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darknavi
JayDustheadz
Nicely done, thank you! It's "small" features like this that make software really nice and pleasant to use. Don't stop there!
JKCalhoun
If it just defaults to the last filename I used for a new document, I would be happy.
(Best of both worlds if I don't have to discover a setting somewhere to get this behavior.)
enneff
Haha thank you! This had been mildly bothering me for a while actually.
__mharrison__
Congrats from another contributor.
I made a slicing plugin years ago that lets you create a layer that defines named rectangles. Each area under the rectangle is saved as an image.
throwaway85825
That's how it starts.
chrismorgan
Just updated to 1.4.4 and it still looks to be drawing.svg.
darknavi
It allows the user to change the default from drawning.svg, but that is still the default out of the box.
sprucevoid
Thank you for creating this. Every small improvement counts :) I clicked through to add a request for a datestamp naming but happily someone had already posted that request https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/7801#n...
chrismorgan
Ah, I see I misread. Got it now; thanks.
therealdrag0
What default would you change it to,
darknavi
I normally change mine to `project.svg` but that's just my preference.
lagniappe
Thank you :)
sprucevoid
Inkscape has many good features but also many rough edges. Fixing the command palette (shortcut key ?) would go a long way. On Windows it takes around 5 seconds for the palette search box to appear after a clean start of Inkscape 1.4.4. Typing is lagging and results are wildly irrelevant. That's a shame because Inkscape has so many powerful features tucked away in menus and side panes. A well working command palette makes it quick and easy for the user to use tools without exploring menu hierarchies or memorizing keyboard shortcuts.
For example if I type "rectangle" in Inkscape command palette I would expect the draw rectangle tool as a top match. Instead the top matches are:
Create a Slicer Rectangle
Create a Slicer Rectangle (No preferences)
Triangle (No preferences)
Clone original path (LPE)
Lightness-Contrast (No preferences)
Refractive Glass (No preferences)
Refractive Gel A (No preferences)
There have been several issue tracker issues about the command palette. Here is one from 2022 and still ongoing about the slow start https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/3227
faangguyindia
Inkscape is really good for products with no budget for designers. Let me explain why.
One of the apps I am working on hit 10,000+ active users (per Playstore dashboard), and Inkscape has a role to play in this.
Since the app is free and doesn't even have a backend, there is no budget for the designer.
I looked for a few tools online, but most of them failed to generate icons/logos.
I ended up using Inkscape to make logos for my app.
Without Inkscape, this workflow is difficult.
Though I am not able to intuitively use it well from the GUI. The thing is, you don't even need the GUI anymore!
But Claude or Codex is able to write SVG line by line (so you can make changes incrementally) and use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
Here's my app for those who are curious: https://macrocodex.app/
I am pretty sure some designer will come and say "you did a bad job at this," which is fine. My experience is in writing backends, not mobile apps or design.
Every app is saying they use "AI for smart recommendation,” while I went the opposite route, of “no, our product does not use AI for any suggestion.“ It’s entirely deterministic.
Leftium
Next time, perhaps my quick logo generator can help: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
The defaults are tuned to aesthetics of my personal logo, but it's quite configurable. (You can even copy your own SVG into the icon input)
Example logos:
- https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
faangguyindia
That looks neat! Thanks for sharing, I’ll try to use it next time I need a logo. :D
david422
> use Inkscape via CLI to generate icons, logos, and graphics for your app.
I do the same thing. How many icon sizes does Apple require now? I create one SVG vector, and then dump them all out with a script. Need to change something? Update the SVG and instantly regenerate the icons.
