Inkscape is one of the most impressive examples of free/libre open-source software (FLOSS). It's developed by a friendly, transparent, well-run community of developers, writers and translators, testers, and designers.
As someone who has used Inkscape for well over a decade on desktop Linux, I continue to be impressed at how nice it is, how well it works, and how much it does. It's really a shining example of not-for-profit software development.
Inkscape is one of my go-to examples when people say FLOSS cannot compete against commercial software. I use it daily for my research publications and it works great. The other astounding example of FLOSS is IMHO QGIS (Quantum GIS). It's one of these softwares that every time you use it you can't stop being surprised it's free.
I expect it to be the leader 3D software in a few years. Blender is in the right path. Next version will add some of the tools that made Sketchup popular. Their bet in Python was also fortunate and they are starting to cash in.
I recently started learning Blender for 2D animation with the new and improved Grease Pencil. It's very cool technology! I can't wait to get the hang of it. Blender is an amazing program.
I think the real killer is going to be the constant improvements to the video editing and mixed 2D animation facilities. I recently used Blender for some casual video editing, and there were a couple things about the experience that really stunk (like not having proper control over framerates, while editing a 15fps video, needing to render to 30fps), but there is also a lot of promise with its tight integration with the Blender renderers and animation system.
I think it's time for a mixed-content VFX BOMP with all the sequences composited and edited in Blender, end to end.
I know people love gimp, but I never cared for the way it is developed and how input / feedback was handled. I hope it is better now, because its interface is as weird as Blender was in its early days.
I may be misguided but it was also low on the radar of big graphical applications in the linux world. For years all I saw was gimp gimp gimp then one day a few people started to mention inkscape. Since then it has been a constant improvement.
They are very different in nature, and by their nature, Gimp is much more used/needed, hence its popularity. Think Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is much much more popular in brand than Illustrator. And actually, Gimp is to Photoshop as Inkscape is to Illustrator, so the analogy is perfect.
There is also Potrace [1], which is embedded in Inkscape. But if you want to call it via a cli you have to use Inkscape commands, which seems difficult for me. They are probably worth knowing, but I couldn't quickly find a full reference manual.
Instead, you can call Potrace directly from the command line. So the components within Inkscape are also worth understanding individually.
I've used Potrace to vectorise raster images of text that was pixelated.
Not mentioned in that blog post is Ted Gould, who started the project. If you've ever met him, it's not hard to see how he'd set a tone that would ensure the community would grow in to what it is.
Wonderful to hear that it is now a native application in macOS that does not require XQuartz!
Perhaps related: Inkscape has always felt quite laggy for me, even with my extremely basic needs. I pretty much just make text in boxes and connect them with arrows. So together with all these new lovely features, I hope that performance is improved in this release also.
The 1.0 version for macOS is a preview release and it still has performance issues, but performance fixes are coming, according to the macOS download page. Honestly, I'm so blown away with the beautiful native macOS support that I'm perfectly content to wait a bit longer for better performance.
Are you sure? I was at 1.0.0rc yesterday, and the brew bumped me up to 1.0.0. Or maybe you are saying that macOS 1.0 version is still sort of "beta"?
Either way, I love Inkscape. I draw all of our apps icons as acts with it and then use it to create all of our pdf icons of iOS and convert to drawables for Android.
Yes, early on I was trying to use Inkscape on Mac OS. I finally switched to Affinity Desginer and was much happier. Hopefully, they fix the performance so that Inkscape can finally be a reasonable option on Mac OS.
Congrats on a v1.0 and thank you for all the hard work. I've used Inkscape & Gimp & script-fu as a professional-grade Adobe CS replacement for a some time, and it works very well. There are some bumps and a lot of DIY, but the experience gets better every year. I am also in the process of teaching my daughter to use Inkscape and Gimp.
I'd love to see the wiki back up, and more v1.0 examples of scripting. Ideally there would be a Inkscape specific Scheme-based language for scripting, with scripts not needing to be packaged as extensions but loaded into a directory. Insert 'I'd do it myself, but..' lame excuses here. I'd love to, but other projects occupy my time.
