This appears to be a packaging problem that some people experience on OSX. We're working on it. Hopefully we'll be able to provide a new OSX package for 0.42 with a fix.
How typical. The only thing that makes me optimistic is that indeed those like you are a minority. Whiners cannot be eliminated completely no matter how we try, that would be contrary to the laws of nature. But we must be doing good job, judging by the fact that we don't hear such whines much more often.
Just to give you an idea, I'm not only a developer. I'm making my living as a graphic designer for 8 years now, and I've been deeply interested in this field for twice as much time. I've used a lot of different vector graphics software (probably unlike you, who seem to be pretty much locked into Adobe) and I've studied this field long before I started working on Inkscape. And yes, now I use Inkscape daily in professional design work.
> Do you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at usability testing?
That Adobe or Microsoft or whoever bases its UI on usability testing is a myth. It's disproven by many counterexamples. For Microsoft, there's Apple whose fans rightfully despise Windows. For Adobe, there are lots of other vector editors (Freehand, Corel Draw, Xara, Canvas) with very devoted user bases - who rightfully consider Adobe a clunky monster.
Maybe they do spend money on testing, but I guess that in the end, management has the upper hand. Some of the UI choices in Illustrator are truly horrible.
One of the most striking examples is Xara. It's a small company in the UK, obviously without a big research budget. But when I discovered Xara in 1997 I was astounded by its usability and features. It was miles ahead of Illustrator back then - so smooth and polished. Today its lead is not so pronounced but it's still much loved by many users. I borrowed a lot of good ideas from Xara into Inkscape.
So, doing things some particular way simply because Adobe does it that way would be rather stupid. Especially considering that, while Photoshop is pretty much a monopoly, Illustrator is far from that - there's a much healthier competition going on in vector editors.
> There have been three button mice about as long as there have been two button mice.
Yeah, but there were plenty two-buttons just a few years ago.
> The point about using the keyboard to pan comes from the simple realization that if you can have both your hands actively working, you're more efficient.
Yes, but how that relates to panning with Space? You're not panning BY spacebar, you still pan with your mouse and you have to use the other hand too - both hands busy! Does not sound like a timesaver to me.
Oh, and if you indeed prefer this way of scrolling, you have it - I forgot that we also have Shift+right drag for panning in Inkscape. Almost the same as space+left drag, just a slightly different key, and no problem on laptops either.
Create a tile (which may be a group of several objects), select it and do Edit->Tile Clones. Set the parameters and create the pattern. Then you can edit the original tile and the rest of the pattern is updated automatically.
> I'm *guessing* that Illustrator has a few more users than Inkscape, so this is a rather self-defeating definition of minority.
It's much more self-defeating of you to include all of Illustrator users in your group, don't you think?:)
Of course by "minority" I didn't mean Illustrator users, but rather "those who come to Inkscape with expectations formed by other apps, and who refuse to try to understand our way of doing things, and who rant about our project's imminent doom as a result." Luckily, such people are indeed a small minority. And you know what, some of them even get converted to Inkscape ways after some time:)
> you are informed of the keyboard shortcut for any command when you mouse over it.
Have you actually tried Inkscape? It has tooltips with keyboard shortcuts ALL OVER THE PLACE. Plus its statusbar (something which does not exist in Illustrator) provides LOTS of helpful hints, including shortcuts.
>needs to be available via some method other than the middle mouse button, since this is absent on many laptops
Most laptops I've seen have an equivalent of a scrollwheel, which works just as well for scrolling in Inkscape.
> it won't hurt to allow the spacebar to do it too
True, and I normally never argue when I can simply implement the thing that the person is asking for, without disrupting anything else. The trouble with spacebar, however, is that we use it to switch to Selector, which is also a well-established UI tradition in at least one program (Xara X, and I think Corel Draw too). In fact I do remember people asking for spacebar to switch to selector (back when it wasn't yet done) but you are the first who is asking for spacebar to scroll.
> Middle-drag and ctrl+arrows may suit _you_, but try them while using a tablet.
I do use a tablet with a pen. For everything. In fact I have no mouse on my desktop at all. Dragging by middle button (which is in the rear of the side button on my pen) is perfectly convenient - when I have a hand on the pen. When I do not, ctrl+arrows work even better. If I were using a mouse, I would be using the scrollwheel primarily.
> does not involve putting down your pen, using the mouse or cursor keys, and then picking the pen up again.
