
Inkscape 0.91 release - p4bl0
https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/3854/
======
khet
Inkscape is a great piece of design software. I've been using it for a good 8
years now to design websites, complex application interfaces, prototype many
projects and everything in between. The application has been designed with
care and it shows. There is a sense of respect towards the user and you can
really enjoy using it for long periods of time. It just fades away and lets
you get to work. No fuss.

The interface and workflows are simple, yet extremely powerful if you spend
some time understanding the tool. I have used Inkscape exclusively to do all
my interface design work during my career.

After moving to OSX, I was put off by the lack of native support. So I tried
moving to Sketch and Illustrator. I found Illustrator to be overly complicated
and plain bloated. I've always had a distaste for Adobe software and
Illustrator maintains that negative image for me. Sketch on the other hand was
unstable when I tried it. It had some serious bugs that made it unusable.

I went back to Inkscape and am now used to the GTK quirks & the lack of Retina
support. The software itself remains my favorite tool. And I'm excited to see
this major update to Inkscape.

~~~
stomach
You're in luck! There is a native OSX port in progress, called the 'osxmenu'
branch:

[https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-
lp/inkscape/osxmenu](https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-lp/inkscape/osxmenu)

There are still some bugs, but it works well for me.

~~~
slaxman
Wow! It's works pretty well! I could never get Inkscape working on OS X
before. There is still the big startup time but it's definitely better than
using xquartz.

~~~
stomach
FWIW - the long startup time is just the first time you launch the
application, I think it's doing something with fonts, after that it launches
pretty quickly.

------
JonnieCache
The notable thing here is that it has a whole new cairo-based renderer. Great
job inkscape team! My go-to tool for svg editing once things get complicated.

EDIT: new binaries arent officially posted yet but here's an OSX nightly build
from 10 hours ago:
[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2n7aim2wcrn6l3h/AAC62qBMxM6317AZi...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2n7aim2wcrn6l3h/AAC62qBMxM6317AZiMnSt2KQa/Inkscape-0.91%2Bdevel-r13881-1-x11-10.7-x86_64.dmg?dl=0)

~~~
oneweekwonder
Inkscape is a tool I wish had better OS X support, the way it handles the gui
just feels broken for me, compared to Windows or GNU/Linux.

~~~
swah
Sincerely, it doesn't feel native in Windows as well.

~~~
fithisux
It is not the developer's fault. The problem is that there is no up to date
builds with up to date dependencies. Maybe msys2 provides an answer. Currently
is in pre version.

~~~
swah
I'm not sure - its really minor stuff like this:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19746944/inkscape%20sele...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19746944/inkscape%20select.png)

------
exogen
Inkscape is amazing. One of the only pieces of "big" software that I use
without first fiddling around in the settings and changing a bunch of things.
It just feels right to use.

~~~
pkorzeniewski
It has come a long way, I remember when I first tried Inkscape several years
ago and it was constantly crashing or freezing on Windows, but now - no
problems at all, the UI is great and it has all the features you need for
vector graphics.

~~~
josteink
The official page says latest stable windows version is 0.48.5 or something.

Is it the Windows build which isn't prioritized, or is it versioned somewhat
differently?

~~~
gpvos
The development version got renumbered from 0.49 to 0.91.
[https://inkscape.org/en/news/2013/12/19/inkscape-049-will-
no...](https://inkscape.org/en/news/2013/12/19/inkscape-049-will-now-be-
inkscape-091/)

------
tarball
I am graphic designer, Inkscape made me realize that Free software could be
also for designers. Now I work exclusively with F/loss on linux. I use
Inkscape every day and I am really happy to see this release.

------
phaemon
Excellent stuff! Inkscape really is a superb bit of software.

I still recall the first time I tried the included tutorials and realised that
the tutorials themselves were just SVG docs. So it had things like, "Let's
explore the handles of an ellipse. Select this one", and the shape is right
there in the tutorial. Brilliant idea!

------
awjr
Just loaded up a 17MB OpenStreetMap svg file (map of Bath, UK) which was
unworkable on my Mac under 0.48. 0.91 is fast. Really fast. I'm sold. Well
done.

------
tripzilch
I never really could get the hang of InkScape (while I'm usually pretty good
with graphics) until I followed the first few parts of this tutorial:

[http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.nl/2011/10/lets-
get-...](http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.nl/2011/10/lets-get-started-
with-circles.html)

Now I love using InkScape. It was a matter of finding the proper workflow.