I love Inkscape, and all I wish for it is to take hints from modern design tools like Sketch and Figma, so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005.
Sketch has so many small life-improving tidbits, that combined they make me 50 times more productive when drawing anything, than in Inkscape.
> so it would stop look and feel like it is still in 2005
Please don't do this, or if you do, leave an option for those of us long-term users who are used to the existing UI.
Between the Office Ribbon, Metro/Modern/WinRT/UWP/WinUI 3, Material design, I've up to my ears in flat, wasted space UIs designed to look as empty as possible in the name of 'cleanliness' and I'd hate to have my primary vector editor fall victim to the 2010s UI dark ages.
I wasn't talking about visual gimmicks at all, but about capabilities to point the line to center of a pixel, mask layers, grouping, repeat-modes, automatic rulers, etc. Things you don't even see but without which it is damn hard to live without.
I did a lot of tasks in inkscape for a while and switched to Google slides oddly enough. Of course it's a significantly smaller subset of features, but once you get good with it, it's very powerful. That said, I would be happy to switch back for a lot of things now that native macOS support is on the table. I think the big advantages I saw in slides is the collaboration and iteration (you just make another slide and hack) instead of cluttering a workspace and then having to collaborate or be a gate keeper on a local file. Super excited to give this a whirl though!
I just downloaded 1.0, and it's so much better now on mac. With a few tweaks it looks quite nice: turn off border and shadow of default document, change default color palette to something less... 1997, maybe switch icons to "tango" - and it looks pretty clean.
The performance is janky, but I think that's a "known issue" since switching away from quartz - but I'm excited for Inkscape again!
This right here, I am in the exact same boat. Much better than making them in powerpoint. And even though we have a (sort of) lab adobe CS key, all of my computers run linux and we only have like 5 keys which makes the process quite silly.
Now I just need to finish the figures for this paper so I can update to this newest version. But everyone in my lab is quite excited about it.
Congratulations to everyone who have made this possible.
Inkscape may not be perfect and perhaps it's not the best tool for graphics professionals but, as a person who is really bad at anything having to do with graphic design, drawing, layout design and graphics programs, it's the only vector graphics program I have been able to learn at a relatively decent level, allowing me to make effective diagrams for slides, papers, etc. With every other vector graphics editor I've tried, the learning curve felt to me like climbing a vertical ice wall.
So kudos for how intuitive it is, and hoping for many new versions to come.
Very importantly, Inkscape is also a very successful free software project, which ensures, that Inkscape's functionality will remain free for as long as its license is enforced.
Adobe Illustrator already implemented it years ago.
I used AI a lot for creating cartoons. But then at some point I completely moved away from MS-Windows, which meant that I couldn't use AI any longer. I've been missing the calligraphic strokes option ever since (including the ability to convert these strokes to paths).
For more information about why calligraphic strokes are essential for drawing/inking cartoons:
How do calligraphic strokes differ from the built in calligraphy pen tool that lets you set a bunch of params to be controlled by your input device (tilt, pressure, etc.)? Is the idea that you make something that looks like similar pen input but in a more bezier-like way?
The idea is that you start with a path (say a rectangle), and then you select (probably in the stroke properties box) a calligraphic pen profile (usually an ellipse under an angle) and then the entire path (the rectangle in this case) will be drawn with that specific calligraphic stroke.
This would work for any path. And you could change the Bezier points after you applied the calligraphic pen to the stroke.
As someone who has used Inkscape for what seems like forever, thanks to everyone who has worked on it. Looking forward to tweaking some SVG assets later today with it.
Inkscape/CorelDraw/Illustrator/etc. are drawing programs. They deal with vector images.
Gimp/Photoshop/Paintshop Pro/etc. are painting programs. They deal with bitmaps.
They're fundamentally different paradigms. Very little intuition from one carries over to the other. Of course, they've been adding some bridge functionality (Photoshop smartobjects, etc.), if people want to nitpick, but the core UX is designed for something fundamentally different.
