11 ms·

Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate

710 points by Vinnl 7y ago

Vinnl 7y ago
Release notes are being drafted here: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0 https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0
- JorgeGT 7y ago
  > Inkscape now supports HiDPI (high resolution) screens natively. :D
  - app4soft 7y ago
    .. and now mostly unusable on 1280x800 screens.
- notpeter 7y ago
  > Native support for macOS with a signed and notarized .dmg file Yay! It even includes a pretty DMG background: https://imgur.com/a/4H6kg9V https://imgur.com/a/4H6kg9V
ape4 7y ago
Important milestone for important application.
fareesh 7y ago
We used Inkscape for a print asset in 2010. At the time it really struggled with: a) Lots of layers, large resolution b) Rendering accurate printable colors after calibration After many long nights we gave up and redid it in Illustrator. Inkscape is a fantastic product though, so it was extremely disappointing. Does anyone know if these features have improved since?
- jofer 7y ago
  I've used inkscape regularly for large print scientific posters for many years. It definitely used to struggle in that regard. It's gotten significantly better about handling high resolution figures and using many layers in recent years. At least on Linux, it's quite capable of handling complex files, though deeply nested layers are fundamentally a bit clunky in the UI. (Inkscape is more focused on using groups the way layers are sometimes used in Illustrator. Layers are really just a named group under the hood, if that makes sense. At any rate, it's often best to rethink your workflows a bit if you're used to having illustator files with several hundred nested layers. The UI in Inkscape semi-deliberately discourages that workflow, while Illustrator deliberately encourages it.) Printing calibrated colors isn't it's strongest suit -- I'd recommending exporting and using something else for the actual final print. However, that may have changed too. I haven't tried recently -- I've mostly taken the "export to PDF and tweak the profile when printing the PDF" approach.
- protonfish 7y ago
  I recently had a major struggle with it's inability to export to CMYK. I eventually found a way to get my graphics into CMYK by exporting to PDF plus an assortment or ad-hoc scripts for conversion. That seems like a real deal-breaker for most professional print applications. I still love Inkscape though.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    Inability to export to CMYK seems like a huge drawback for the printing industry. RGB colours cannot be represented correctly in print. Being able to work in and export to CMYK is pretty much necessary for any kind of professional printing work.
  - ris 7y ago
    When necessary, my trick has been to export inkscape graphics to Scribus when print colour support is needed. Scribus has extremely good spot/CMYK colour support, but a rather weird UI (I'm told it's modelled on QuarkXPress).
solarkraft 7y ago
Are the tons of glitches and incoherent UI fixed? I recently tried Inkscape again (on arch, so I assume a relatively recent version) and it was still pretty bad (although better than a few years ago) :s Snapping is a nightmare. Layers are kind of hard to work with. Elements don't keep their ratio by default. The way the canvas border works by default makes no sense. The UI is just not sensibly arranged in many places. Since they talk about crashes I hope at least the spontantous crashes while copy/pasting are gone now. A nice bonus would be touchpad zooming (at least moving around now works smoothly). It's still the best FOSS vector editor out there, but 1.0 is a big release. I hope it now has the polish it deserves.
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  Inkscape snapping had always worked well for me. I love the fine-grained control available on the snapping panel. I do find the layering / grouping controls confusing.
- tommyage 7y ago
  I am not familiar with the package of arch, but changes could have been done. When in doubt and need, try an vanilla version from source. You can adapt the layout in the preferences. > Since they talk about crashes I hope at least the spontantous crashes while copy/pasting are gone now. Yes, copy-pasting had issues, but if you adapt to duplicating instead almost all problems will be gone. > A nice bonus would be touchpad zooming (at least moving around now works smoothly). Touchpad zooming will be in the 1.0 release, called pinch-to-zoom When I am using an FOSS tool, i try to learn it as an tool, meaning that I want to understand the reasoning for some work flows. By learning the tool I want to show my appreciation to the devs. On mouseover you will see that the '%' sign enables/disables snapping, which is almost always the desired behaviour.
dsalzman 7y ago
Native MacOSX Support!! "Inkscape is now a first-rate native macOS application, and no longer requires XQuartz to operate. The minimum required operating system version is OS X El Capitan 10.11. It has a standard Mac-style menu bar (rather than a menu bar within the window). Keyboard shortcuts now use the command (⌘) key rather than the control key. Retina display screen resolution is now supported. The build is now cleanly 64-bit, a prerequisite for macOS Catalina 10.15 and beyond. It comes bundled with Python 3 to power Inkscape extensions. "
- dchest 7y ago
  Unfortunately, this native version is quite laggy compared to the previous XQuartz releases. I wonder how it compares with a Linux version in a VM; my previous experience suggests it may work better.
  - joeberon 7y ago
    Yeah same issue here, much worse performance than the XQuartz releases. Dragging objects, especially arrows, is extremely laggy and awful. I've moved to Affinity Designer for now, which is better in almost every way except that unfortunately it is not easy at all to add LaTeX equations. Also the UI looks somehow feels less native macOS-like than the XQuartz versions, they're still not even using NSOpenPanel which is a huge pet peeve for me
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      Apparently they're aware of it: https://mastodon.art/@inkscape/103993588384088165 https://mastodon.art/@inkscape/103993588384088165 > Yes. This is related to GTK and is holding the macOS release back while Win/Linux graduate from beta. If you want to connect with the developers they can be found at: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team So if you want to help resolve it, perhaps check there :)
  - ken 7y ago
