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Inkscape Version 0.91 Released
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they've switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.
Oh wait, it's free? Clever Inkscape, very clever.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Why does the slashdot community care?
So how much do i need to pay to promote my product on slashdot... ? Same as Inkscape ?
I like Inkscape. It's generally a great program. But its most serious problem is that it uses GTK+ as its toolkit.
GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI to this hideous, unusable UI.
The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace. It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it.
It will be a lot of work, but they need to port Inkscape from GTK+ to Qt. Qt is a much better toolkit. It looks great. It works (and actually works, in that the resulting software is perfectly usable!) pretty much everywhere.
GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Inkscape devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.
I'm just a designer, and I've never done any C++ programming, but I'm thinking that maybe I'll have to learn it so I could potentially contribute to any effort that arises to fix the UI of Inkscape.
One of the coolest things about Inkscape is that it does a good job of converting bitmapped images to vectors, which is especially nice if you want to combine source elements created in a raster-art program at wildly different scales. This capability is found in other software, I know, but Inkscape makes it relatively simple and (at least if you're going to use the results *in* Inkscape) saves some steps.
This is also a fun way to decompose images into constituent color layers, separate them, and then play with the resulting layers -- cool high-contrast results sometimes in combining just 2 or 3 of the resulting layers.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox... gtk apps so great I can't avoid them in KDE.
KDE is great for a bunch of reasons (just had to return to it from Xfce recently), but dealing with gtk apps is a must on Linux systems, it seems. Likewise, some KDE apps are very nice, like Dolphin, Konqueror (but most tricks only would work inside KDE, perhaps), Amarok and things like Digikam, Kolourpaint, among others.
The efficiency in using several toolkits in a same desktop should be taken very seriously, I think.
The last relatively serious thing I used it for was to draw tree form illustrations using a Wacom. I had always like the application, but this use made it clear how much more usable it had become than Illustrator. Granted, Illustrator might have made some changes in the handful of years since I've bothered, but I've preferred Inkscape's UI because it's just so much less clicky.
Glad to see the long-awaited new version. Hopefully they fixed some of the annoying bugs I saw using the drawing tablet.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Since this is really a slashvertisement I may as well add some more fuel to the fire. If you're already brave enough to use Inkscape as your bread winner, perhaps you've thought about branching out into making signs? If this is the case then you should definitely check out Inkcut http://sourceforge.net/project... Just add a vinyl cutter to the mix and you're rolling. GIMP, Inkscape and Inkcut, all you need to start making signs on the cheap.
Inkscaper Alexandre Prokoudine provides a nicely visual article about the release, including a video to demonstrate some of the new things you can do with it: http://libregraphicsworld.org/...
Inkscape has been out for more than a decade, and its still not version 1.0?
No wonder people talk about FOSS developers being amateurs. Seriously, making a bit deal out of a .9x release?
That's just low. Next you will be telling us that you have revenue share deals for all the big software. I'll bet you got yourself some really nice toys with the money you made from Firefox and LibreOffice you recently promoted. What next? Promoting KDE or Gnome with some sweet purchase price deals?
Also, why even promote this? What is this, some kind of news site for nerds? How dare you.
Have a lttle heart would you, this stuff matters.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Look, there may be valid reasons to ditch your working code for adding a dependency on some other open source project. But this reasoning stinks.
No wonder Linux still attracts 0.87% of desktop users. Get the new program palsy? HAHHAHA! This inqscrape website is a fog of incomprehensible babble. After 25 years !!? Still scratching that feckin-A itch ... fail.
https://inkscape.org/en/news/2015/01/30/inkscape-version-091-is-released/
I'd been thinking this would never see the light of day.
The Cairo backend stuff was a focus in 2010 and 2011 and everyone thought 0.49, the first version with the new renderer, was going to be released in 2012.
Whatever happened in those three years, I'm glad they've turned the corner and hopefully future development can be release early release often again.
For Windows, the UI will seem to lag or not redraw in real-time while drawing or using it.
Disable Rulers (ctrl + r, or Menu: View -> Show/Hide -> Rulers) will fix it.
I spoke with the very helpful people on Inkscape's IRC Channel for this tip.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ink...
This may also apply to some versions of The G.I.M.P.
My current business depends on Inkscape. I use Inkscape's 'gcodetools' plugin to generate gcode for a CNC mill. I can go from designing to cutting in five minutes flat. I'm not sure if it is included in this release, but you can get it in the beta.