Paint Shop Pro in particular did a good job of combining bitmap and vector objects. Not sure if it still does, it's undergone many changes since I was familiar with it. There was also an associated editor dedicated to SVG, but I think they gave up on that long ago.
I agree they don't do the same thing, but I agree with dest that the Inkscape UI is much better than GIMP. I've used GIMP way more than Inkscape, so I should be more comfortable with it. But I end up feeling like GIMP is fighting me in ways that Inkscape would like me to get things done.
I personally find GIMP more intuitive than Inkscape. I think most of it depends on what you're using the tool for, though, and I think I just do more GIMPy takss than Inkscapey tasks right now.
Try using Inkscape to cut a person out of a photo, adjust contrast/white balance, and add a vignette...
On the other hand, try making a beautiful invoice template in gimp, with a nicely laid out table, and nicely typeset text....
It's kind of like comparing Word to PowerPoint. Both can place text on pages, and it's possible to write an essay in PowerPoint, or make a presentation in Word, but you'll be hurting to do it.
Right. But somebody who uses both word processors and slide programs can definitely cross-compare in terms of UI quality and polish.
To pick a more obvious dimension, if somebody said, "Word is buggier than Powerpoint", nobody would say, "You can't compare them because they don't do the same thing." Bugginess is an abstractable quality across kinds of product.
The same thing is true about UI quality. It goes well beyond intuitiveness. You can look at fit-and-finish details. You can look at number of unnecessary actions. You can look at difficulty for novices completing common tasks. You can compare utility of error messages. How much are key concepts related to a task obvious vs hidden? Et cetera, et cetera.
In my experience, Inkscape is better in that dimension. I think this even though I have used GIMP a lot more, and so normally would be biased the other way, because familiarity makes its UI issues less obvious to me.
I don't think this is true: Both are editing programs. The main subject being edited is a single file (as opposed to multi-file projects, like an IDE does). Both therefore need a UI for file handling (load/save their "native" format that exactly represents their internal model), import/export of other formats, undo/redo, etc.
For both there is the question how editing multiple files at the same time is being dealt with, i.e. how processes and windows relate to files. Both have to arrange many tools and helpers together with the main view on the file being edited. Both want to have help and documentation. The files being edited support meta-data.
Both raster images and vector images are visual and can therefore be exported to other visual representations, and especially both can be printed. So both programs have to deal with printing, page setup etc.
The whole topic of colors and color spaces applies to both raster images and vector images.
I could go on, but the above should give a hint how much these programs conceptually have in common.
I'm relatively a power user and can mostly work my way through most any software and regularly help people with software I've never used before, but I just can't wrap my head around Gimp for some reason, everything seems way too complicated. When I Google the solution to something I can do in 3 minutes in Paint.NET, it often turns out to require lots of unintuitive steps, I hit edge cases, look up bug reports and feature requests and then just decide to use Pinta instead. And other people seem to work fine with it, so it must be that people are just wired differntly or something.
Gimp is also technically very capable, especially when combined with G'mic plugins. I've used both software for different projects and I think I could switch permanently to Gimp if it could get better in two ways:
- Non-destructive filters, AKA "layer effects" or "smart filters" (I've read it's supposed do come in some distant future when the GEGL overhaul is finished). A node-based nondestructive filter system would be awesome
- Smarter selection tools. Current tools create little to no gradient in the mask they create, and it's a pain to refine a selection after creating it. Sure there are workarounds, but it feels repetitive and inefficient.
Sure the interface is a bit all over the place but it's not so bad, and it's free!
Same here - Photoshop is full of confusing idioms that make it hard for me to get things done, whereas I find Gimp is simple and straightforward. I suspect a lot of people who think Gimp is hard to use haven't used it in the last 5-10 years (it's been improved significantly in that time).
That's surprising in some ways and very unsurprising in others.
Gimp is primarily a raster graphics tool (pixels), where inkscape is vector graphics (lines and points).
If you've been using gimp to do flat graphicy design stuff with its pathing tool suite, it's unsurprising that you found inkscape a better fit.
