I love Inkscape so much. I use it every other week to make presentations, slides or just simple graphics when I need it. I illustrated my thesis with it.

Another piece of 2D vector software that I use and recommend is Graphite [1]. It too is open source. Graphite has nodes and can be procedural in nature. Have them both in your graphics toolbox.

[1] https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite

The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.

Inkscape has its UI quirks but is really quite a fantastic tool for people who make things. It's my go-to tool for anything that looks like a 2D vector image or plot. I even use it to design vinyl motorcycle emblems: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...

The one new feature in 1.4 that I appreciated the most is the ability to disable anti-aliasing when exporting from the command line:

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167

Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.

I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.

Is it only me that, when I open Inkspace, I really cannot get anything done without watching a tutorial or reading docs / blog posts?

Adobe might be more impressive wiht AI but wth that your data will be exploited by bigger players. And, in media, in a world of lawsuits, the big media corpos often have better lawyers.

If you want your media to be stolen to generate 'new' media, choose Adobe. If you want to own your produced media, choose free software, such as Inkscape, Krita, Gimp, Cinelerra-CV, KDEnlive, Blender, Ardour.

I did a lot of strange things in old Inkscape to achieve the same result as given by this new:

  Shape Builder

  You can now tackle quick edits on raster (pixel) images within Inkscape using the Shape Builder tool. Load an image and select sections that you want to isolate.

It can open Affinity Designer files!? That’s something of a buried lede.

That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.

Inkscape is one of the best and most important tools in my arsenal. From creating and editing vectors for use with a laser cutter to designing icons when tools like Illustrator are too expensive and alternatives like ChatGPT fall short, Inkscape never ceases to amaze me with its capabilities. It's remarkable how well this open-source, free application performs. Thank you, Inkscape, for being one of the most reliable and impressive apps I know!

We really need a vector editor that has some of the features of Flash's UI. I haven't seen them in other programs.

Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.

It would be nice if Inkscape supported SVG P/S. We need that for BIMI, and now have to pay someone who has access to Adobe.

Woo-ha!

    … bug fixes and setting the stage for the arrival of GTK 4.

I've just bought a Surface Pro tablet. Does Inkscape interface work well in a tablet or with a pen?

Calligraphy pen is still unusable, laggy and jaggy. Too slow, not enough setting increments to fine tune it, awfully, almost absurdly angular on even slightly fast motions. 0.92 remains the most responsive version. Welp, i don't know what i expected, since every time i'd check latest version it'd still be like this. Celebrating 4 years of Inkscape breaking calligraphy tool and never fixing it since.

Have they added any method of setting a tool style before drawing, rather than adjusting style after drawing?

The prospect of discarding 25 years of muscle memory in Adobe Illustrator is unfathomable to me, as much as I loathe what Adobe has become.

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