Just putting it out here, in case it might also help others.

~~~
Schwolop
These are awesome! Thanks a bunch for this - I'll definitely be trying to
follow them.

------
jasonkostempski
I'm not a designer but I do occasionally whip up my own images if the task is
simple enough. One thing I've always wanted in a drawing program is the
ability to create shapes by typing in dimensions. e.g. Dragging out a a
rectangle to be exactly NxM units is so tedious and it comes up all the time.
Does Inkscape or any other drawing program support anything like that?

~~~
vesinisa
Yes, you can have full control over SVG element dimensions in InkScape through
input boxes as well as dragging by mouse. You can also use a snapping grid to
define all your elements in relation to the grid, or enable many other types
of snapping and automatic aligning.

------
calibwam
Inkscape has been a project for 11 years, why the hesitance to have a version
number above 1.0?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
As a long term user I'd agree to some extent, the 1.0 version feel has
definitely been and gone - probably I'd say this is about a version 4, to my
mind.

[http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/InkscapeInvariants](http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/InkscapeInvariants)
are the stated aims of the project and AFAICT they've not achieved the SVG
spec compliance completely yet. Though I thought I recalled them aiming at the
reduced SVG "basic" set (? if that's what it's called) and reaching it.

I've been a user since it forked from SodiPodi (and indeed was a SodiPodi user
too).

~~~
rektide
I miss SodiPodi, with it being multiple-document single-toolbar'ed. Iirc this
was the sole contention of the fork- Inkscape was born explicitly to have each
document have it's own suite of controls.

~~~
ScislaC
No, it was born because of the structure of SodiPodi. Lauris was effectively
the gatekeeper and others did not have commit access. He wasn't accepting
patches he didn't want to, so a handful of our founders decided to fork and
have a much more open approach. As it stands, if you have two patches accepted
with the project (Inkscape) and want it, you can have commit access.

------
dcarmo
I love Inkscape, but not having a native OSX build sucks.

~~~
dannyking
Totally agree. I'm a huge fan of Inkscape. When I moved to OSX I started using
Sketch as my main design software, but I do often find myself frustrated
wanting a feature that Inkscape had. Really pleased to see this update. Hoping
for better native OSX support, rather than running it through X11.

------
Htsthbjig
You have a native mac beta version here:

[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b7tyrnugif2ywqj/qpMx1ygywo](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b7tyrnugif2ywqj/qpMx1ygywo)

Much better than needing XQuartz.

~~~
cbreuel
Is there an official location for this project, with source code etc.? Forgive
me if I sound paranoid, but downloading a binary from a random Dropbox is a
little weird.

~~~
robotfelix
Looking in the README, it appears that this OS X branch is part of the main
repository. The page for it is at [https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-
lp/inkscape/osxmenu](https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-lp/inkscape/osxmenu)

------
fabian2k
I like Inkscape a lot, but there are still cases where it just doesn't work
well. The import of postscript or PDF produces some strange results sometimes,
especially with text. That is something the commercial alternatives still do
quite a bit better.

The speed increase is nice, Inkscape could be painfully slow on complex
drawings with lots of paths.

~~~
p4bl0
For me the PDF import and export already works well enough: it's been years
since I printed a PDF form just to fill it, sign it and then scan it to email
it back. I just open the PDF in Inkscape, fill it with the text tool, insert à
JPG of my hand signature, save it, and send the resulting PDF back. The
administrative efficiency I gained with this technique is gigantic, especially
because I don't have to wait to have access to a printer _and_ a scanner to do
such things anymore.

~~~
iXce
When you want to edit the text a bit (so not just to fill forms, but actually
edit a PDF/EPS, extract a figure from a paper and rework some text), in 0.48
imported text looked nice initially, but as soon as you start changing a
single character the whole text block gets completely wrong (misaligned,
writing new characters over the beginning of the text instead of appending...)

~~~
p4bl0
Yep, that's true. I will have to try that with the new version (when it will
hit Debian testing…).

------
chops
Inkscape is great. I've only recently started using it more heavily as a tool
for building a board game with my wife. It gets the job done for me, and I
don't have to unlearn anything, as I'm not coming from illustrator.

I'm very pleased to see it's under active development.

------
follower
This version of the release notes is properly formatted and includes the
images referred to in the text:
[http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91](http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Hopefully the mods can update the OP to point to it?

------
wooptoo
Great job. This release took quite a bit. I think 0.48 was released two years
ago. They basically rewrote the whole software in OOP.

~~~
kgabis
Is there a reason for doing that?