    Hopefully removing a whole extra layer will make it easier to profile and improve, both for Mac tools and for Mac developers. One of my main complaints about Firefox is that everything is so completely custom (even the parts that look 'native') that all my years of Mac development knowledge are useless. I see that, for better or worse, Inkscape is still fully GTK+ even on macOS. It uses the slightly improved native features of that toolkit, but all the controls still look like they're ripped from an X11 app. The text labels don't even use Mac naming conventions. I wonder if GTK+ is architected in a way that's going to be easy to optimize on the Mac graphics architecture.
tony 7y ago
Downloads: https://inkscape.org/release/1.0rc1/platforms/ https://inkscape.org/release/1.0rc1/platforms/ On Linux, it was easy to test: Grab it via https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86.... wget https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage chmod +x Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage ./Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage They finally updated the UX. Though the only thing I notice is my theme sticks better (could be a matter having gtkrc set locally) Anything related to inkscape and gimp being powered up and having the functionality of Illustrator and Photoshop (without the bloat and background services) is very openly welcomed. The stuff that I use something like inkspace for (Pen tool, SVGs) and Photoshop (very very basic photo editing, resizing, exporting) doesn't need a huge hulking application. That's not to mention: - Blender for 3D: https://www.blender.org/ https://www.blender.org/ - Inkscape, Gimp, and Blender, are all scriptable in two ways (headless) and extensions in-app (headless, in app): Inkspace: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_the_Command_Line https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_the_Command_L..., https://inkscape.org/develop/extensions/ https://inkscape.org/develop/extensions/, Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/ https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/, https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Extensions https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Extensions Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/command_line/render.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/command_line..., https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/scripting/index.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/scripting/in... What drives the development of these apps? I'd guess Adobe making the applications heavier/bulkier over years, and pushing a cloud model where an app tries to become a bigger part of daily life than 9/10 people want it to be. My guess is most Illustrator users like the app, but don't want a daemon running in the tray 24-7. And why invest in saving files in Adobe when there's solutions that work for all files, (and it may require a local network filesystems for sizes that big, cloud won't be practical)
- mattl 7y ago
  The UX or the UI?
  - tony 7y ago
kstenerud 7y ago
The problem with Inkscape, as well as other open source gui apps, is that there's nobody to lead a holistic UX QA process, and so they're full of enough bugs, edge cases, and general UX fail, that it's a chore to use the app, and you're constantly worried that you'll hit something big enough that you can't complete your work. I've had this happen often enough with libreoffice that I've stopped using it.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  I’d love to see a case study of how Blender managed its massive 2.8 UX overhaul. It’s the only major open-source application I know of that’s pulled something like that off. [edit: changed 1.8 to 2.8]
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    From my extremely limited involvement in the community it seems like it was started by one artist publishing a very dreamy vision of "this is what the future of Blender could look like" to his followers. It seems like people liked it enough that a lot of it was eventually incorporated. It might have also started a wave of enthusiasm for more people to become involved.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I think you mean either 2.5 or 2.8. 2.49 was the last one with the really inscrutable old UI, 2.5 was a big overhaul but still had a lot of basic functionality buried behind hotkeys or menus, and 2.8 is the relatively recent one with a lot of that basic functionality exposed. I don't follow the blender development process too closely, but I think Blender Guru's videos kicked off a lot of the 2.8 design work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk Along with lots of discussion elsewhere as the actual redesign was underway https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-user-interface-design/505 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-user-interface-des...
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Are there any open source apps with clear HIGs, backed up by a test suite which enforces them?
rndgermandude 7y ago
>Windows Smartscreen blocked... Thanks Microsoft... At least you can override this. Would be helpful tho if you actually "smartly" "screened" stuff instead of resorting to the "this file is new/unknown and thus potentially dangerous" metric.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  It detected the virus called "Open Source".
theK 7y ago
I'm really struggling with the multiple comments saying that inkscape has buggy UI or bad UX. I used inkscape extensively about 5-6 years ago and had a really good experience. A couple of months ago I used the up to date version for some ad hoc work (designing a logo) to the same effect. I think this is a great milestone for a great app. Thumbs up to the people making this possible!
- alpaca128 7y ago
  I thought the UI isn't that bad until I tried Gravit Designer. I don't know if it's comparable to Inkscape in terms of features, but to me as a more occasional user it's a vast difference in usability(even considering the compulsory online account with Gravit). Maybe more proficient users would feel different but in Inkscape there are so many buttons and switches visible at all times that I constantly have to look for the right one. But again, that's just me as someone using it every couple of months; in general I always manage to get the stuff done in Inkscape and it seems pretty solid behind the UI.
- tgb 7y ago
  I'm shocked at how much negativity there is here for Inkscape - it's long been a go-to example for how great open source software can be, in my mind. These days, I often use the (non-free, $26) Vexlio [1] software since it works better for my use-case (diagrams for use in Latex documents). But Inkscape is clearly the more fully-featured product for most users. [1] https://www.vexlio.com https://www.vexlio.com
  - frostburg 7y ago
    I know people that are still bitter about Freehand being abandoned in favour of Illustrator.
    - chongli 7y ago
