I've always found Inkscape surprisingly easy to use in comparison to other open source tools (like for Gimp for example).
I use it for almost all my diagramming needs (scientific publications/documentation). Closed source tools are almost certainly better in one or more respects. But it's certainly good enough for me, and it makes me feel happy and secure to be using an open source tool.
Same here. As a quite graphically-challenged person, Inkscape is the only tool I feel reasonably comfortable using, and can produce passable results with. Most of the other graphics tools I have tried confused me to no end. In Inkscape, maybe the UI isn't as beautiful and flashy as in other tools, but it's very understandable and the amount and arrangement of tools feels logical to me.
I can't speak for people who don't suck at design, probably for them Inkscape falls quite short, but for me it was a godsend (despite the presence of some bugs, namely copying and pasting to/from different instances used to be a lottery, let's see if it's better in this version). Kudos to the team.
Gimp prefers the absolute most surprising and unexpected behavior given all available options. Krita designers should be hired to redesign Gimp. If Krita support image editing slightly better, I'm pretty sure no one would use Gimp again.
Inkscape is excellent at surfacing options. Even a novice can discover how to use it simply by reading options available at any time.
Agreed! I actually prefer it to Dia or commercial products for drawing diagrams.
Sometimes, it's even useful for simple 2D CAD (for cutting shapes on a desktop CNC mill), editing PDFs or printing the output of KiCAD's PCB exports to check it for errors.
Truly a secret weapon and certainly my favorite open source graphics program.
You can write your own plugins¹ for Inkscape as well. Last year I've had a lot of fun writing a plugin that skews, scales, and rotates objects in Inkscape to create (simple) drawings in the isometric perspective² — have a look at the write-up if you want to find out about basic linear algebraic SVG transformations in Inkscape. SVG is extremely well-suited for such tasks.
Inkscape is amazing. So is Gimp, Blender and many other. All amazing software. I have just one thing that I wonder, why do they all seem to be lacking in the UI department? They all have UIs that look and feel way more clunky than even the cheaper proprietary alternatives. Not complaining, I like them anyway but maybe a more user friendly UI would open up this amazing tool to a broader audience?
1. It's very very hard to find out what's intuitive, yet powerful to use. Unlike implementing some algorithms, creating a good UI requires feedback from users.
2. It takes a lot of time and you frequently have to start over once you find out that what you thought works well, doesn't work well for others.
3. From anecdotical experience, I'd say that user interface design isn't what open source developers are interested in. It's a distraction from what they actually want to work on.
Personally, I find Inkscapes UI okay to use. Blender and Gimp, on the other hand, are a horrible, unintuitive mess. Whenever I need to do some image manipulation, I try to get by with Irfan View and Inkscape (even for raster graphics) as much as possible, just to avoid having to mess around with Gimp.
Blender's UI is pretty good, much better than it used to be. It takes some getting used to, but once you learn the keyboard shortcuts, it's pretty quick to navigate.
That said, Andrew Price's improved UI mock-up did look pretty amazing, and I'd love to see something like that.
Inkscape now has a design team, started by Xaviju of rethinkscape (see the link in another comment). Do join the fun in the dev mailing list and IRC #inkscape-devel
I don't get your point. We are talking about professional software here, there is no "user friendly" Illustrator or Photoshop either. They all require a heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and have learning curves that a broader audience simply cannot get past and all need input devices that a broader audience simply doesn't posses. It takes equally long time to get productive in any of them. The real difference is not in their UIs, but in features, tools, performance, especially performance, Adobe just has more resources to throw at it, and those things can make you noticeable more productive in the long run.
I think the big thing is that most open source software is done on Linux, while most proprietary software is done for Windows and Mac. On Windows and Mac you have only one, native look and feel, to which all apps try to conform. On Linux, every distro looks different, and a big part of users doesn't want GUIs at all, so they consider aspects like look and design secondary. On Mac and Windows most users want GUIs for everything, so it's more important to make those GUIs look and feel good.
Sometimes it wouldn't hurt if open source applications adopt UI defacto-standards made popular by popular proprietary applications.
