I am so happy for the continued development of desktop-first, offline, and free content tools. Inkscape, Blender, Godot, Krita, and (still, hopefully not spyware?) Audacity [0]. Without the commercial treadmill, I see these all being solid alternatives rather than the broke-student option.
While I am no artist, I have produced several icons and schematics in Inkscape over the years. A true boon that has let me sketch out some ideas for presentations or images for internal applications.
I recently learned an interesting little fact about Inkscape when looking for an SVG to PNG "converter". First, I knew that, in theory, SVG has a similar complexity to HTML. I didn't know that it is quite difficult to find a high quality standalone-ish (not and appendage of a HTML engine) renderer / engine for the format. Well, Inkscape has one of the most complete around, even implementing some not yet standardized features.
You can also include JavaScript in SVG. That is used e.g. by the flamegraphs generated with Brendan Gregg’s Flamegraph.pl script. Consequently, when you open them in a classic image viewer, they’re static, but when you open them in a web browser, they’re interactive. I don’t think Inkscape supports JavaScript.
One less well known feature is the ability to query dimensions and render subsets of the SVG by element ID. That makes it possible to assemble say a drawing of some UI elements all together on one sheet that illustrates use and then programmatically extract bitmaps as needed for use in an app.
My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[0], uses EchoSVG[1], which fixes numerous issues with Apache Batik[2]. KeenWrite takes SVG rasterization a little further by also making a text-to-diagram layer available. That is, text is transformed via Kroki[3] to SVG, then rasterized using EchoSVG. (Along the way, variables are interpolated and inserted, shown in the first screenshot.)
rsvg-convert from https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/librsvg is what I use. They've been refactoring it in Rust for the last 5 years. It fit my needs, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to compile and get a fully static build.
If anyone is interested to keep updated with Inkscape Development, I highly recommend the Youtube channel [0] of Martin Owens. Martin is an Inkscape developer who added the multipage support, finalized the shape builder tool, and much more.
With the recent-ish addition of multi-page documents, Inkscape is now a full replacement for Adobe Illustrator for my use case (with the exception of CMYK support, but I do print stuff < once a year these days). Congrats to the team!
Thanks! Inkscape is a wonderful project, I've used it for years - I started around the time those jerks at Adobe took CS into the cloud, and unlike GIMP, I found the UI fairly intuitive if you've studied graphic design AND it played well with the OSX windowing system instead of trying to use GTK or KDE or whatever the hell... the stuff I see when I open up GIMP to slap impact font text onto the images I take with my personal cell phone.
I've been using inkscape since I learned about it on sourceforge around 2006 or so. Not only for uni in my studies on graphic design but for all my professional career, which has been almost my de facto tool for all things vector (the other being MetaPost), so I literally owe my career to inkscape.
I agree Inkscape is super intuitive and love that is keyboard oriented so it lets you have a quick workflow you cannot reach with any other similar software, and it should be the paradigm for how design and gui apps should be done - and considering pretty much all other GTK apps aren't as complex and not as easy to use as Inkscape, makes it even more underrated.
Glad to donate to it so it can keep growing, and boy it has grown so much.
Do not update to macOS Ventura if you rely on Inkscape! There is an unresolved issue that currently affects all GTK3 based apps on macOS Ventura, making the app unresponsive to certain mouse events."
[+] [-] fbdab103|3 years ago|reply
While I am no artist, I have produced several icons and schematics in Inkscape over the years. A true boon that has let me sketch out some ideas for presentations or images for internal applications.
[0] I have given up on Gimp.
[+] [-] kitotik|3 years ago|reply
[0] ardour.org
[+] [-] Apanatshka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahartmetz|3 years ago|reply
For reference: https://inkscape.org/develop/about-svg/ section "How does Inkscape implement SVG?"
[+] [-] yakubin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedgehog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thangalin|3 years ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/docs/scree...
[1]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/
[2]: https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/
[3]: https://kroki.io/
[+] [-] leeoniya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1291|3 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@doctormo
[+] [-] franga2000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontbenebby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gualdrapo|3 years ago|reply
I agree Inkscape is super intuitive and love that is keyboard oriented so it lets you have a quick workflow you cannot reach with any other similar software, and it should be the paradigm for how design and gui apps should be done - and considering pretty much all other GTK apps aren't as complex and not as easy to use as Inkscape, makes it even more underrated.
Glad to donate to it so it can keep growing, and boy it has grown so much.
[+] [-] catach|3 years ago|reply
"Note for macOS users:
Do not update to macOS Ventura if you rely on Inkscape! There is an unresolved issue that currently affects all GTK3 based apps on macOS Ventura, making the app unresponsive to certain mouse events."
[+] [-] geenat|3 years ago|reply