      The history of FreeHand is actually quite interesting [1]. Adobe acquired it in 1994 when they bought Aldus. The FTC then ordered the product to be returned to Altsys which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia in 1995. Macromedia developed it for a number of years before being acquired by Adobe in 2005. Finally, Adobe had successfully gained control of FreeHand whereby they immediately killed it. One wonders why the FTC did not block Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia or at least require FreeHand to be spun off into a separate company. The market has really suffered since Adobe became dominant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand
solarkraft 7y ago
There are some awesome things in here (taken from https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0 https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0, thanks Vinnl), here are my highlights: - HiDPI support - Touch pad and touch screen pinch to zoom (YES!!!) - The canvas can be rotated and flipped (probably great for hand drawing, would be way more useful if possible by touch) - GTK 3 - Pressure sensitive pencil - Interactivity for UI mockups - Autosave is on by default - Plotter extension automatically converts things to paths - Unified raster tracing - Better Mac OS integration While the UI has apparently been polished a whole bunch, I think most of my other comment moaning about it still applies - and that's really sad, especially when you want to market this as a mile stone release everyone should try. You'll still end up turning off a lot of people, I'm afraid.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  "Pressure sensitive pencil" I assume this was only missing in the MacOS version, because I used a wacom tablet with inkscape already 10 years ago.
  - tommyage 7y ago
    Pressure sensitivity was only working on the caligraphy tool, not on the pencil! This is an huge improvement - The rendering of the pencil tool is way faster for me and i suppose pencil lines are plain paths with an strokeWith, so the resulting svg would have way less complextion on the path data, i guess. Not checked yet. :- )
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      Oh, that is good news!
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  > The canvas can be rotated and flipped […] I discovered this one by accident in the 1.0 beta. I still don't know which shortcut did that, but I definitely like having that option. Great when you are making woodworking plans and want to work on a section of the drawing where some parts are not aligned horizontally or vertically.
Endlessly 7y ago
Initial release was 16 years ago, long time coming. What is Inkscape? “Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor. This software can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos, icons and complex paintings. Inkscape's primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG); however, many other formats can be imported and exported.” SOURCE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape Adobe Illustrator, is Inkscape’s main non-open-source pay-to-use competition and is 33 years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator —————— Use both, they’re both great products depending on your needs.
- dmos62 7y ago
  Elaborate on differences? When do you use which?
  - Endlessly 7y ago
    Adobe is much easier to learn & use and works well with Adobe’s other 30-50 products depending on what is being done. Professionals tend to use it, so if you need to work with others, likely the best choice. Inkscape is free, open-source, and not cloud based — and is less user friendly, has a much higher learning curve. GIMP, which is comparable to Photoshop, works okay with Inkscape, but is not comparable to the ways Adobe’s products work together. Personally, I enjoy using Inkscape because I value the freedom it provides. Including knowing that if I create an digital asset with it and backup the build used it create it (OS, Inkscape, etc) - very likely I’ll be able to edit the file as it was when I created it; same is not likely true for Adobe products, especially over long time periods. Highly recommend if you’re using either that you also understand the SVG file format and stick to it as much as possible. If you have any additional more specific questions, happy to try and answer them. Love vector based graphics.
    - billfruit 7y ago
      Why wouldn't Inkscape work with other tools/people as well, it uses SVG after all.
chrismorgan 7y ago
I found the 1.0 beta unusable on Windows and filed https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/879 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/879, which seems to have been completely ignored. I find the 1.0 release candidate also completely unusable, and have filed https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/2307 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/2307. It looks like just now it might finally be getting some attention. (I did deliberately express my opinions much more strongly than the first time.) But until multiple critical issues are fixed, I can’t use this, and must stay on the 0.92 series.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  > I think dropping all this feedback in one place is probably better for triage than me opening lots of individual bugs You presumably know better than this. The standard, decades-old advice for submitting issues and bug reports is the opposite -- one problem per issue submission, so discussion and triaging individual issues is possible. With most community-supported open source projects, casual drive-by braindumps are likely to be ignored. Reduce the friction to the developer as much as possible.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    There comes a point when so much is broken or in need of changes, especially when most of it’s essentially in one area (in this case, the win32 GTK theme it’s using) that that traditional wisdom (which I normally follow) ceases to be true. I know that were I developing on such a thing I would genuinely prefer one big report to begin with than a large number of tiny bug reports. I might or might not then split it up, depending on how much effort things would be. In this case, I think that most of the issues could be fixed (or mitigated) by one person modifying the theme stylesheet, fairly quickly. Then there are some things that I simply don’t know whether they’re the same underlying thing or not, and splitting them out if they’re the same root cause is a nuisance when you’re a developer—you just end up needing to coalesce them again.
    - Quanttek 7y ago
