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.

you still cannot create color pallets easily/user-friendly , we did not implemented this yet.

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.

I love Inkscape so much, thank you and all of the team for this release :)

Inkscape also has an experimental OpenGL backend that seems fairly stable. When I tested it, it seemed pretty stable and glitchless. I hope it will replace the Cairo backend soon, since OpenGL will give Inkscape even MORE performance!

> Now please give me a dialog for key rebinding, similar to Krita. And better key binding discoverability.

Krita is using the default KDE key binding dialog box. I don't know is there something similiar in GTK.

As for discoverability (of keyboard shortcuts as well as commands), few versions back Inkscape introduced `View > Command Palette`, by default bound to "`?`" key:

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.

The command palette in the Windows version of Inkscape is inexplicably slow very often, not only on first run. 5 seconds to open slow. Is it spending time making fancy command predictions? Does it request and rebuild a list of existing commands each time? It is also missing some commands, like the Shape Builder tool. I'd rather have a stupid static list of all possible commands that opens instantly and filters super quickly as you type.

Yes, there is a huge space for improvements there, besides sup-par speed, strange filtering and ordering, unintuitive focus management … but at least it is there and has chance to evolve. I'm quite convinced, that even five seconds delay of (each) command palette invocation is most of the times better than mindlessly sifting through menus and keyboard settings. And as always, the "happy path" is to to use it just once and memorise the direct shortcut of desired command, so next time there will be not use for the palette.

There's a year old issue https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/3227 with no visible progress and a medium priority label. I hope it gets more dev focus soon.

Free software isn't about cost primarily though. Its about avoiding stuff like this: https://petapixel.com/2019/10/08/adobe-blocks-all-users-in-v...

In fact being free software means anyone can jump in and change the UI to work for you. Even for pay…

I bit the bullet and put many hours into it and came away finding it fine. I almost entirely use key commands, just I like I did with Illustrator. Maybe that's why I find it acceptable. I no longer wish I was using Illustrator.

As a casual Inkscape user, I'm always infuriated by the outdated open/export file dialogs on Windows, that don't remember the last location and won't let me enter the file path. I've resorted to copying files I want to edit to the Downloads folder for easier access.

Other than that, it's been really handy on many occasions.

Whats bothering you about it? I probably lack perspective because I haven't used other software, but I'm really happy using both for whenever I need to do something.

Not GP, but when I want to export etc., I want a dialog box to open and then disappear, not add to the clutter of tabs on the right.

I very much prefer the export dialog for raster export where it is in the drawer because that is literally where i carry out a huge part of my workflow (fill/stroke, alignments, doc properties, it's all in one place.

Saving to various formats is still done through transient dialogs including format specific settings just like you are describing.

But letting me intetact with the document alongside the export settings (vs being in window behind popout dialogue) just seems so much more intuitive.

I've been using inkscape for years to generate vectors for plotting and laser cutting/engraving and while it has come a long way with quality of life features, it's always been able to get the job done for me.

Thanks for your perspective.

Yeah it's a decent piece of software once you get used to the idiosyncrasies, just like Gimp.

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!

I use nexusfont to manage my fonts.

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..

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!

We are slowly working also on that

How does on get involved to help with the UI challenges/improvements?

I bought Designer and Photo just a few months before 2.0 came out, and just before the window for free upgrade for existing customers begun.

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.

Indeed, another annoyance I have with Designer is how not purely vector it is. I mean it's great and makes it a breeze to make documents but it really sucks for making web-targeted SVGs. Both Inkscape and Illustrator support using SVG as the project file and I never have to guess if the feature I'm using is going to actually export as vector or just rasterized and embedded as a base64 PNG (which is true for fancy gradients and some of the more advanced masking, not even just the raster persona stuff).

which version of designer have it? i didn’t upgrade to latest yet.

2.0 and up.

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

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.

I love Inkscape but for as long as I can remember it's always been laggy on a Mac. IIRC at one point there was a disclaimer on the website that the Mac version wasn't well maintained.

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!

How did you measure this?

Quicktime screen recorder! Then count the frames with ffmpeg.

https://superuser.com/questions/542989/getting-the-video-fra...

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.

