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I started out doing vector based illustration in Illustrator and have been using Inkscape for probably 16 years now. I really like Inkscape for the performance

I started out doing vector based illustration in Illustrator and have been using Inkscape for probably 16 years now. I really like Inkscape for the performance and simplicity of it. It's also got a bunch of features I've come to enjoy, like specifying exact positions for guides, and guides on angles. The menus and tool pallets kind of suck, but I don't use those anyway. Really from what I've seen in the industry, most designers are heavy keyboard users and aren't clicking around on menus to do stuff. It takes too long! The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color, so when I need something printed I bring it in to Illustrator and make sure my colors are mapped to the appropriate CMYK colors.

ygra 10y ago
> The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color This has been painful for me. As a side project I made a card game and produced the cards in SVG as a template (handwritten, but I use Inkscape to convert to PDF/PNG, so Inkscape has to render it correctly), a CSV file for all text content that should appear in it, and some scripting. SVG has been awesome for that, as it's a vector graphics format that's very easy to programmatically modify. But when it comes to printing things you suddenly find yourself in a world where RGB is downright painful. Slightly off colours, wrong black tones (RGB black is blacker than CMYK black, so it's always mixed with colours). It probably wouldn't matter much with photos, but text and shapes are very affected. So in the end we had to take Illustrator to the final PDF, convert to CMYK, and make sure every last bit of black is CMYK(0,0,0,1). SVG as a web technology only caters to sRGB as a colour space; there have been attempts at standardising CMYK, and Batik had a half-finished implementation, I think. But eventually both the standardisation efforts and the implementation were pulled, IIRC.

ygra 10y ago

> The only big drawback for me is that it doesn't support CMYK color This has been painful for me. As a side project I made a card game and produced the cards in SVG as a template (handwritten, but I use Inkscape to convert to PDF/PNG, so Inkscape has to render it correctly), a CSV file for all text content that should appear in it, and some scripting. SVG has been awesome for that, as it's a vector graphics format that's very easy to programmatically modify. But when it comes to printing things you suddenly find yourself in a world where RGB is downright painful. Slightly off colours, wrong black tones (RGB black is blacker than CMYK black, so it's always mixed with colours). It probably wouldn't matter much with photos, but text and shapes are very affected. So in the end we had to take Illustrator to the final PDF, convert to CMYK, and make sure every last bit of black is CMYK(0,0,0,1). SVG as a web technology only caters to sRGB as a colour space; there have been attempts at standardising CMYK, and Batik had a half-finished implementation, I think. But eventually both the standardisation efforts and the implementation were pulled, IIRC.