      Considering that the small group of developers are all volunteers, I think you owe it to them to write your bug report in a way that is actually usable by them. One way would be creating one bigger issue with your suspected root cause (the win32 GTK theme) and a long, enumerated list of the specific issues, their reproduction, etc. (including screenshots). Ideally, each item on the list links to a new issue that follows the standard model for bug reports. Reacting as strongly as you did in the issue thread will definitely not get anything fixed. Please consider the human and, here, the limited resources of the developers.
suyjuris 7y ago
This is quite exciting! I have started using Inkscape to draw diagrams for use with LaTeX a few years ago and I like it a lot. (There is an option to export PDF+LaTeX with allows you inline code.) For more precise stuff which requires programmatic handling (e.g. algorithm visualisations) I can just write out an initial SVG and edit that by hand afterwards. Maybe now is a good time to look into some customisation options, it seems there are lots of them with the 1.0 update.
crazygringo 7y ago
Congrats! Can anyone explain what led them to choose this release as 1.0, as opposed to any of the others from the past decade and a half? Just curious if they always had a goal of meeting a certain featureset, level of reliability, cross-platform quality, etc., and now they did. Or if it's pretty arbitrary, or something else. Since there's no explanation on the page, and I can't find anything recent in their News section.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Move to Python3 and some breaking changes in the extension API along with other big changes like theming, proper high DPI support, 64 bit & native app on mac. Then the usual glut of use case feature improvements to boot.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  Extension authors were asked to update their extensions to the new API, so that is one of the breaking changes. I've updated my simple extension¹ for applying matrix transformations to create drawings in an isometric perspective accordingly. The 1.0 beta's of Inkscape gave quite adequate feedback to help transition my Python code, so it was quite straightforward to do. 1: https://github.com/jdhoek/inkscape-isometric-projection https://github.com/jdhoek/inkscape-isometric-projection
tomcooks 7y ago
Inkscape helped me bring several projects to life, thank you to all devs. The last boardgame I released was completely designed with the previous version of Inkscape
UglyToad 7y ago
Congratulations to the team on the release. I was reflecting on the Open Source UI debate recently because I was helping a family member do some document layout stuff in Scribus. Certainly these tools can have a daunting UI but the existence of these free alternatives (Blender, GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, etc) is so important, especially as the existing tools in these ecosystems move towards an even more unaffordable subscription pricing model. The ability for people without access to either pirated copies or student subscriptions to start playing around with, for example, Blender as a way to get started in 3D modelling, is a huge benefit to the world. And it was ultimately easier to do what we needed in Scribus than in Word so I think there's an extent to which we have Stockholm syndrome for existing UI.
gramakri 7y ago
Great news. Our company's logo was entirely designed in inkscape
phponpcp 7y ago
Performance on complex vector graphics is abysmal with Inkscape :(
dang 7y ago
This release was discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969. For discussion purposes, moving from Beta to RC doesn't make a new topic, i.e. the discussion tends to be substantially the same. Edit: Even when a project goes from one version to another, there's rarely anything new in the thread about the new version, because the comments are nearly always about the project in general [1]. For example, in the present case, you'll find a few comments about XQuartz being removed (something which sounds like a major new development), but the vast majority are just about Inkscape in general. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need to limit the number of times it happens, or HN's front page would mostly be discussing the same projects over and over. Obviously there are exceptions in unusual cases, but when it's the same project, with the same version, going through two different statuses (like Beta to RC or actual release), you will be hard pressed to find the slightest difference in the threads. That makes this post a duplicate by HN's rule (see [2]). I won't bury this one, but when this comes up again in a few weeks, let's not have a third thread. Nothing against this project, of course. It's just that front page space is the scarcest resource HN has [3]. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22project%20in%20general%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- app4soft 7y ago
  You linked discussion of `v1.0-beta1`, but actual discussion is about `v1.0-rc1`.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's the point. For the purposes of HN threads, there's no difference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22445850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22445850
    - aliswe 7y ago
jordache 7y ago
Even with elimination of XQuartz, there is still little rationale to use Inkscape, if you are actually trying to be productive towards a result. Just pick up Affinity Designer.. One time purchase... awesome UX, on par with Illustrator. For simpler, quicker result, Keynote has awesome diagram tools.
- doctormon 7y ago
  Except if you use Linux are care about freedom :-P
  - jordache 7y ago
    ahaha "muh freedom!"
blitmap 7y ago
I am an incredibly huge fan of Inkscape and the monumental efforts put forth by the developers of this amazing piece of software. I cannot do half of the things I've done in Inkscape that I've tried to do in Visio.
thayne 7y ago
> The user interface has been changed to utilise a more recent version of GTK+ (GTK+ 3) with GTK 4 just around the corner
gnyman 7y ago
PSA, you can use Inkscape to edit text in (some) PDF's. Just note (as it says when you import it) to use the internal importer as otherwise you won't have editable text. Saved me a bunch of work already. https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1243103422313836544 https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1243103422313836544
jquast 7y ago
I've been learning to use this just recently, as part of considering purchasing this pen plotter from the Evil Mad Scientist, https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846 https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846 I had no idea it is also actively maintained and reaching stable, I hope vector graphics make a big comeback in many more construction-art kind of ways than just mobile apps or webverts.