Inkscape, Krita and Gimp have a good or at least good enough UI (it took some years). I don't understand why Blender has such a unique UI. It feels more like Unix Motif style app from 1994, something that was used for Jurassic Park. 3D editors and 3D CAD apps got a lot more user friendly - pretty much every 3D editor from 3DMax to UnrealED, Unity Editor and 3D CAD like Soldworks, CATIA, Creo and the open source FreeCAD have a very similar user interface and UX. You don't need a manual, if you know one, you can easily pick up an additional app and learn the details starting from there. I wish Blender would over an alternative mode, with more "traditional" mouse and keyboard mappings and re-arranged toolbar-icons.
In part I think UI is difficult because you can't do it incremently - if you update part of the app to have a better UI then the whole app suffers with lower UX because of the disparity in design and non-consistency in operation.
Meanwhile adding or updating features can be done readily, just stick another menu item on ... which can be eroding the UX gradually.
To add to that the UI that you have becomes familiar and so there's a huge inertia to overcome to make changes. I'm used to The GIMP way of things because it was my first such graphics program that I used heavily - using something like Photoshop/Krita/Corel Draw is hard because of the nuanced different approaches despite them being probably easier for a person approaching them fresh.
It's a difficult thing for a developer to distance themselves from an app to take a fresh view, also difficult to have a plan to make the app harder to use for veteran users in order to make UX gains in the long run.
Is a cohesive UI basically a dictatorial effort that needs a command-and-control effort from a powerful visionary force to implement? If so, that's not a good match for decentralized open source development.
Or at the least, more effort would need to be put in on the meta layer - how to enable a cohesive UI vision in a decentralized manner.
I'd imagine this is a different challenge than backend coding styles. There is still room for differing backend coding styles as long as certain principles are followed like following APIs, writing tests, etc. A cohesive UI requirement sounds much more stringent.
I think that this is an issue shared by almost all open source projects.
They thrive to include as many feature as possible and have absolutely no UX / design guidance.
Anecdotally, each time I have interacted with open source enthusiasts while working on a our b2c closed source product, they have ended up being very user adverse with little empathy for the fact that the end user has no interest in learning to use the 10000 features they want to dump to them.
Yes, the ui is not user friendly and it alieanates designers who are used to other software. We need more designers in the inkscape, gimp and blender communities.
As an impoverished freelancer I've used Inkscape to create lots of illustration that helped put food on the table. I found it easy to use, only occasionally did I need tutorials for a specific task.
I don't really understand the complaints about Inkscape being unintuitive - tools that have lots of options and do complex things will by nature be less intuitive than tools that do simple things. Sometimes you've just got to learn the software to make use of it. I have lots of experience with both Inkscape and Illustrator and I actually like Inkscape more. Illustrator was perfect to me at one point, and it seems like Adobe just kept tweaking endlessly in ways that were detrimental to the product, rather than enhancing it.
Inkscape is great! Its PDF+Latex exporting functionality makes it perfect for diagrams in papers, exams, and whatnot. The editing tools are also very nice.
It also edits PDFs, which I found pretty cool! I use it to make airline tickets not take up a full sheet of paper. To be honest, if you export the PDF back out, it jumbles some of the fonts a little, but that's mostly OK.
Inkscape is a gem! I'm glad more people seem to know of it than did even 5 years ago. I haven't tried 0.92 yet, but the one problem I have had with it is the macOS version, which requires X11 and has more problems with the window manager than even GIMP. Realistically, it's better to run these programs in a VM on macOS, sadly. On Linux & Windows, it is awesome and I have yet to encounter a circumstance where I couldn't achieve something that could be done in Illustrator.
I find it interesting how people still don't like GIMP. I always suspect people want it to be like Photoshop, but now I don't know. With single window mode, I have virtually no complaints. (beyond the continual lack of CMYK support, which prevents wider adoption)
For those developing Inkscape, I hope you realize that your efforts have helped me professionally, as I have regularly used it to design graphics and icons for web development at my work. Thank you!
There is an unofficial build floating around somewhere of a native MacOS Inkscape written against the Cocoa framework rather than X11. That's the one I use. It's an old version though.