~~~
randomsearch
Also, a rationale for choosing C++ would be interesting.

~~~
danmaz74
If you want to go OOP from C, what would you choose?

~~~
randomsearch
Personally, I'd choose one from many languages.

I'm not convinced C++ is a good choice for user-level applications. Maybe for
the performant parts, or for compatibility.

Perhaps other factors like skillsets came into play...

~~~
danmaz74
We're talking about a port from C. Porting from C to C++ is much easier than
porting from C to any other language...

~~~
randomsearch
I didn't think it was a straight port...

But, yeah, it's going to be easier. It's also an opportunity to consider
another language that might improve productivity, reliability etc. in the
future. Just wondering. Didn't mean to start a language war :-)

~~~
danmaz74
No problem, I'm not interested in a language war either - even more so because
I haven't used C++ in 5 years :)

Just wanted to point out that if you have a C code base, it is way easier to
port to C++, which isn't a bad language at all.

------
pdknsk
My only feature request is GUI-less builds, to match running it GUI-less. This
would significantly cut down on dependencies and also reduce compile time.

I notice there was a discussion about this on inkspace-devel years ago, but it
yielded no results from what I can tell.

[http://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/20403131/](http://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/20403131/)

------
michaelbuddy
I think my biggest problem with inkscape is the tearing of the screen when I
move the canvas around and it redraws. something about it makes the entire
thing _seem_ unstable to me. I dislike Illustrator but I feel like it could
handle a big file better than inkscape, if inkscape can't even draw the screen
fast enough. How will it handle the memory of a three-hundred thousand node
vector image. Somebody tell me what the heck is that tearing happening and why
after 20 versions isn't it improving?

As long as I work on Windows, there is Xara thankfully. It's got quirks but
has been good to me and my workflow. On Mac now thankfully is Affinity
Designer. Not quite fully fleshed out but still excellent to have. Inkscape is
a great utility program for me that has a lot of low level tweak settings and
it's great it constantly gets better.

------
arocks
Inkscape is a vastly underrated app. It makes simple things possible and for
complex things, it has a great Python-based plugin system. The API is quite
easy to understand. You would be building scripts in no time to automate your
art pipeline.

Best of all, it has great single-key keyboard shortcuts for higher
productivity :)

------
ris
Great news!

But my heart still yearns for CMYK and (to a lesser extent) spot colour
support.

------
stefanix
Does the "Support for real world document and page size units, e.g.
millimeters" mean any mm dimensions are also stored in the file as mm?

For all the SVG-base CNC apps this would be great news.

~~~
jarek-foksa
Implementation-wise, the only place where real world units such as "mm", "cm"
or "px" make sense are the "width" and "height" properties of the outermost
<svg> element.

This is because everything inside SVG document lives in an imaginary infinite
world where dimensions and distances are expressed in abstract "user units".

You use "viewBox" attribute on the outermost <svg> element to specify a
rectangular fragment of that world for the purpose of rendering. You use
"width" and "height" properties to specify the real-world size of that
fragment.

Authoring tools might show you dimensions of SVG objects such as rectangles or
paths in real-world units computed from "viewBox", "width" and "height" of the
outermost SVG element, but under the hood the size of those objects should be
stored in user units.

~~~
stefanix
The issue is with translating "user units" to real world units. Up until now
SVG is tricky as a CNC file format because of this little detail. For Inkscape
you had to translate user units/px based on the assumption of 90dpi.

Not a big deal if you only use Inkscape. The real mess starts when going
between different authoring apps. Then pretty soon a 100mm line in Inkscape
turns into something longer or shorter. This is when you revert back to DXF,
the bastard of all file formats.

I don't see how the viewBox's real world units can solve this. I think the
geometries need to actually use real world units (which the SVG standard
supports).

~~~
jarek-foksa
I don't understand how DPI is relevant here, if an authoring tool takes into
account DPI when translating user units to viewport units then it's a bug in
the authoring tool rather than limitation of the SVG format.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but some tiny rounding errors might occur
during conversion if there are many transforms involved between the user space
and the viewport space, but this can be avoided if user space values are
stored with high enough precision.