710 points by Vinnl 7y ago

Release notes are being drafted here: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0 https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0

JorgeGT 7y ago
> Inkscape now supports HiDPI (high resolution) screens natively. :D
- app4soft 7y ago
  .. and now mostly unusable on 1280x800 screens.
notpeter 7y ago
> Native support for macOS with a signed and notarized .dmg file Yay! It even includes a pretty DMG background: https://imgur.com/a/4H6kg9V https://imgur.com/a/4H6kg9V

ape4 7y ago

Important milestone for important application.

fareesh 7y ago

We used Inkscape for a print asset in 2010. At the time it really struggled with: a) Lots of layers, large resolution b) Rendering accurate printable colors after calibration After many long nights we gave up and redid it in Illustrator. Inkscape is a fantastic product though, so it was extremely disappointing. Does anyone know if these features have improved since?

jofer 7y ago
I've used inkscape regularly for large print scientific posters for many years. It definitely used to struggle in that regard. It's gotten significantly better about handling high resolution figures and using many layers in recent years. At least on Linux, it's quite capable of handling complex files, though deeply nested layers are fundamentally a bit clunky in the UI. (Inkscape is more focused on using groups the way layers are sometimes used in Illustrator. Layers are really just a named group under the hood, if that makes sense. At any rate, it's often best to rethink your workflows a bit if you're used to having illustator files with several hundred nested layers. The UI in Inkscape semi-deliberately discourages that workflow, while Illustrator deliberately encourages it.) Printing calibrated colors isn't it's strongest suit -- I'd recommending exporting and using something else for the actual final print. However, that may have changed too. I haven't tried recently -- I've mostly taken the "export to PDF and tweak the profile when printing the PDF" approach.
protonfish 7y ago
I recently had a major struggle with it's inability to export to CMYK. I eventually found a way to get my graphics into CMYK by exporting to PDF plus an assortment or ad-hoc scripts for conversion. That seems like a real deal-breaker for most professional print applications. I still love Inkscape though.
- grawprog 7y ago
  Inability to export to CMYK seems like a huge drawback for the printing industry. RGB colours cannot be represented correctly in print. Being able to work in and export to CMYK is pretty much necessary for any kind of professional printing work.
- ris 7y ago
  When necessary, my trick has been to export inkscape graphics to Scribus when print colour support is needed. Scribus has extremely good spot/CMYK colour support, but a rather weird UI (I'm told it's modelled on QuarkXPress).

solarkraft 7y ago

Are the tons of glitches and incoherent UI fixed? I recently tried Inkscape again (on arch, so I assume a relatively recent version) and it was still pretty bad (although better than a few years ago) :s Snapping is a nightmare. Layers are kind of hard to work with. Elements don't keep their ratio by default. The way the canvas border works by default makes no sense. The UI is just not sensibly arranged in many places. Since they talk about crashes I hope at least the spontantous crashes while copy/pasting are gone now. A nice bonus would be touchpad zooming (at least moving around now works smoothly). It's still the best FOSS vector editor out there, but 1.0 is a big release. I hope it now has the polish it deserves.

foobarbecue 7y ago
Inkscape snapping had always worked well for me. I love the fine-grained control available on the snapping panel. I do find the layering / grouping controls confusing.
tommyage 7y ago
I am not familiar with the package of arch, but changes could have been done. When in doubt and need, try an vanilla version from source. You can adapt the layout in the preferences. > Since they talk about crashes I hope at least the spontantous crashes while copy/pasting are gone now. Yes, copy-pasting had issues, but if you adapt to duplicating instead almost all problems will be gone. > A nice bonus would be touchpad zooming (at least moving around now works smoothly). Touchpad zooming will be in the 1.0 release, called pinch-to-zoom When I am using an FOSS tool, i try to learn it as an tool, meaning that I want to understand the reasoning for some work flows. By learning the tool I want to show my appreciation to the devs. On mouseover you will see that the '%' sign enables/disables snapping, which is almost always the desired behaviour.

dsalzman 7y ago

Native MacOSX Support!! "Inkscape is now a first-rate native macOS application, and no longer requires XQuartz to operate. The minimum required operating system version is OS X El Capitan 10.11. It has a standard Mac-style menu bar (rather than a menu bar within the window). Keyboard shortcuts now use the command (⌘) key rather than the control key. Retina display screen resolution is now supported. The build is now cleanly 64-bit, a prerequisite for macOS Catalina 10.15 and beyond. It comes bundled with Python 3 to power Inkscape extensions. "

dchest 7y ago
Unfortunately, this native version is quite laggy compared to the previous XQuartz releases. I wonder how it compares with a Linux version in a VM; my previous experience suggests it may work better.
- joeberon 7y ago
  Yeah same issue here, much worse performance than the XQuartz releases. Dragging objects, especially arrows, is extremely laggy and awful. I've moved to Affinity Designer for now, which is better in almost every way except that unfortunately it is not easy at all to add LaTeX equations. Also the UI looks somehow feels less native macOS-like than the XQuartz versions, they're still not even using NSOpenPanel which is a huge pet peeve for me
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    Apparently they're aware of it: https://mastodon.art/@inkscape/103993588384088165 https://mastodon.art/@inkscape/103993588384088165 > Yes. This is related to GTK and is holding the macOS release back while Win/Linux graduate from beta. If you want to connect with the developers they can be found at: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team So if you want to help resolve it, perhaps check there :)
- ken 7y ago
  Hopefully removing a whole extra layer will make it easier to profile and improve, both for Mac tools and for Mac developers. One of my main complaints about Firefox is that everything is so completely custom (even the parts that look 'native') that all my years of Mac development knowledge are useless. I see that, for better or worse, Inkscape is still fully GTK+ even on macOS. It uses the slightly improved native features of that toolkit, but all the controls still look like they're ripped from an X11 app. The text labels don't even use Mac naming conventions. I wonder if GTK+ is architected in a way that's going to be easy to optimize on the Mac graphics architecture.