Inkscape is amazing and I mostly used it for creating 2D graphics for game UI. One of the downsides is X server dependency in MacOS. Look and feel don't match the MacOS' standart look and feel. Keyboard handling and focus issues can be annoying time to time. Also some long awaiting issues like disabling antialiasing for exports are considered as low priority[1]. This prevents designer to export crisp images for 8bit style games.
Also, .93 will have more options in png export; so it's not impossible that antialiasing options makes it, that bug being in my shortlist of "bugs with potentially easy solutions to try". No promises, though.
Sorry to be that guy, but I always had the impression that Inkscape is way more cumbersome and difficult than it should be. And it seems to me that there is very little progress.
I don't use/need vector graphics editors very much, but I now bought affinity designer. It seems to be way more professional, and is quite affordable (basically in the same price category as Inkscape, at least for me).
I don't know why you are downvoted for your opinion, but totally agree that Inkscape is pretty low quality and buggy as well. On the Mac specifically the experience is so 1990s and un-macOS (yeah I know, it's an X app)
I used it for a while for generating SVG files, ended up writing a script that would optimize the crappy files it generated and reduce them 10 to 20 times in some cases. Oh and then there are these odd floating point drifts (coordinate 10 becomes 10.035 etc.). Seems like one of those pieces of software that would be very difficult or impossible to fix.
Not to mention it's really really slow when you start editing stuff with even simple effects like drop shadow, it's good for some things (like say you get an SVG file and you need to convert fonts to curves with a free app or something like that) but it's very limited and the UI is ghastly (the side panels that open when you edit effects and stuff in particular - huge controls with so much padding and ugly layout). GTK+ is just the worst for these kinds of feature packed UI (it can be OK for material design style UIs where you have few elements and don't mind the empty space, but not densely packed stuff like graphics effect panels and dialogs), GIMP and Inkscape suffer because of it.
It's a GTK+ X11 application on MacOS X. Last time I tried it, it was completely unusable--copy-paste totally non-functional (would paste vector selections as bitmaps).
On Linux, it's vastly more usable, and quite polished for a GTK+ application.
After trying to use Inkscape for few days to draw myself vector logo in few versions for my OS projects, I've decided to bite it and get Affinity Designer while it was 20% off at App Store. I've had logo I was pleased in few versions and setup to export in all formats and sizes I've required in two hours. Its not even complex stuff, its basic things like making square with each corner having different radius.
Inkscape is free, so unless you mean using stolen property, which is not free, there is no comparable vector image editor on the market for that price.
https://github.com/tksh/Pure-Stroke-SVG-Portrait I’m an analog illustrator. This is my first digital artwork made with Inkscape 0.91. Drawing with Inkscape is very interesting for me. If Michelangelo lives in our time, his sketches are made with Inkscape I think.
But it has a few problems in terms of usability the major one that would be nice to get addressed at some point is GTK. Getting inkscape to run on macos for instance, requires X11 which creates a really bad integration with MacOs itself. The solution is Qt, probably this is one of those initial decisions that Inkscape devs regret everyday.
Gradients is another example about bad usability, try by yourself to add a new step to the gradient without smashing your keyboard/mouse. Turns out the solution is googling it which gives a solution for that, however you will eventually forget about that since it's non-sense (then repeating the same cycle again).
It could use an update though. I like Ⓜ for the on-screen ruler. It's quite useful if you are drawing plans using physical units of measurement (millimetres etc.).
This seems like a good opportunity to ask, is there a clear way to export an svg from inkscape for the web? In a lot of applications (for instance with logos on the web) you want to be able to make a selection, reduce it down to a single path represented by a single d attribute, and then be able to copy that off, or save as a file. I did manage to do it by fiddling around by combining/intersecting different shapes, until the output svg got into the right form, then normalizing that with an online tool. But is there a way to do this more easily in Inkscape?
Ideally you could make a selection, and then go to file > export for web, and get a graphical dialogue to allow you to play around with viewBox and other display attributes. Or is there another open-source program that handles this well? Now that SVG seems to be becoming more and more a first class part of the web, this kind of thing would be very useful.
