Inkscape really is one of my favorite piece of software.
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!
As an Affinity Designer user, it's insane too see how close we went from only Illustrator having Shape Builder to both Designer and Inkscape releasing it so close together. It's super handy and happy to see it as an option everywhere now.
Honestly if they focused on cleaning up the UI I could see myself trying out Inkscape more seriously!
For me Inkscape has been one of the stars of free software. I especially like how one can align all the things rather easily and exactly, without having to trust ones mouse pointer movement skills and helper lines. Of course SVG is also about exactness, so a tool working with SVGs should also allow you to do things exactly.
Looks like usability on mac improved massively between version 1 and this version. Version 1.0 was barely usable on a mac. I just tried version 1.3 out for a few minutes. The UI looks very slick and responsive compared to what I last saw. I'm not a designer but this looks like I could use it and would probably experience a bit of a learning curve. It's a bit intimidating with all the buttons on all sides of the window.
Since Figma has gotten better and better, I have significantly reduced my usage of Inkscape, however, when dealing with SVGs I find that Inkscape is really good for solving bugs with the SVG exports from Figma.
This seems to be my only use-case currently. It also has several very useful features like crop-to-content for SVG.
There is a lot in this release that I'll readily use. Pinned colours and font collections in particular seem useful, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the improved node deletion logic works too. Deleting nodes used to have unintuitive effects on the path; not in terms of its shape, but in the distribution of the nodes on the section where you deleted one.
I vividly remember "designing" (with my light skills) a T-Shirt using Inkscape for a sports team back at university in ~2008. It was organized as a competition with the winner getting a free shirt.
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!
if you use Inkscape in print workflows, two thing stand out: rewritten pdf import and page margins and bleed.
To clean up path tracings from surplus edges, a changed "node deletion logic" is also welcome.
Does the PDF import work for anyone? I've struggled with it since version 1.1
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]
Inkscape is a gem, I used to like it a lot in earlier versions despite its clunkiness (after all, I'm not paying for it so I can't really complain if it doesn't looks like an Adobe product). And yet in recent versions it feels like it has improved massively, both in terms of UI and performance. Truly amazing!
I use Inkscape regularly and I'm very happy with what seems like an increase in development! Good job!
I'll try it. For me the best experience used to be with 0.92 and since then it has significantly degraded, with counter-intuitive things happening all the time in the UI. One of the operations I find the most complicated is to place circles at specific positions. I only know how to adjust their size and left position but as I'm using inkscape to design drill positions, it's a real pain for me to have to mentally subtract the radius and the line width. And in general, I find everything related to movements, alignments and such particularly difficult, to the point that generally you have to find a video showing a trick to proceed efficiently.
Some of these features look useful, but their example animations make me feel inadequate.
Looks like a great release - kudos to the team. I grew up with Illustrator and use Inkscape exclusively since a few years. Overall I am quite happy with the features, the UI and the UX.
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?
calligraphy pen remains unusable, after being made worse in pretty much every regard in 1.x. it's slow, quality of strokes is terrible, and it's been that way ever since 1.0 betas with zero improvement https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1473#note_1128... welp, still using 0.92.5, where the pen is actually responsive and creates good results.
I used Inkscape quite a bit back in 2007-2008. Time to fire it up again. The open source modelling world is on fire. I recently discovered FreeCAD when I couldn't convince myself to keep using SketchUp due to the price. I found that FreeCAD is highly regarded, imports and exports from Blender, and has solid support for making parts (3D printing and CNC) and architecture. It has thermal and torque modelling!! In short, it easily replaces SketchUp and many other modelling tools that cost a fortune (SOLIDWORKS is $50k).
Is there a way to extrude an edge in Inkscape? I'm constantly having to create new shapes, align them with my existing shape by manually positioning the node coordinates, and then union them. I wish I could select an edge on my path and "extrude" it like I could with an edge or face in Blender.
I like this application. The major thing it is missing is a tool that lets you cut shapes arbitrarily. I know there is something akin to masking, but it leaves the original shape data in the file.
As an example. Say I wanted cut a semicircle out of a square.
If I'm missing something that already exists, let me know.
Page Margins were the big missing feature for me. I'm glad they've been added.
Yay, that shape builder tool looks awesome.
Anyone got a good resource for learning inkscape? Youtube prefered.
Inkscape is amazing software. Congratulations to the team!
guess I missed publishing of 1.2 haha. it let me feel good to get double update one time.
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Yes!
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.