I use regularly Inkscape, and it has been a constant source of frustration. The UI is the exact opposite of how I expect things to work.
It's improving at breakneck speed though. 1.2 already solved some of my frustrations (the new interface for linecaps & line dots, amazing!)
Almost all the features in this release seem to solve a major frustration I had with Inkscape.
* The node deletion behavior, it was so annoying, how you delete a node on a straight line and suddenly you get some soup.
* The awful color palette. You had to manually edit text files to get your own palettes, couldn't edit them in Inkscape. I, in fact, never managed to create a custom palette. Pinned colors seem to solve this.
* Lasso selection. It was soo fiddly to select a group of nodes. One missclick and you had to start from scratch, clicking on the tinny controls.
* Multithreaded rendering. The single-threaded software renderer is a misery for complex projects, or just zooming in. Now Inkscape is going to be 12 times faster on my machine
* Font selection was utter garbage, the new UI seems promising
* Patterns was also a constant source of frustration, looks like this release improves it.
This is exciting. I'm looking forward to use this new release.
Now please give me a dialog for key rebinding, similar to Krita. And better key binding discoverability.
you can expect some performance gains but not really 12x it does not scale lineri .
you can edit SOME keyboard shortcuts in preference - Interface -keyboard .
Some (a lot) of actions are still not migrated to actions so you cannot change shortcuts easily. But this is ongoing process.
Krita is using the default KDE key binding dialog box. I don't know is there something similiar in GTK.
https://inkscape.org/doc/keys-1.3.x.html#idm734
It allows you to search for command by name and "tooltip description" and displays their assigned shortcuts. This is IMO the one of the few recent features that should be implemented in all applications. In Inkscape it is not as smooth as in IDEs, has somewhat slow first run, but I'm super glad it is even there.
In fact being free software means anyone can jump in and change the UI to work for you. Even for pay…
Honestly if they focused on cleaning up the UI I could see myself trying out Inkscape more seriously!
I have to say it's more performant than Inkscape, clearly geared towards artists, but there are still stuff that are more easily done in Inkscape. These mostly relate to automation. To add insult to the injury there is NO plugin system for Designer. I think this is a huge oversight on Serif's part, people would be so happy to fill the gaps.
Honestly you better save your money if you can live without it. I've been using 1.x for years and they never asked for more money so I upgraded to show my support but I don't really think it's worth forking that much amount of money yet if you're happy with 1.x
5.000 + 2mm
5.000 + 0.2cm
Can you talk more about it? What kind of things are you designing? How detailed are the designs?
To clean up path tracings from surplus edges, a changed "node deletion logic" is also welcome.
I understand why it's not there, though. But for me, an accidental "need to design this quick" amateur, I really don't like juggling 01_cover.svg, 02_inlay_left.svg 03_inlay_right.svg and so on. Designing a booklet, folder, or even business-card is frustrating.
You still need scribus in the loop to get to cmyk, it's not a seamless workflow yet.
I'm running Inkscape 1.1 on an M1 Pro. I just measured time between clicking a plain rectangle and it being selected. It takes about 460 ms.
New 1.3 version takes 216 ms, about twice the speed. It looks a lot more usable!
As an example. Say I wanted cut a semicircle out of a square.
If I'm missing something that already exists, let me know.
What I was actually needing at the time was an arbitrary box/lasso select. Does that exist?
The new features are almost all things that I have wished Inkscape had dozens of times.
Font collections (the font menu is slow when you have to go through half of it to find the font you want), pinned colors (I often had a text file opened with hex color code to copy-paste them), margin management (I often had a transparent rectangle at the content size to use for placement), shape builder tool (so many steps to do this work using path difference and path union operations), lasso node selection (all this zoom in and zoom out to select dots one by one when a rectangle selection cannot do it), …
Congrats to the team!
Between google fonts and squirrel fonts there are thousands of fonts and styles.
Nexusfont lets me build sub-collections and then i can install only the fonts i want from the dialogue to keep my system from having a bloated fonts folder.
The drawback is having to reload inkscape to see the new fonts. The benefit is that loadtime is much faster when only select fonts from a much larger collection have been installed into the system.
I tried the font browser dialogue in inkscape and it was not on par with what I'm already doing. I also tried FontBase but was just not thrilled with the some features being paywalled behind a FontBase Awesome Subscription model. While nexusfont has less polish, it also has less B.S..
Thread 1 "inkscape" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007ffff5194a34 in GooFile::size() const () from /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/inkscape/../libpoppler.so.118
Edit: having looked a bit more into this:
~ libtree /usr/bin/inkscape | grep poppler
│ ├── libpoppler-glib.so.8 [runpath]
│ │ ├── libpoppler.so.124 [ld.so.conf]
│ ├── libpoppler.so.118 [runpath]
My main pain point is drawing vector curves. I cannot seem to get the intuition on how to rapidly draw curves, and it seems I need to switch tools to remove anchors and modify curvature. In Illustrator I used one tool and a few keyboard shortcuts and could trace fast.
Maybe it's just that I never fully learned the Inkscape way. It's a major issue since this is the main thing I want to do in Inkscape. Am I missing something?
I made my proposal for improwing this wholl workflow still waiting for interested developer to implement it https://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/5
This seems to be my only use-case currently. It also has several very useful features like crop-to-content for SVG.
IIRC it took me about 6h, the Inkscape UI was frustrating at first but eventually I got better at it and won the contest. Such a fun seeing other people running around the city of Karlsruhe (Germany) wearing my shirt.
Thank you Inkscape team! I'm seeing as much potential as with Blender in kicking some commercial vendor's butts!