SOLAR_FIELDS
I'm no Jony Ive, also a design stunted engineer but I'd say that looks decent given the constraints. My only obvious complaint is the kerning of the text "Get it on Google Play" and "Download on the App Store" (italics emphasis mine, what's in italics is what looks terrible on my laptop screen
pxoe
Calligraphy pen/tool is still unusable, messy and less responsive (lower resolution, more angular, etc), much worse than in 0.92, and it's been this way ever since 1.0. It also now requires windows ink to be on, and they removed devices panel so you can't even tell if your device is recognized properly. It's bad with a tablet, but it's still just as bad and much worse in comparison even with the mouse. It's kinda disappointing to see this bad of a regression to just linger there for years. Here's the issue for this problem on their gitlab https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/work_items/1473#note_...
ltlnx
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
pxoe
One thing about pen tool that can be kind of tricky to adjust even in 0.92 is Mass parameter, where even in that version there's not enough granularity literally just between 0, 1 and 2 (it honestly could use about a 100 levels to adjust between just 0 and 2), and the lack of granularity and pen control is made even more severe in 1.x where there's not enough granularity even between just 0 and 1, and even 1 already feels much slower than higher settings in 0.92. Though I'm not sure if fixing that would even be that pressing at all if it was just brought up to 0.92 level of performance.
I don't know if anything is solved in 1.5 dev build yet, but the calligraphy pen there seems to be even worse than before and worse than even in 1.4.4. It's frankly impressive. I take it nobody actually uses that tool for drawing at all (which would explain a lot really), otherwise the issues with it would be immediately glaring a while ago.
ltlnx
It's a dev build for a reason. The canvas itself has performance regressions, especially prominent on Windows. You'd have to wait for the development to happen, otherwise I'd like to see patches.
nathanmills
Keep in mind that it's FREE and OPEN SOURCE software
2ndorderthought
I remember my car broke down, it was trash worth maybe 200 in scrap metal at the time. The tow to the yard was like 100 or something. I was screwed and couldn't get rides to work. My buddy lent me a car he had for free. I did not complain once to anyone about the things wrong with that car, and I never will. I even fixed some small issues with it to return the favor. The guy and that car saved my livelihood at the time.
I realize that's a little dramatic. I also think people are allowed to raise issues. But the entitlement and the way people talk about free software is annoying. Especially when alternatives cost as much as a used or new car.
If you have a Ferrari pallete for software then I hope there's an alternative that satisfies that for free, if so say so, otherwise shut up, contribute, or pay the Ferrari dollars already.
josephg
Eh. I draw the line in a slightly different place. I think saying that some piece of software is bad is not an attack on the developers. It doesn't imply ill will, or entitlement or any of that. People are allowed to write whatever software they want. And its generally net positive to share that software, for free, with the world.
These things are true at once:
- Good work inkscape developers! Inkscape is used by lots of people. I'm happy for the developers and the users, and I hope inkscape keeps getting better.
- I don't want to use inkscape because when I tried it, it seemed ugly, slow and buggy.
The only problem here is when people equate "this program is junk" with "this person is junk". That's a very dangerous belief to have, because it makes an enemy out of practice. And an enemy out of experimentation. The road to expertise is paved by mistakes. If bad quality work makes you a bad person, you can never learn a new skill.
lagniappe
I appreciate you
nkrisc
Potential users like honest reviews and criticisms of open source software. It helps us decide if it’s worth using or not.
pxoe
Yeah, I'm keeping it in mind. 0.92 still works great. There's basically nothing that's so severely lacking in 0.92, or anything that would be so enticing in 1.x, so there's no pressure to switch at all, and it may as well stay broken forever.
It's a little odd to me that the tool regressed so badly in 1.x and stayed the same for five years though, even despite some apparent attempts to fix it, for something that i assume is a core tool (it's right there on the toolbar), though maybe not so much if it's so low priority that it stays unaddressed. It's not a situation where people are asking for something new to be added, it's a feature that worked fine before that got broken years ago and stayed broken. It's frankly bizarre to see hot new releases get touted year after year, while a part of core experience just stays broken.