While on the topic of Inkscape. I've been wanting to post this for the programmer/gamer crowd. At one point I was able to do vector scans & then go in an fill them. I had a lot of interest from German gamer crowd, whom liked the backdrops. However, Inkscape no longer allowed this. Adobe followed with something similar (plug-in)- D3.js(code).Do to heavy memory use this would make a good isolated app. Here is an example . . http://i.imgur.com/20W2UBd.png?1
[+] [-] new299|9 years ago|reply
I use it for almost all my diagramming needs (scientific publications/documentation). Closed source tools are almost certainly better in one or more respects. But it's certainly good enough for me, and it makes me feel happy and secure to be using an open source tool.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|9 years ago|reply
I can't speak for people who don't suck at design, probably for them Inkscape falls quite short, but for me it was a godsend (despite the presence of some bugs, namely copying and pasting to/from different instances used to be a lottery, let's see if it's better in this version). Kudos to the team.
[+] [-] smrtinsert|9 years ago|reply
Inkscape is excellent at surfacing options. Even a novice can discover how to use it simply by reading options available at any time.
[+] [-] donquichotte|9 years ago|reply
Sometimes, it's even useful for simple 2D CAD (for cutting shapes on a desktop CNC mill), editing PDFs or printing the output of KiCAD's PCB exports to check it for errors.
Truly a secret weapon and certainly my favorite open source graphics program.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|9 years ago|reply
1: https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/%3Dextension/
2: http://jeroenhoek.nl/articles/svg-and-isometric-projection.h...
[+] [-] duiker101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuetz|9 years ago|reply
2. It takes a lot of time and you frequently have to start over once you find out that what you thought works well, doesn't work well for others.
3. From anecdotical experience, I'd say that user interface design isn't what open source developers are interested in. It's a distraction from what they actually want to work on.
Personally, I find Inkscapes UI okay to use. Blender and Gimp, on the other hand, are a horrible, unintuitive mess. Whenever I need to do some image manipulation, I try to get by with Irfan View and Inkscape (even for raster graphics) as much as possible, just to avoid having to mess around with Gimp.
[+] [-] danellis|9 years ago|reply
That said, Andrew Price's improved UI mock-up did look pretty amazing, and I'd love to see something like that.
[+] [-] buovjaga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzcpan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] upatricck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segf4ult|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skocznymroczny|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosscriven|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|9 years ago|reply
Inkscape, Krita and Gimp have a good or at least good enough UI (it took some years). I don't understand why Blender has such a unique UI. It feels more like Unix Motif style app from 1994, something that was used for Jurassic Park. 3D editors and 3D CAD apps got a lot more user friendly - pretty much every 3D editor from 3DMax to UnrealED, Unity Editor and 3D CAD like Soldworks, CATIA, Creo and the open source FreeCAD have a very similar user interface and UX. You don't need a manual, if you know one, you can easily pick up an additional app and learn the details starting from there. I wish Blender would over an alternative mode, with more "traditional" mouse and keyboard mappings and re-arranged toolbar-icons.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|9 years ago|reply
Meanwhile adding or updating features can be done readily, just stick another menu item on ... which can be eroding the UX gradually.
To add to that the UI that you have becomes familiar and so there's a huge inertia to overcome to make changes. I'm used to The GIMP way of things because it was my first such graphics program that I used heavily - using something like Photoshop/Krita/Corel Draw is hard because of the nuanced different approaches despite them being probably easier for a person approaching them fresh.
It's a difficult thing for a developer to distance themselves from an app to take a fresh view, also difficult to have a plan to make the app harder to use for veteran users in order to make UX gains in the long run.
My 2¢.
[+] [-] tunesmith|9 years ago|reply
Or at the least, more effort would need to be put in on the meta layer - how to enable a cohesive UI vision in a decentralized manner.
I'd imagine this is a different challenge than backend coding styles. There is still room for differing backend coding styles as long as certain principles are followed like following APIs, writing tests, etc. A cohesive UI requirement sounds much more stringent.