Hmm, have you ever tried a pen? Even a cheap one like Intuos has all of the controls of the mouse except scrollwheel, right on the pen. I never use mouse.
> reflect on why other applications have panning tools
I think that's mostly historic. They date from the times when most applications didn't use middle button for anything and when scrollwheels didn't exist.
> I love SVG but I think I have to mark my expectations for Inkscape down a notch if this is typical of the project philosophy.
Another doomsayer... welcome to the club:)
Here's a little observation for you. Such rants (sorry but it's a rant) about our "project philosophy" typically come from people who either have yet to try Inkscape, or have very little experience with it. Simply speaking, they are newcomers who have had experience with other tools and want Inkscape to be the same. But we never get this kind of feedback from those who really use the program every day (and there are plenty of such users). What such users propose usually makes sense within Inkscape's UI principles, and therefore gets implemented quickly. We never get "campaigns" by users trying to persuade the developers to implement something and stubborn developers refusing. This kind of thing just never happens in Inkscape. Think about it.
We do plan to make keyboard customizable. But it's very difficult because of the way the code is organized historically. We're making some progress, though.
> In any case, that's really Bad News for the future of the app.
I've seen this very attitude ever since the start of Inkscape. It's not too frequent, but it does happen with surprising regularity. "You dare to ignore my beloved Illustrator/Freehand/whatever, you're DOOMED." I try to give them our reasons and show them _our_ way of doing it, but they just won't listen.
I think by now, Inkscape's explosive growth and the tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers.
You simply _don't get it_. (Luckily you are in a minority, but the fact that you don't get it still saddens me.) We're not in the business of creating an Illustrator clone. We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome. If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.
> Hmm the text tool is less than intuitive and hangs the screen for a little while (application not responding) the first time it initializes.
Known bug on Windows, we even have a patch for it but that patch must go into Freetype, so it's not there yet.
> But illusive and hard to reproduce bugs are not something to brush off. They drive the users insane just as much as they annoy developers.
Sure. But many bugs only _seem_ elusive at first sight. For 100 users that will uninstall the program after getting an "elusive" crash, there will be 1 who will be motivated enough to help us debug it.
> if you brush it off and say it works on your machine
If I do that, and if the crash is real, I'll keep getting more and more reports on it from different people. So eventually it WILL get fixed. But in any case, we never "brush off" bugs without trying to get at least some useful info from the user.
> The thing that annoys me about both Inkscape and the Gimp is that there are no floating palettes.
Unlike Gimp, Inkscape has just a few rarely used modal boxes (such as "Add a layer"). EVERYTHING else is either in floating dialogs (that can stay open as long as you need them) or in the toolbars in the document window.
> I see now that postscript and.eps support has been enhanced, hopefully the transparency/gradient stuff won't bork the output too much now.
Gradients in PS/EPS export work now (with some limitations, see Release Notes). But transparency does not work simply because PS has no such thing, and "emulating" it is an enormous hassle.
> all the output is always antialiased... any ideas?
That's one of the problems with our renderer currently. It only has the AA mode. Hopefully this will be fixed when Inkscape is ported to use Cairo.
with as much details as possible, ideally with a backtrace.
> keyset that Adobe and Macromedia apps use?
Because there are many other nice apps that we borrow from. One is Xara X. Another is (yeah) Gimp and other Gnome apps. We can't be a monkey of a single app, and sometimes we can't be a monkey of anyone because we do some original stuff too.
> holding space should enable the panning tool
We don't have a panning tool because we have lots of other ways to scroll. The best of them are middle-drag and ctrl+arrows. Try them, you may like them better when you get used to them.
> holding alt (not shift) should make the zoom tool zoom out rather than in.
That one makese sense - alt+click is currently unused in zoom tool, so i think I'll enable it to zoom out _in addition_ to shift+click.
> Also, double-clicking on the zoom tool should revert to "standard" zoom--not open the preferences panel.
Just press '1' to get 100% zoom. And it would be horribly inconsistent to make doubleclick work different on zoom tool than on other tools.
To summarize, we welcome any feedback, and very often we honor it, but also quite often people just want us to imitate exactly their favorite app without realizing that (1) there are other vector apps which are just as worthy of imitation, (2) Inkscape's way of doing it may be actually better, or (3) we can't do that because that would break consistency of Inkscape behavior in unpleasant ways.