But again, it's kinda fine because the old version is just there, it just makes for a bit of an odd caveat when recommending it to people, for them to stick with the old version because it works better (well, actually works at all). It's a little unfortunate for the new users that might not know that and will just get the latest version and won't experience a feature properly though. (like, if I was a new user to it and picked up any 1.x version and tried the tool there, it would be clear that it's unusable for drawing and it'd be immediately dismissed, even though it actually works pretty great in older versions)
simonh
Firstly developers and designers of OSS need honest feedback from users as well, not just commercial developers.
Secondly, how does being OSS justify significant regressions?
nathanmills
As an open-source developer, feedback is about 1% of what I need. Contributions are the other 99%. However, the reality is flipped where what I get is 99% feedback (issues/feature requests in the issue tracker) and 1% contributions. And this is not a "significant regression", I use Inkscape very often for graphics work and it works great for me. And it does not "justify" regressions, but if you are not willing to fix it yourself, you have no right to do anything other than kindly request a fix, not complain about it. And btw, I don't search hacker news for "feedback", I search my issue tracker.
trwired
There seems to be pervasive opinion among FOSS enthusiasts that the software being free and volunteer made is kind of get out of jail card for not only criticism, but often simply just feedback.
I deeply appreciate that FOSS exists. But - subjective feeling - in general it always had certain reputation for jankiness and user unfriendliness. Sniping down feedback "because the software is free" certainly contributes to that perception. If I have a choice between free, volunteer made software that's unreliable or doesn't even work for some of my use cases, and a commercial, but non-free product, I will be pragmatic about it and choose the latter.
2ndorderthought
Because the authors don't owe you anything. You aren't giving them a single thing. They don't have to justify a thing. There is no SLA, no contract, nothing.
Feedback is fine, but there are so comments being things like "ermahgerd I paid nothing for this thing and a feature wasn't working What the actual F!". Go file an issue and fix it yourself buddy.
squeaky-clean
There's already feedback in the gitlab issue that the top commenter linked. Their HN comment isn't really adding anything
Hit me with the downvotes, but the only thing their comment has contributed to is causing arguments.
bowsamic
Inkscape is the only software that I see people get so defensive about when criticised. I even had the lead dev appear in my mentions and try and start fighting me on twitter when I complained on my own timeline about the performance on macOS. Weird culture
ltlnx
Would you like to name names? I don't think we have a lead dev currently.
fragmede
In this day and age, why not fork it and use Codex or Claude to fix the specific problems you're hitting?
michaelmrose
You are drastically underestimating how hard this is to do if they don't code and the time cost which would be spent actual using the tool.
Also either the difficulty either upstreaming changes or porting these changes to every subsequent version.
fragmede
I absolutely am, but I've seen non-coders get up to all sorts of mischief using AI these days.
robinsonb5
Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.
It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.
I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)
s1291
CMYK support is currently in active development. Martin has been working working on it for about two years, and he regularly posts update videos about inkscape [0].
pugworthy
Some of the plugins for it are pretty interesting. We have a Brother embroidery machine in our work Makerspace, and it ends up there's an Inkscape plugin (called Inkstitch) to create command files for the machine. It's like working with a slicer for 3d printing, but more about changing thread than filament, plus how stitches should be oriented and such.
bityard
Yes! I use an Inkscape extension to send my own designs to a vinyl cutter that works perfectly well but has LONG since stopped being supported by its manufacturer or any other closed-source tools.
The extension is inkscape-silhouette (https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette) and is apparently being maintained by a makerspace in Germany.
sen
I'll have to see if I can get this working with our vevor vinyl plotter, as ink cut hasn't worked for a long time now and there doesn't seem to be any way to use the aliexpress/vevor vinyl plotters without paid proprietary software currently.
foobiekr
My wife makes extensive use of inkstitch and loves it.
tasuki
Ah, the tool I love and hate. Mostly love though. Let me tell you about the single thing I hate:
I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" button.
Literally everything else about Inkscape is amazing! Congrats to the team!