[+] [-] on_and_off|9 years ago|reply
They thrive to include as many feature as possible and have absolutely no UX / design guidance.
Anecdotally, each time I have interacted with open source enthusiasts while working on a our b2c closed source product, they have ended up being very user adverse with little empathy for the fact that the end user has no interest in learning to use the 10000 features they want to dump to them.
[+] [-] upatricck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GlennS|9 years ago|reply
Windows only though.
[+] [-] fsloth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RUG3Y|9 years ago|reply
I don't really understand the complaints about Inkscape being unintuitive - tools that have lots of options and do complex things will by nature be less intuitive than tools that do simple things. Sometimes you've just got to learn the software to make use of it. I have lots of experience with both Inkscape and Illustrator and I actually like Inkscape more. Illustrator was perfect to me at one point, and it seems like Adobe just kept tweaking endlessly in ways that were detrimental to the product, rather than enhancing it.
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|9 years ago|reply
It also edits PDFs, which I found pretty cool! I use it to make airline tickets not take up a full sheet of paper. To be honest, if you export the PDF back out, it jumbles some of the fonts a little, but that's mostly OK.
[+] [-] anilgulecha|9 years ago|reply
Protip: It's PDF import is amazing.. try it.
The only thing I miss is a workable layers functionality.
[+] [-] saycheese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buovjaga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|9 years ago|reply
I find it interesting how people still don't like GIMP. I always suspect people want it to be like Photoshop, but now I don't know. With single window mode, I have virtually no complaints. (beyond the continual lack of CMYK support, which prevents wider adoption)
For those developing Inkscape, I hope you realize that your efforts have helped me professionally, as I have regularly used it to design graphics and icons for web development at my work. Thank you!
[+] [-] gcr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbayer|9 years ago|reply
[1] : https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/947660
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|9 years ago|reply
[1]: https://code.launchpad.net/~suv-lp/inkscape/osxmenu
[+] [-] mc-|9 years ago|reply
The "bug importance" field is detailed here: https://inkscape.org/en/develop/bug-management/#Bug_importan...
Also, .93 will have more options in png export; so it's not impossible that antialiasing options makes it, that bug being in my shortlist of "bugs with potentially easy solutions to try". No promises, though.
[+] [-] smd686s|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] struppi|9 years ago|reply
I don't use/need vector graphics editors very much, but I now bought affinity designer. It seems to be way more professional, and is quite affordable (basically in the same price category as Inkscape, at least for me).
[+] [-] mojuba|9 years ago|reply
I used it for a while for generating SVG files, ended up writing a script that would optimize the crappy files it generated and reduce them 10 to 20 times in some cases. Oh and then there are these odd floating point drifts (coordinate 10 becomes 10.035 etc.). Seems like one of those pieces of software that would be very difficult or impossible to fix.
[+] [-] rubber_duck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rleigh|9 years ago|reply
On Linux, it's vastly more usable, and quite polished for a GTK+ application.
[+] [-] Ralfp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taivare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saycheese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tksh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandioca|9 years ago|reply
But it has a few problems in terms of usability the major one that would be nice to get addressed at some point is GTK. Getting inkscape to run on macos for instance, requires X11 which creates a really bad integration with MacOs itself. The solution is Qt, probably this is one of those initial decisions that Inkscape devs regret everyday.
Gradients is another example about bad usability, try by yourself to add a new step to the gradient without smashing your keyboard/mouse. Turns out the solution is googling it which gives a solution for that, however you will eventually forget about that since it's non-sense (then repeating the same cycle again).
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
Otherwise a superb product, in particular if you are on Windows or Linux and you can't run Sketch.
[+] [-] saycheese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aargh_aargh|9 years ago|reply
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.92
[+] [-] Brakenshire|9 years ago|reply
Ideally you could make a selection, and then go to file > export for web, and get a graphical dialogue to allow you to play around with viewBox and other display attributes. Or is there another open-source program that handles this well? Now that SVG seems to be becoming more and more a first class part of the web, this kind of thing would be very useful.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|9 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/EI1hxXt9U4c
I had to pause it quite a bit, but the demonstrations are nice to skim.
[+] [-] taivare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]