What is surprising, is that gimp is a ridiculously simple program, and inkscape is slightly notorious for having a questionably intuitive interface, and vectors are also less intuitive than raster.
Gimp is hard to reason about until you start using masks and realize that hitting either ctl or shift turns your regular paintbrush into a line. Then it stopped being quite as obnoxious.
The filters are phenomenal though, I've been using Gimp for fifteen years and find it's good enough even though I still find the UI difficult.
For me the weirdest part is that clicking on the X on the toolbar closes only the toolbar instead of it realizing that probably if I click an X anywhere I mean to close at least the currently open project. I get the logic with multiple windows open, it's just the one weird thing that I will never get used to. I'm sure we all have those stories.
Edit: Didn't even need to look that far, was in an obvious menu (good UI!) and was just unchecked probably since upgrading didn't switch the option by default. Can't really argue with that but boy is the single window mode less painful to look at! Thanks again!
Guess I'm in the minority. While Inkscape is incredibly powerful and a great OSS option for vector editing, the UI has simply never made sense to me. After using Illustrator for 10+ years, every time I try to do something in Inkscape I find myself either lost or frustrated that buttons and options don't do what I think they will. I feel like it's in the same land as Blender was before 2.8 (I'm a big fan of the 2.8 changes for usability).
Inkscape seems like a much more natural successor of something like Corel Draw, and as someone who grew up doing things on that program, inkscape has always made the most sense to me. So it's probably just familiarity than anything else. I can definitely attest that inkscape has a very deterministic and thoughtful UX and workflow process.
I'll second this assessment. I used a ton of Corel Draw in the 90s thru the early 2000s. Inkscape feels like a spiritual successor. I was productive with it almost immediately.
After riding a skateboard for 10+ years every time I try to ride a bicycle I find myself either lost of frustrated that pedals and levers don't do what I think they will.
I can appreciate inkscape as a tool, but I always dread starting it, because it somehow takes 10 seconds to start up. What is it doing in those 10 seconds?
That is definitely abnormal. For me (on an i5-3350P (!) Linux junk desktop from Hell) it starts up in about one second, so eomething is definitely wrong (or you're using an even worse machine than I am, in which case something _else_ is definitely wrong). Maybe one of the Inkscape support channels could help you here?
I'm on a athlon x4 860k at the moment, which according to benchmarks is marginally slower than your CPU.
Startup times certainly seem to be CPU bound, it pins one core to 100% during startup. This means they somehow are spending something to the tune of 1e10 cpu cycles to start a vector editor.
When inkscape is started up they use around 70 mb of ram. If they just store everything they need in ram in a linear file and load that at startup, the program would launch in a fraction of a second on an SSD.
I started using inkscape recently for editing a few svg's and was impressed at how much this free program can do while also being easy to use.
I've been using gimp for a long time now and still get lost in it's poorly laid out UI, with inkscape I can usually find what I'm looking for on the first try.
Excited to see! I had to pick up inkscape over the last month for--of all things--machine embroidery. It has a python extension called inkstitch for creating patterns.
At first it was very confusing, but I'm slowly realizing that where tools like Sketch give a very clean, simple UX, inkscape often has the extra functionality I need!
I've seen some really amazing things produced by the Inkscape community. One of my favorite demos was at GNOME Asia a few years ago where I saw a shoe company from Indonesia that exclusively uses open source tools like Inkscape to produce their line of shoes (https://coscup.org/2018/programs/using-inkscape-to-design-sh...).
It's awesome to see this Inkscape 1.0 release and it's incredible to think about how much impact Inkscape has had on the open source design tool landscape.
I'm the Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab, btw. Thanks @Inkscape for being part of the GitLab for Open Source community!
Inkscape looks to have made very impressive progress.
The one feature I'm missing before I can use it is multipage support, to be able to print a large image across several sheets of paper (which can then be taped together, etc.)
Apparently this isn't in there because SVG has no notion of such a thing?
Even if desired I could use the operating system print driver to use lots of pages for a large drawing or embed lots of SVG drawings in an HTML document that had a print stylesheet to give the pagination needed.
