you like the idea of it being available free of charge for others, please consider donating to the contributors.
Inkscape has information here https://inkscape.org/support-us/fund-contributors/