This FAQ is somewhat obsolete. It's not a replacement for commercialware in ALL situations, that's true. But it's not as far from it as it used to be just a few releases back.
Come On. If you get a crash, REPORT IT! Right here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=604306&group_ id=93438&func=browse
And please note that we never have more than a few confirmed reproducible crash bugs in the tracker. (Currently just 2 I believe, and not fully reproducible at that.) We simply don't tolerate them. We, you know, fix them. Quickly and mercilessly. (Other types of bugs get fixed too, so don't worry).
>... during a time of war.
I love this last bit. We're at war!!! Hey, doesn't that justify all the atrocities and stupidities of this administration? You bet it does!
We're at war, vote Bush. Vote Bush, get war. A perfect vicious circle. To survive a war, you need a "tough" (as opposed to smart, honest, educated etc.) president. And once you get a tough president, you get war. As simple as that.
"Things are used -- they're traded on the market -- and the desire to profit from doing so is the best guarantor of all that property owners will encourage free speech. It's just good business."
What a stupid idea.
1. People are not governed by profit motive alone. Quite often, they are willing to lose some profit in order to promote their agenda. So if you depend on the "good business" argument for free speech protection, you may end up with rich people successfully silencing what they don't want to hear (and don't want others to hear) _even_ if this makes them suffer financially.
2. Even without 1, the speech which needs protection the most is often the least financially sustainable. Most people are not happy to listen to troubling news and analysis which shows how rotten their world is, not to mention paying for that. And those who do have such news and analysis to offer often do not have resources to buy airtime.
So what you get at the end is a world totally controlled by those with deep pockets and pretty similar political agendas. It's basically the same as now, to be sure, but now at least you have some chance to affect that through democratic mechanisms, government channels (yes!) and public property. What this guy is selling is is just a legalization of the worst aspects of the current system and the removal the last checks that limit it today.
Slashdot Mirror
This appears to be a packaging problem that some people experience on OSX. We're working on it. Hopefully we'll be able to provide a new OSX package for 0.42 with a fix.
How typical. The only thing that makes me optimistic is that indeed those like you are a minority. Whiners cannot be eliminated completely no matter how we try, that would be contrary to the laws of nature. But we must be doing good job, judging by the fact that we don't hear such whines much more often.
Just to give you an idea, I'm not only a developer. I'm making my living as a graphic designer for 8 years now, and I've been deeply interested in this field for twice as much time. I've used a lot of different vector graphics software (probably unlike you, who seem to be pretty much locked into Adobe) and I've studied this field long before I started working on Inkscape. And yes, now I use Inkscape daily in professional design work.
> Do you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at usability testing?
That Adobe or Microsoft or whoever bases its UI on usability testing is a myth. It's disproven by many counterexamples. For Microsoft, there's Apple whose fans rightfully despise Windows. For Adobe, there are lots of other vector editors (Freehand, Corel Draw, Xara, Canvas) with very devoted user bases - who rightfully consider Adobe a clunky monster.
Maybe they do spend money on testing, but I guess that in the end, management has the upper hand. Some of the UI choices in Illustrator are truly horrible.
One of the most striking examples is Xara. It's a small company in the UK, obviously without a big research budget. But when I discovered Xara in 1997 I was astounded by its usability and features. It was miles ahead of Illustrator back then - so smooth and polished. Today its lead is not so pronounced but it's still much loved by many users. I borrowed a lot of good ideas from Xara into Inkscape.
So, doing things some particular way simply because Adobe does it that way would be rather stupid. Especially considering that, while Photoshop is pretty much a monopoly, Illustrator is far from that - there's a much healthier competition going on in vector editors.
> There have been three button mice about as long as there have been two button mice.
Yeah, but there were plenty two-buttons just a few years ago.
> The point about using the keyboard to pan comes from the simple realization that if you can have both your hands actively working, you're more efficient.
Yes, but how that relates to panning with Space? You're not panning BY spacebar, you still pan with your mouse and you have to use the other hand too - both hands busy! Does not sound like a timesaver to me.
Oh, and if you indeed prefer this way of scrolling, you have it - I forgot that we also have Shift+right drag for panning in Inkscape. Almost the same as space+left drag, just a slightly different key, and no problem on laptops either.
That's why we announce 0.42 :) It's much easier now.
Heh, I can do lots of useful things in Inkscape while Illustrator simply LAUNCHES on my system. Inkscape is up and running almost instantaneously.