~~~
Maybe this is also the right time & place to plug my favourite SVG path editor? https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ - free as in both beer and freedom, a tool to craft minimalistic well-behaved SVG paths.
driggs
That's a pretty absurd complaint.
Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document?
SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with.
(As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know when to choose my battles!)
2ndorderthought
Well duh the inkscape team should write this feature just for them. For free of course lol. My god
nicbou
I feed all my svgs to svgomg before out using them on the web. It works wonders.
omoikane
> a simple hand-crafted SVG
I have also had trouble with some generated SVGs, for example:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/5317
Part of the problem is that Inkscape is too good, and the file format it uses mostly conforms to standards, so I have the expectation that opening arbitrary SVGs would just work. With other programs that use proprietary formats, I wouldn't have tried to generate drawings at all. It's a bummer when I run into what seem to be corner cases of Inkscape's SVG handling, but fortunately the set of corner cases seem to be shrinking.
cycomanic
Have you tried saving in one of the different SVG formats. I forgot what inkscape calls them, but IMO there are 2 or 3 different SVG formats one can choose when saving. I know I needed that a long time ago, because chrome could not deal with the advanced features in regular inkscape SVG.
elaus
I too love the SVG Path Editor, used it many times to create SVGs that had "nice code". Nobody really appreciates it, but it just felt good.
Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.
But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)
phoronixrly
There are options to simplify and optimize SVGs on 'Save as'. Apart from the Plain SVG, there is Optimised SVG that you might find useful since you're into editing manually.
simonbw
There is actually one tool I've dealt with that works nicely with hand-crafted SVG's: https://boxy-svg.com/
ctippett
I have zero expectation that any design tool will export concise and optimal SVG markup.
I highly recommend using SVGO (https://svgo.dev/).
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uzidil
I love Inkscape! My game Enalim was made with Inkscape. (https://uzudil.itch.io/enalim)
I'm glad this project keeps going.
idle_zealot
You use Inkscape for pixel art? How does that workflow go?
omoikane
I also use Inkscape for pixel art. There are two settings under document properties that make it easier to draw in screen pixel units:
- Set display units to "px"
- Set scale (px per user unit) to 1.0
I have a script that converts SVGs to PNGs as part of my build process:
https://github.com/uguu-org/sor6/blob/master/data/svg_to_png...
poulpy123
the art style really made me think of Ultima VII
0x69420
inkscape has had a long and quiet ascent from quintessentially janky foss creative software to genuinely pleasant to use. i still wish it were a little easier to edit the individual portions of deeply nested clip/mask operations, but if you need to crank out some icons, you can use inkscape and not hate your life, which is something i'd have called someone insane for telling me a decade ago.
jszymborski
Pre-1.0, I remember hating and wrestling with UI. It was so jank.
1.0 and after, and it's been truly a dream. I now use it to make all my figures for my research publications and presentations. Inkscape has gone from compromise I begrudge to my tool of choice in relatively little time. This is a good reminder that I should probably send them a donation.
nine_k
Inkscape is an indispensable tool for me. I use it for quick drawing and drafting, for presentation slides, illustrations, small-scale print works, and even just pictures for fun. It allows to combine freehand drawing and moving things around with very precise, CAD-like handling of shapes, sizes, coordinates, etc.
There are few tools that are very ingrained in my daily operations, stay for years, and would be hard to replace, like Emacs or Firefox; Inkscape is among them.
amelius
I wish Inkscape would add constraints, as found in CAD tools.
daniel_reetz
This is what I'm looking for. This would replace Corel Draw for me.
There is a plugin for blender that allows CAD style sketching. It may be a way forward.
Tommix11
I use 0.92 for extracting HPGL data from cutting machine software and converting it to better vector formats sometimes. I use that version because I think HPGL support was removed in newer versions. Inkscape is a great program, keep up the good work. Kind Regards A user
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I have my first contribution to Inkscape in this release I think. It's quite a minor feature though, so I don't see it in the changelog. It allows the user to set their default saved file name. I was tired of drawing.svg :)