In order to convert user units to viewport (physical) units and vice versa you
only need the current transformation matrix, viewBox rect and viewport size. I
have created a demo which shows how I can determine the line length in
physical units:
[http://jsfiddle.net/9n5hf2jw/1/](http://jsfiddle.net/9n5hf2jw/1/)

The way how real world units are interpreted inside the SVG document is so
messed up that even the SVG spec itself discourages their use:

 _Defining the size of a document in mm and then using mm units for shapes
within it is going to give counterintuitive results, since they 'll be
converted to user units to resolve against the view box._
([https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/coords.html#Units](https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/coords.html#Units))

~~~
stefanix
Thanks for the jsfiddle. I think I understand what you mean. Cross-referencing
this with how the new Inkscape saves files actually makes sense. By using
width/height and viewBox you can define how user/px units are converted to
physical units.

When I setup up Inkscape to use mm it does set with/height in mm and then the
viewBox to the same dimensions (without units). This way it is implying the
user/px units (e.g. all unitless dimensions in the file) are basically mm.

Previous versions of Inkscape would always safe in user/px units with an
implied conversion of 90dpi, meaning a scaling factor of (25.4/90) to go from
values in the file to mm. CorelDraw always uses 96dpi, Illustrator always
72dpi. I am not saying this makes sense. It's just how different authoring
apps do it. If you want to use the file in a CNC machine you have to make
sense of what the app meant when it uses unitless dimensions. When a file was
edited with two different apps it very often is not possible to make a smart
guess by some basic heuristics.

BTW: the CNC app I am working on is LasaurApp, part of an open source laser
cutter called Lasersaur - [http://lasersaur.com](http://lasersaur.com)

------
cies
I so wish they would have picked Qt of GTK back in the beginning. That said: I
love the tool, use it all over the place, one of the apps i always install.

------
jhallenworld
Has support for embedded drawings in Word improved? I remember it didn't work
or there were bugs..

Anyway inkscape is otherwise good- it passes my figure drawing test: draw a
ruler with tick marks and numbers. Corel can do it. Vizio can do it. Xfig can
do it. Not too many others can (try this with the draw tool built into open
office and you'll see).

------
aembleton
I'm impressed that it isn't even at version 1.0 yet. Really good piece of
software.

------
scardine
I learned to create vector graphics on CorelDraw 3, Inkscape looks like an old
friend for me.

------
the_mitsuhiko
I love Inkscape, I still use it, even though the Mac version is abysmal. It's
such a shame that it does not have any proper OSX developers as I think it can
more than compete with professional vector software.

~~~
stomach
Native osx mac port in progress:

[https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-
lp/inkscape/osxmenu](https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-lp/inkscape/osxmenu)

------
jestinjoy1
Inkscape is very easy to use. We have used it for creating brochures,
posters,.. for our Free Software conference. What I like most about Inkscape
is, it is easy to use, learn and do.

------
spot
Inkscape is really great but what I really need are Photoshop and After
Effects. What are the best Linux equivalents? And don't say GIMP the UI is too
different.

~~~
SEJeff
I've used photoshop on a contracting (professionally) basis since I was 15
using version 4. I've used just about every version since, but kind of stopped
since Adobe is moving to more of a service based model with the creative suite
cloud crap.

I've also used gimp for approximately 8 years and it has made HUGE strides in
the past few years. In fact, I've done a few professional, or semi-
professional (ie: not paid) photo restoration jobs recently and I used gimp to
do it. Not that surprisingly, people still absolutely loved the work I did
restoring pictures of their loved ones or whatnot.

Photoshop still has nothing equivalent to the SIOX background removal tool as
the guy who wrote his PHD thesis on it wrote a gimp plugin. If you've not seen
it, it is kind of amazing: [http://www.siox.org](http://www.siox.org). See
this video for an example using a much much older version of gimp:
[http://www.siox.org/videos/siox-in-gimp.mpg](http://www.siox.org/videos/siox-
in-gimp.mpg)

~~~
spot
I'll try the gimp again but the problem isn't capability it's just how weird
and different the UI is.

~~~
panzi
Maybe it's because I'm a software developer myself but I never had a problem
with GIMPs UI. I never had a problem with Blenders UI either (only when they
changed some things and I couldn't find them anymore because they are now
somewhere else). In fact back in 2001 when I once tried Photoshop I found GIMP
quicker to grasp than Photoshop (maybe because it has less features and thus
one can get an overview of all the functions quicker).

------
gatesphere
Finally, they're exporting slanted and italic font styles to PDF!

Seriously, that bug has been biting me since 2011. I'm glad to see it fixed.

------
nmeofthestate
I tried using Inkscape recently to draw something with text along a path, but
the support was too primitive so I gave up. Maybe it's been improved.