Now one showstopper on Inkscape for me has been support for SVG viewbox where the origin is centred on the drawing rather than in a corner.
Part of the problem is being able to keep the scale of the original document. That is, I have a document with an image of a ski 175cm long, and when I print it I need it to be 175cm in the real world, as I am using it as a template for cutting material (if only I had a giant CNC machine...). So far I have not found a way to get system print dialogs to do this for me. I can take a PDF or PS file and print them, but the scale management is rudimentary.
Somehow I was able to do these things easier with 1990s DTP tools?
In the end Microsoft Publisher has worked for me. Sort of.
Nice to see Inkscape continue to grow. I still get a lot of use out of it myself. (And to toot my own tooter, I did some work on the pencil interpolation code. I feel happy to have contributed something to a project like this).
I use Inkscape from a long time, and it's generally a very good experience. The only thing I tried to do recently that didn't work was to open an .eps file provided by Google (the official Google Play button - they do not have .svg files, but even Apple has for their App Store). It couldn't directly open the file, I searched for tools to convert it but nothing worked. The only program that could open it was Adobe Illustrator, from there I could export it to .svg. I'd hope Inkscape could open .eps files AND Google to provide a open standard format for their vector files.
There are some absolutely huge changes in here. And they fixed my (least) favourite bug, which is that Line Height basically didn't work. Not to mention HiDPI. As a Surface Pro user, it's well worth the upgrade.
I wanted to love this on MacOS so badly, but it was too laggy for basic usage on a 2020 MBA. I have always found it fine on my less capable Debian box, but, but Affinity Designer has become my go to on Mac.
Inkscape is a fantastic product and it can be used for some many unexpected things: editing a PDF, vectorizing an image, creating a pixel perfect resume...
Inkscape is amazing. I am using it for years now on all three major operating systems. I am a complete amateur as far as graphic design is concerned but I just used it to add a text to cartoon that designer did in...wait for it....Inkscape.
Very user friendly for easy tasks but I am struggling with more complex edits. But that is just because I never upgraded my knowledge since both Gimp and Inkscape provide everything I need.
You can use Krita if you want to create illustrations or drawings not by modifying vectors (like in Inkscape) but by drawing with a digital brush. It’s pixel based like GIMP, which can also do digital drawing but with less ease and sophistication I imagine than in Krita. Whether it’s useful to you really depends on your illustration style, it’s probably less suited for a flat and vectory look. It’s more for things like storyboarding or other forms of digital painting.
From what I've looked into it, and now I'm a novice is it's build more for illustrations. I think of inkscape more as a graphics designer software for making images and logos and things which you might use for a company logo. Where as Krita is more artistic in nature so like paintings and things (web comics). At least that has been my thoughts from my minimal exposure to both. Though I'm sure you can easily do all in either.
I really like Inkscape, it compares favorably with Affinity Designer. My only wish is that it was written for the browser. A tool like this would actually be a great starting point for SVG web apps, IMHO. Plus interactive SVG drawing has been implemented about 3000 times, and it would be great to see some best practice libs become standard.
I really like Inkscape. I've been using it since the first release in 2003. I do all of my illustration with it. If I need to print, then I will bring the artwork into Illustrator and adjust the colors. Compared to Illustrator, it's very fast and lightweight.
Inkscape is outstanding. Thanks for all the hard work.
My one and only complaint is, for very large drawings, selecting a large number of elements and moving them is very slooooooow. It would be great if, going forward, performance improvements can be made.
Hopefully since this is such a sudden and severe regression in canvas performance, it is related to a shallow bug rather than an architectural misadventure.
Congratulations! I've been using you for at least a decade, been more user friendly for me than Illustrator with as many features and only getting better. Thanks!
Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855357 (710 points, 23 days ago, 157 comments)
Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001969 (603 points, 7 months ago, 167 comments)
Inkscape launches versions 0.92.4 and 1.0 alpha – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940568 (299 points, Jan 18 2019, 68 comments)