tony 7y ago

Downloads: https://inkscape.org/release/1.0rc1/platforms/ https://inkscape.org/release/1.0rc1/platforms/ On Linux, it was easy to test: Grab it via https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86.... wget https://inkscape.org/gallery/item/18047/Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage chmod +x Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage ./Inkscape-09960d6-x86_64.AppImage They finally updated the UX. Though the only thing I notice is my theme sticks better (could be a matter having gtkrc set locally) Anything related to inkscape and gimp being powered up and having the functionality of Illustrator and Photoshop (without the bloat and background services) is very openly welcomed. The stuff that I use something like inkspace for (Pen tool, SVGs) and Photoshop (very very basic photo editing, resizing, exporting) doesn't need a huge hulking application. That's not to mention: - Blender for 3D: https://www.blender.org/ https://www.blender.org/ - Inkscape, Gimp, and Blender, are all scriptable in two ways (headless) and extensions in-app (headless, in app): Inkspace: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_the_Command_Line https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Using_the_Command_L..., https://inkscape.org/develop/extensions/ https://inkscape.org/develop/extensions/, Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/ https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/, https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Extensions https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Extensions Blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/command_line/render.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/command_line..., https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/scripting/index.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/scripting/in... What drives the development of these apps? I'd guess Adobe making the applications heavier/bulkier over years, and pushing a cloud model where an app tries to become a bigger part of daily life than 9/10 people want it to be. My guess is most Illustrator users like the app, but don't want a daemon running in the tray 24-7. And why invest in saving files in Adobe when there's solutions that work for all files, (and it may require a local network filesystems for sizes that big, cloud won't be practical)

mattl 7y ago
The UX or the UI?
- tony 7y ago

kstenerud 7y ago

The problem with Inkscape, as well as other open source gui apps, is that there's nobody to lead a holistic UX QA process, and so they're full of enough bugs, edge cases, and general UX fail, that it's a chore to use the app, and you're constantly worried that you'll hit something big enough that you can't complete your work. I've had this happen often enough with libreoffice that I've stopped using it.

mortenjorck 7y ago
I’d love to see a case study of how Blender managed its massive 2.8 UX overhaul. It’s the only major open-source application I know of that’s pulled something like that off. [edit: changed 1.8 to 2.8]
- solarkraft 7y ago
  From my extremely limited involvement in the community it seems like it was started by one artist publishing a very dreamy vision of "this is what the future of Blender could look like" to his followers. It seems like people liked it enough that a lot of it was eventually incorporated. It might have also started a wave of enthusiasm for more people to become involved.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I think you mean either 2.5 or 2.8. 2.49 was the last one with the really inscrutable old UI, 2.5 was a big overhaul but still had a lot of basic functionality buried behind hotkeys or menus, and 2.8 is the relatively recent one with a lot of that basic functionality exposed. I don't follow the blender development process too closely, but I think Blender Guru's videos kicked off a lot of the 2.8 design work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk Along with lots of discussion elsewhere as the actual redesign was underway https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-user-interface-design/505 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-user-interface-des...
Brakenshire 7y ago
Are there any open source apps with clear HIGs, backed up by a test suite which enforces them?

rndgermandude 7y ago

>Windows Smartscreen blocked... Thanks Microsoft... At least you can override this. Would be helpful tho if you actually "smartly" "screened" stuff instead of resorting to the "this file is new/unknown and thus potentially dangerous" metric.

solarkraft 7y ago
It detected the virus called "Open Source".

theK 7y ago

I'm really struggling with the multiple comments saying that inkscape has buggy UI or bad UX. I used inkscape extensively about 5-6 years ago and had a really good experience. A couple of months ago I used the up to date version for some ad hoc work (designing a logo) to the same effect. I think this is a great milestone for a great app. Thumbs up to the people making this possible!