Create a tile (which may be a group of several objects), select it and do Edit->Tile Clones. Set the parameters and create the pattern. Then you can edit the original tile and the rest of the pattern is updated automatically.
> I'm *guessing* that Illustrator has a few more users than Inkscape, so this is a rather self-defeating definition of minority.
:)
:)
It's much more self-defeating of you to include all of Illustrator users in your group, don't you think?
Of course by "minority" I didn't mean Illustrator users, but rather "those who come to Inkscape with expectations formed by other apps, and who refuse to try to understand our way of doing things, and who rant about our project's imminent doom as a result." Luckily, such people are indeed a small minority. And you know what, some of them even get converted to Inkscape ways after some time
> you are informed of the keyboard shortcut for any command when you mouse over it.
Have you actually tried Inkscape? It has tooltips with keyboard shortcuts ALL OVER THE PLACE. Plus its statusbar (something which does not exist in Illustrator) provides LOTS of helpful hints, including shortcuts.
>needs to be available via some method other than the middle mouse button, since this is absent on many laptops
Most laptops I've seen have an equivalent of a scrollwheel, which works just as well for scrolling in Inkscape.
> it won't hurt to allow the spacebar to do it too
True, and I normally never argue when I can simply implement the thing that the person is asking for, without disrupting anything else. The trouble with spacebar, however, is that we use it to switch to Selector, which is also a well-established UI tradition in at least one program (Xara X, and I think Corel Draw too). In fact I do remember people asking for spacebar to switch to selector (back when it wasn't yet done) but you are the first who is asking for spacebar to scroll.
> Middle-drag and ctrl+arrows may suit _you_, but try them while using a tablet.
:)
I do use a tablet with a pen. For everything. In fact I have no mouse on my desktop at all. Dragging by middle button (which is in the rear of the side button on my pen) is perfectly convenient - when I have a hand on the pen. When I do not, ctrl+arrows work even better. If I were using a mouse, I would be using the scrollwheel primarily.
> does not involve putting down your pen, using the mouse or cursor keys, and then picking the pen up again.
Hmm, have you ever tried a pen? Even a cheap one like Intuos has all of the controls of the mouse except scrollwheel, right on the pen. I never use mouse.
> reflect on why other applications have panning tools
I think that's mostly historic. They date from the times when most applications didn't use middle button for anything and when scrollwheels didn't exist.
> I love SVG but I think I have to mark my expectations for Inkscape down a notch if this is typical of the project philosophy.
Another doomsayer... welcome to the club
Here's a little observation for you. Such rants (sorry but it's a rant) about our "project philosophy" typically come from people who either have yet to try Inkscape, or have very little experience with it. Simply speaking, they are newcomers who have had experience with other tools and want Inkscape to be the same. But we never get this kind of feedback from those who really use the program every day (and there are plenty of such users). What such users propose usually makes sense within Inkscape's UI principles, and therefore gets implemented quickly. We never get "campaigns" by users trying to persuade the developers to implement something and stubborn developers refusing. This kind of thing just never happens in Inkscape. Think about it.
We do plan to make keyboard customizable. But it's very difficult because of the way the code is organized historically. We're making some progress, though.
Yes this bug is fixed in 0.42. (Reportedly, as I don't have OSX myself.)
> every time I select the Text tool and click on the page the application freezes
Known bug on Windows, we even have a patch for it but that patch must go into Freetype, so it's not there yet.
> In any case, that's really Bad News for the future of the app.
I've seen this very attitude ever since the start of Inkscape. It's not too frequent, but it does happen with surprising regularity. "You dare to ignore my beloved Illustrator/Freehand/whatever, you're DOOMED." I try to give them our reasons and show them _our_ way of doing it, but they just won't listen.
I think by now, Inkscape's explosive growth and the tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers.
You simply _don't get it_. (Luckily you are in a minority, but the fact that you don't get it still saddens me.) We're not in the business of creating an Illustrator clone. We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome. If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.
> Hmm the text tool is less than intuitive and hangs the screen for a little while (application not responding) the first time it initializes.
Known bug on Windows, we even have a patch for it but that patch must go into Freetype, so it's not there yet.
> But illusive and hard to reproduce bugs are not something to brush off. They drive the users insane just as much as they annoy developers.
Sure. But many bugs only _seem_ elusive at first sight. For 100 users that will uninstall the program after getting an "elusive" crash, there will be 1 who will be motivated enough to help us debug it.