If I think for print the single most important thing that I would think of is CMYK support

For me, above that, is multi-page support.

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.

I think they added multi-page support in the previous point release[0]. I only use inkscape to make graphics though, so I'm not sure how user friendly the implementation is.

[0] https://inkscape.org/news/2022/05/16/inkscape-12/

I was apparently running a somwhat older version (thanks to snaps/deb failures). Upgraded and its there!

Thanks a lot for the hint. It looks and feels great.

it's really good. very easy to import and work on multi-page docs, even with different page sizes. the developers did an amazing job there.

I expect that having SVG as the native Inkscape format makes this somewhat difficult.

It really does not. SVG is not sRGB-only. You can embed an ICC profile that describe a CMYK-based color space and use colors available in that color space, in native CMYK markup, with sliders and stuff.

true, but that'd be not part of the 1.3 release notes.

You still need scribus in the loop to get to cmyk, it's not a seamless workflow yet.

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

I suspect it requires a specific version of libpoppler? I have no idea which version I'm supposed to be using, can't see any mention in the release notes.

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]

Perhaps this is https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1023159?

Yes, I've used it a lot on Ubuntu 22.10/23.04.

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.

You can adjust the radius of a circle when the circle tool is selected. You can also place circles centered around a specific point by holding down shift while drawing them.

Thanks, that's useful! However that's one main issue with this tool, it's really oriented towards the UI itself. You're bounded by your mouse (or worse, touchpad) resolution to place the center and often in addition to wasting a lot of time, it's inaccurate. The convenient approach would be to place an approximate circle, then edit the center and radius and enter values by hand.

you dont need to do mental math you can chang your bbox calcuations to use geometry preferences- tools - bbox geometry

Thank you, I'll try that. It's all but intuitive to have to touch bbox preferences just to edit the center of an object :-/

Some of these features look useful, but their example animations make me feel inadequate.

A fun thing they show in the animations is how you can do basic arithmetic in the size fields. So if you've setup your document in millimetres (I do this for woodworking designs) and you have a shape with width 5mm you can do this:

    5.000 + 2mm

Or:

    5.000 + 0.2cm

I don't know when Inkscape started doing this, but I just gave it a go one day because it felt like something I would put in (and to their credit, they did).

I implemented it as part of a GSoC project a decade ago, which was first included in the 0.91 release in 2015.

> I do this for woodworking designs

Can you talk more about it? What kind of things are you designing? How detailed are the designs?

Nothing professional; just sketches for personal projects in and around the house. Usually fairly detailed, but mostly useful to get a sense of proportion and to design the basic layout of things like built-in closets.

Inkscape's snapping, aligning, and layering features make it a good tool for this as long as you need nothing more than 2D views.

I also use Inkscape to prepare the (plywood, MDF) sheet sawing instructions for the lumber yard. They love it when customers present them with a clear overview for the cuts (and I love it when wood I order is cut correctly). For me it's useful to use a single sheet as economically as possible.

That's awesome, thank you. Built-in closets and simple shelves is what I'm looking for. And maybe a french cleat system for organizing tools. A 2D view should be enough.

I'm using draw.io for floor plans to get a basic sense of spacing for bigger projects. Inkscape looks like a good fit for smaller ones.

its been there for a very long time

Most of them seem fine but that first one is pure "chip away at everything that doesn't look like David."[1]

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/

Is it, though? It looks like they drew the dolphin with circles. They aren't just randomly placed circles.

They're not randomly placed but I have no idea how one would do that. Or why -- you have a pen tool and bezier curves.

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?

imho this is sothing inskcape is lacking a lot and lots of needed features are hidden way too much. manly that if you want to create curve and tehn straight line you need to press Shifl+L

I made my proposal for improwing this wholl workflow still waiting for interested developer to implement it https://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/5

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.

yeha it seems like upstrem bug . Inscape is porting to 1.4 so hopefully this will be addresed there

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.

ytou can do that with boolean operations in path menu or with new shape buuilder tool

You are correct. Sorry, it's been a while.

What I was actually needing at the time was an arbitrary box/lasso select. Does that exist?

Yes .. ish we have touch to select hold alth while dragging

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.