alpaca128 7y ago
I thought the UI isn't that bad until I tried Gravit Designer. I don't know if it's comparable to Inkscape in terms of features, but to me as a more occasional user it's a vast difference in usability(even considering the compulsory online account with Gravit). Maybe more proficient users would feel different but in Inkscape there are so many buttons and switches visible at all times that I constantly have to look for the right one. But again, that's just me as someone using it every couple of months; in general I always manage to get the stuff done in Inkscape and it seems pretty solid behind the UI.
tgb 7y ago
I'm shocked at how much negativity there is here for Inkscape - it's long been a go-to example for how great open source software can be, in my mind. These days, I often use the (non-free, $26) Vexlio [1] software since it works better for my use-case (diagrams for use in Latex documents). But Inkscape is clearly the more fully-featured product for most users. [1] https://www.vexlio.com https://www.vexlio.com
- frostburg 7y ago
  I know people that are still bitter about Freehand being abandoned in favour of Illustrator.
  - chongli 7y ago
    The history of FreeHand is actually quite interesting [1]. Adobe acquired it in 1994 when they bought Aldus. The FTC then ordered the product to be returned to Altsys which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia in 1995. Macromedia developed it for a number of years before being acquired by Adobe in 2005. Finally, Adobe had successfully gained control of FreeHand whereby they immediately killed it. One wonders why the FTC did not block Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia or at least require FreeHand to be spun off into a separate company. The market has really suffered since Adobe became dominant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FreeHand

solarkraft 7y ago

There are some awesome things in here (taken from https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0 https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0, thanks Vinnl), here are my highlights: - HiDPI support - Touch pad and touch screen pinch to zoom (YES!!!) - The canvas can be rotated and flipped (probably great for hand drawing, would be way more useful if possible by touch) - GTK 3 - Pressure sensitive pencil - Interactivity for UI mockups - Autosave is on by default - Plotter extension automatically converts things to paths - Unified raster tracing - Better Mac OS integration While the UI has apparently been polished a whole bunch, I think most of my other comment moaning about it still applies - and that's really sad, especially when you want to market this as a mile stone release everyone should try. You'll still end up turning off a lot of people, I'm afraid.

hutzlibu 7y ago
"Pressure sensitive pencil" I assume this was only missing in the MacOS version, because I used a wacom tablet with inkscape already 10 years ago.
- tommyage 7y ago
  Pressure sensitivity was only working on the caligraphy tool, not on the pencil! This is an huge improvement - The rendering of the pencil tool is way faster for me and i suppose pencil lines are plain paths with an strokeWith, so the resulting svg would have way less complextion on the path data, i guess. Not checked yet. :- )
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    Oh, that is good news!
Freak_NL 7y ago
> The canvas can be rotated and flipped […] I discovered this one by accident in the 1.0 beta. I still don't know which shortcut did that, but I definitely like having that option. Great when you are making woodworking plans and want to work on a section of the drawing where some parts are not aligned horizontally or vertically.

Endlessly 7y ago

Initial release was 16 years ago, long time coming. What is Inkscape? “Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor. This software can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos, icons and complex paintings. Inkscape's primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG); however, many other formats can be imported and exported.” SOURCE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape Adobe Illustrator, is Inkscape’s main non-open-source pay-to-use competition and is 33 years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator —————— Use both, they’re both great products depending on your needs.

dmos62 7y ago
Elaborate on differences? When do you use which?
- Endlessly 7y ago
  Adobe is much easier to learn & use and works well with Adobe’s other 30-50 products depending on what is being done. Professionals tend to use it, so if you need to work with others, likely the best choice. Inkscape is free, open-source, and not cloud based — and is less user friendly, has a much higher learning curve. GIMP, which is comparable to Photoshop, works okay with Inkscape, but is not comparable to the ways Adobe’s products work together. Personally, I enjoy using Inkscape because I value the freedom it provides. Including knowing that if I create an digital asset with it and backup the build used it create it (OS, Inkscape, etc) - very likely I’ll be able to edit the file as it was when I created it; same is not likely true for Adobe products, especially over long time periods. Highly recommend if you’re using either that you also understand the SVG file format and stick to it as much as possible. If you have any additional more specific questions, happy to try and answer them. Love vector based graphics.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    Why wouldn't Inkscape work with other tools/people as well, it uses SVG after all.

chrismorgan 7y ago

I found the 1.0 beta unusable on Windows and filed https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/879 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/879, which seems to have been completely ignored. I find the 1.0 release candidate also completely unusable, and have filed https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/2307 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/2307. It looks like just now it might finally be getting some attention. (I did deliberately express my opinions much more strongly than the first time.) But until multiple critical issues are fixed, I can’t use this, and must stay on the 0.92 series.

Symbiote 7y ago
> I think dropping all this feedback in one place is probably better for triage than me opening lots of individual bugs You presumably know better than this. The standard, decades-old advice for submitting issues and bug reports is the opposite -- one problem per issue submission, so discussion and triaging individual issues is possible. With most community-supported open source projects, casual drive-by braindumps are likely to be ignored. Reduce the friction to the developer as much as possible.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  There comes a point when so much is broken or in need of changes, especially when most of it’s essentially in one area (in this case, the win32 GTK theme it’s using) that that traditional wisdom (which I normally follow) ceases to be true. I know that were I developing on such a thing I would genuinely prefer one big report to begin with than a large number of tiny bug reports. I might or might not then split it up, depending on how much effort things would be. In this case, I think that most of the issues could be fixed (or mitigated) by one person modifying the theme stylesheet, fairly quickly. Then there are some things that I simply don’t know whether they’re the same underlying thing or not, and splitting them out if they’re the same root cause is a nuisance when you’re a developer—you just end up needing to coalesce them again.
  - Quanttek 7y ago
    Considering that the small group of developers are all volunteers, I think you owe it to them to write your bug report in a way that is actually usable by them. One way would be creating one bigger issue with your suspected root cause (the win32 GTK theme) and a long, enumerated list of the specific issues, their reproduction, etc. (including screenshots). Ideally, each item on the list links to a new issue that follows the standard model for bug reports. Reacting as strongly as you did in the issue thread will definitely not get anything fixed. Please consider the human and, here, the limited resources of the developers.