> if you brush it off and say it works on your machine
If I do that, and if the crash is real, I'll keep getting more and more reports on it from different people. So eventually it WILL get fixed. But in any case, we never "brush off" bugs without trying to get at least some useful info from the user.
> The thing that annoys me about both Inkscape and the Gimp is that there are no floating palettes.
Unlike Gimp, Inkscape has just a few rarely used modal boxes (such as "Add a layer"). EVERYTHING else is either in floating dialogs (that can stay open as long as you need them) or in the toolbars in the document window.
> I see now that postscript and .eps support has been enhanced, hopefully the transparency/gradient stuff won't bork the output too much now.
Gradients in PS/EPS export work now (with some limitations, see Release Notes). But transparency does not work simply because PS has no such thing, and "emulating" it is an enormous hassle.
> all the output is always antialiased... any ideas?
That's one of the problems with our renderer currently. It only has the AA mode. Hopefully this will be fixed when Inkscape is ported to use Cairo.
> .35 used to not drag horizontally for some reason
:) The 0.35 is truly *prehistoric*.
Wow, what a jump you are making
That's why we ship with gdb.exe! Why don't you just make a shortcut to always run it from GDB and send us the backtrace when it crashes.
Please submit your crash report:
http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php
with as much details as possible, ideally with a backtrace.
> keyset that Adobe and Macromedia apps use?
Because there are many other nice apps that we borrow from. One is Xara X. Another is (yeah) Gimp and other Gnome apps. We can't be a monkey of a single app, and sometimes we can't be a monkey of anyone because we do some original stuff too.
> holding space should enable the panning tool
We don't have a panning tool because we have lots of other ways to scroll. The best of them are middle-drag and ctrl+arrows. Try them, you may like them better when you get used to them.
> holding alt (not shift) should make the zoom tool zoom out rather than in.
That one makese sense - alt+click is currently unused in zoom tool, so i think I'll enable it to zoom out _in addition_ to shift+click.
> Also, double-clicking on the zoom tool should revert to "standard" zoom--not open the preferences panel.
Just press '1' to get 100% zoom. And it would be horribly inconsistent to make doubleclick work different on zoom tool than on other tools.
To summarize, we welcome any feedback, and very often we honor it, but also quite often people just want us to imitate exactly their favorite app without realizing that (1) there are other vector apps which are just as worthy of imitation, (2) Inkscape's way of doing it may be actually better, or (3) we can't do that because that would break consistency of Inkscape behavior in unpleasant ways.
Why don't you submit a bug for that, and don't forget to attach one of the files that crash it.
This FAQ is somewhat obsolete. It's not a replacement for commercialware in ALL situations, that's true. But it's not as far from it as it used to be just a few releases back.
Come On. If you get a crash, REPORT IT! Right here: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=604306&group_ id=93438&func=browse
And please note that we never have more than a few confirmed reproducible crash bugs in the tracker. (Currently just 2 I believe, and not fully reproducible at that.) We simply don't tolerate them. We, you know, fix them. Quickly and mercilessly. (Other types of bugs get fixed too, so don't worry).
> ... during a time of war.
I love this last bit. We're at war!!! Hey, doesn't that justify all the atrocities and stupidities of this administration? You bet it does!
We're at war, vote Bush. Vote Bush, get war. A perfect vicious circle. To survive a war, you need a "tough" (as opposed to smart, honest, educated etc.) president. And once you get a tough president, you get war. As simple as that.
"Things are used -- they're traded on the market -- and the desire to profit from doing so is the best guarantor of all that property owners will encourage free speech. It's just good business." What a stupid idea. 1. People are not governed by profit motive alone. Quite often, they are willing to lose some profit in order to promote their agenda. So if you depend on the "good business" argument for free speech protection, you may end up with rich people successfully silencing what they don't want to hear (and don't want others to hear) _even_ if this makes them suffer financially. 2. Even without 1, the speech which needs protection the most is often the least financially sustainable. Most people are not happy to listen to troubling news and analysis which shows how rotten their world is, not to mention paying for that. And those who do have such news and analysis to offer often do not have resources to buy airtime. So what you get at the end is a world totally controlled by those with deep pockets and pretty similar political agendas. It's basically the same as now, to be sure, but now at least you have some chance to affect that through democratic mechanisms, government channels (yes!) and public property. What this guy is selling is is just a legalization of the worst aspects of the current system and the removal the last checks that limit it today.