Comments on: Inkscape: Open Source Drawing for SVG

By: threepointone

threepointone — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:32:19 +0000

+1. Love inkscape.

By: Hans Schmucker

Hans Schmucker — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:14:49 +0000

Another vote here. Everything you need is there and most stuff (currently excluding filters, which aside from blur are a pain to set up) is there, easy to get started with but with enough options to satisfy even the most ambitious graphics artist.

As far as performence is concerned, I have to disagree with the posts above, even with very complicated paths (a 8000 polygon image works just fine) or large bitmaps (think 8000×16000), it remains pretty snappy. The only real performance issue I’ve found so far is when using filters. While performance is fine at 100%, it slows down to a crawl when zooming.

By: willworkforart

willworkforart — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:04:55 +0000

As a designer and part illustrator, my software of choice is Inkscape! I love this software – quick updates, good performance (in most areas), easy to use – but although most users of Adobe Illustrator will look down upon it – Inkscape hasn’t even reached a 1.0 release and there is amazing work being put into the development. At this rate (as long as their continues to be a strong community of us designers that use it and contribute ideas) Adobe will be looking to it for features…

By: tj111

tj111 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:37:53 +0000

Inkscape is a great tool, I use it frequently for logo/icon/button designing, but as RSarvas said it can become prohibitively slow on complicated svg’s. Here’s too hoping performance improvements are at the top of their list for future releases.

By: pothoven

pothoven — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:33:17 +0000

You might also want to check out the inkscape tutorials weblog at http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/
(no affiliation)

By: RSarvas

RSarvas — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:44:25 +0000

As someone that has used various graphic design tools over the years, I’d like to say that while InkScape is on the track to being a good vector illustration tool, I have found that it currently cannot handle complicated graphics containing thousands of points like FreeHand and Illustrator (though even FreeHand gets slow at that point). Still, for less complicated projects like icons, web page graphics, simple technical drawings, etc., InkScape works fine and is probably the best free vector illustration tool out there right now.

By: broofa

broofa — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:24:49 +0000

I’ve been using Inkscape for about a year now and it’s a fantastic tool for application developers. One thing it excels at is in allowing you to finesse artwork at the pixel and sub-pixel level, which makes it ideal for creating icons and small (button-size) graphics at pixel-level detail, while offering all the power that comes with a vector-based model for artwork.

I originally started with the Linux version, which provides a well-integrated experience on that OS. On Mac, however, it’s a bit cumbersome because it runs inside the X11 window environment which uses the traditional Linux/PC keyboard shortcuts, so you are constantly fumbling to remember the right key combinations for common operations like copy and paste, etc.

In spite of that, it’s still my tool of choice when it comes to creating artwork.