Sweet! Happy for you and that's great information. By the way, do you use Blender http://blender.org/ (Free and Open Source 3D and Video editing) too? Here is a sweet tutorial on how to generate 2D artwork (SVG's) from 3D models. http://goinkscape.com/use-blen... if you ever need it. That's the great thing about Blender and Inkscape, there are so many free and great tutorials on the Internet as well as a wonderful community of users you can most likely get an answer from when you get stuck. Something I really want to learn myself is how to run a CNC milling machine (or Plasma cutters) as well as how to 3D print. I mean if you learn Blender, GIMP, Inkscape and Inkcut one can be very versatile and valuable to a lot of companies in a lot of situations. Or like yourself, run your own business.
I do not like to jump the gun with adding extra sources on my installs. Inkscape is one of the appllications in the Linux distro media.
Question - how long before Ubuntu / Mint update will feature this version? 2 weeks? 2 months?
Will we (on Linux) be "good enough" to get the extra goodies as an option in Synaptic - the Corel/Visio files from LibreOffice.
captcha - "soviet" ... how the heck it knows the Inkscape video presenter is Russian (I'm 99% sure)
the last time I checked, [GIMP] still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.
Have the patents on practical methods of color matching expired yet? If not, then it's impossible for free software to support proper color matching.
Is it just me, or is this whole thread making you feel nostalgic for the good ol' Slashdot days when we gabbed about stuff that was a lot more fun to gab about?
Linux and open source, baby!
Whoa.
Did we live through our very own hipster 60's freedom-power revolution without realizing it?
I use Inkscape and Photoshop to design T-shirts and educational materials. While Inkscape is a decent program, GIMP is shit in almost every way possible (design, features, speed, stability), thus it is the very last program I would recommend to anyone who needs to work with bitmaps . Free options like Paint.net or commercial choices like Paint Shop Pro are better choices.
Captcha: unsuited. Sums it up perfectly.
the 8eaper BSD's
Knowing Ubuntu it can take months... at least not till the next release. If you want the latest on some apps you just have to forgoe the standard distibution repository and either add in the program specicic PPA or install it manually. Its not really THAT hard, once you have done it a couple times its not much extra bother.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
It's a shame that these open source user applications (Inkscape, GIMP, VLC, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird...) usually work very well, but open source desktops are glitchy as hell. I use a lot of OSS under Windows too, as the apps are professional quality.
I love Inkscape and want to use it, but as long as there is no proper CMYK / printing support it's pretty useless for profession work.
Xara Designer Pro is still the only viable alternative to Illustrator at this point.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
I don't know what they were thinking using GTK for GIMP in the first place!
One of the biggest changes in GIMPShop was the single window mode that docked the toolbox into the image window, GIMP 2.8 has such a feature as standard(if it's not default it's in the window menu, i think), the other things such as photoshop equivalent bindings used to be available in the form of ps-menurc, oh, it's still around http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php.
All of the differences that actually matter between PS and GIMP are of course completely unaddressed by GIMPshop and other similar hacks, gimp doesn't support all manner of layer modes and operations that are used extensively in photoshop, if you're going to adapt to going without such things then surely you can learn some keybindings.
Will I have to install systemd to run this? Serious question. I heard gimp had a dependency on systemd, so I'm wondring if other graphics programs do too.
Please STOP this crap of building good software with lots heaping stinking piles of completely dependence-bound libraries and toolkits.
What good is "open source" when everything is built with a hundred different specific versions of assorted libraries (each of which has a hundred OTHER dependencies on OTHER specific versions of oddball libs, etc) so that a typical user cannot just download and untar the tarball and then config and make it???
Once a project needs all sorts of oddball contortions to build, most people will look for pre-built binaries and/or packages .... which means most people (even most coders) NEVER look at the source. This means very few people are actually looking and verifying that there's nothing nasty and/or dangerous in the code and also means the end-user has no more confidence that HIS binary actually came from the associated "open source" source code tree. At that point, there is NO security benefit to so-called "open source" projects. When average coders can no longer easily change and re-build projects, "open source" also loses the benefits of any claim that anybody can freely change them also, further eroding the claimed benefits.
The current you generation of coders seem to be becoming rather incompetent as "coders" and super-competent as "stitchers" who can glue together other peoples' code. I see very few stand-alone apps being written now where a single "vision" ties together all the code and the person or people who wrote the thing know how ALL of it actually works. I know SOME see this as great progress, but it stinks to me like a collective lazy slump toward incompetence and a possible future where a great many projects will become unmaintainable AND untrustworthy.