suyjuris 7y ago

This is quite exciting! I have started using Inkscape to draw diagrams for use with LaTeX a few years ago and I like it a lot. (There is an option to export PDF+LaTeX with allows you inline code.) For more precise stuff which requires programmatic handling (e.g. algorithm visualisations) I can just write out an initial SVG and edit that by hand afterwards. Maybe now is a good time to look into some customisation options, it seems there are lots of them with the 1.0 update.

crazygringo 7y ago

Congrats! Can anyone explain what led them to choose this release as 1.0, as opposed to any of the others from the past decade and a half? Just curious if they always had a goal of meeting a certain featureset, level of reliability, cross-platform quality, etc., and now they did. Or if it's pretty arbitrary, or something else. Since there's no explanation on the page, and I can't find anything recent in their News section.

zamadatix 7y ago
Move to Python3 and some breaking changes in the extension API along with other big changes like theming, proper high DPI support, 64 bit & native app on mac. Then the usual glut of use case feature improvements to boot.
Freak_NL 7y ago
Extension authors were asked to update their extensions to the new API, so that is one of the breaking changes. I've updated my simple extension¹ for applying matrix transformations to create drawings in an isometric perspective accordingly. The 1.0 beta's of Inkscape gave quite adequate feedback to help transition my Python code, so it was quite straightforward to do. 1: https://github.com/jdhoek/inkscape-isometric-projection https://github.com/jdhoek/inkscape-isometric-projection

tomcooks 7y ago

Inkscape helped me bring several projects to life, thank you to all devs. The last boardgame I released was completely designed with the previous version of Inkscape

UglyToad 7y ago

Congratulations to the team on the release. I was reflecting on the Open Source UI debate recently because I was helping a family member do some document layout stuff in Scribus. Certainly these tools can have a daunting UI but the existence of these free alternatives (Blender, GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, etc) is so important, especially as the existing tools in these ecosystems move towards an even more unaffordable subscription pricing model. The ability for people without access to either pirated copies or student subscriptions to start playing around with, for example, Blender as a way to get started in 3D modelling, is a huge benefit to the world. And it was ultimately easier to do what we needed in Scribus than in Word so I think there's an extent to which we have Stockholm syndrome for existing UI.

gramakri 7y ago

Great news. Our company's logo was entirely designed in inkscape

phponpcp 7y ago

Performance on complex vector graphics is abysmal with Inkscape :(

dang 7y ago

This release was discussed 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969. For discussion purposes, moving from Beta to RC doesn't make a new topic, i.e. the discussion tends to be substantially the same. Edit: Even when a project goes from one version to another, there's rarely anything new in the thread about the new version, because the comments are nearly always about the project in general [1]. For example, in the present case, you'll find a few comments about XQuartz being removed (something which sounds like a major new development), but the vast majority are just about Inkscape in general. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need to limit the number of times it happens, or HN's front page would mostly be discussing the same projects over and over. Obviously there are exceptions in unusual cases, but when it's the same project, with the same version, going through two different statuses (like Beta to RC or actual release), you will be hard pressed to find the slightest difference in the threads. That makes this post a duplicate by HN's rule (see [2]). I won't bury this one, but when this comes up again in a few weeks, let's not have a third thread. Nothing against this project, of course. It's just that front page space is the scarcest resource HN has [3]. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22project%20in%20general%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

app4soft 7y ago
You linked discussion of `v1.0-beta1`, but actual discussion is about `v1.0-rc1`.
- dang 7y ago
  That's the point. For the purposes of HN threads, there's no difference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22445850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22445850
  - aliswe 7y ago

jordache 7y ago

Even with elimination of XQuartz, there is still little rationale to use Inkscape, if you are actually trying to be productive towards a result. Just pick up Affinity Designer.. One time purchase... awesome UX, on par with Illustrator. For simpler, quicker result, Keynote has awesome diagram tools.

doctormon 7y ago
Except if you use Linux are care about freedom :-P
- jordache 7y ago
  ahaha "muh freedom!"

blitmap 7y ago

I am an incredibly huge fan of Inkscape and the monumental efforts put forth by the developers of this amazing piece of software. I cannot do half of the things I've done in Inkscape that I've tried to do in Visio.

thayne 7y ago

> The user interface has been changed to utilise a more recent version of GTK+ (GTK+ 3) with GTK 4 just around the corner

gnyman 7y ago

PSA, you can use Inkscape to edit text in (some) PDF's. Just note (as it says when you import it) to use the internal importer as otherwise you won't have editable text. Saved me a bunch of work already. https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1243103422313836544 https://twitter.com/gnyman/status/1243103422313836544

jquast 7y ago

I've been learning to use this just recently, as part of considering purchasing this pen plotter from the Evil Mad Scientist, https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846 https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846 I had no idea it is also actively maintained and reaching stable, I hope vector graphics make a big comeback in many more construction-art kind of ways than just mobile apps or webverts.