Every Inkscape Problem (According to Affinity Users) 

Inkscape is king of SVG. Has been for years.

That was a great video! It's rare seeing a FOSS dev having an open conversation with its community. Genuinely thank you all for your hard work put into Inkscape, it's already a great piece of software that can be a lot better. The only thing I'd like to suggest is that even though you haven't been a Windows user in 20 years (which I respect, I'm also a Linux user), keeping an eye on modern app design trends and technologies from the other side every now and then is a good idea, in order to refresh your knowledge database and gain a new perspective on how to work with a piece of software, that was first launched 20 years ago, in 2024. Feedback in the form of a RU-vid comment does not translate very well, I feel like. Anyway, thanks again for all your hard work!

Martin - not sure if you are aware of this but Autodesk Fusion 360 will import Inkscape documents directly. No SVG export needed. Not only that - but Fusion will recognize Inkscape spiral, circle, star/polygon objects without having to convert the object to path. This is the main reason I stick to an open source SVG vector editor. You simply cannot have this same capability with AD, AI or Corel.

Like I have said many times my friend. I have had the Adobe package which is the industry standard but I still came back to Inkscape. Inkscape has a few flaws, that's true but I love the application. As for the people who hated for the sake of it, I have heard this very often due to Inkscape being my primary app. I am a fan of constructive criticism but for people to hate with no reason behind it - they are the people not worth your time imo. I think you are all doing a fantastic job & it can only get better. Keep up the great work

It take a certain kind of courage to dig into RU-vid comments in this depth. Well done! Love the app, love your videos. Thanks for all your work!

You did a great job, as did everyone involved in Inkscape. I've been completely using Linux for 4 years now. Inkscape has been in use for a long time, but I haven't fully studied it yet, and I use only basic tools. I am glad that I am somehow participating in the Inkscape project, since I (Denis Kuznetsky) am participating in the screen competition. I am pleased that people like you give us the opportunity to create, since not everyone can afford to purchase paid programs. I wish you all the best and positivity!

Thank you for a great video. Personally I think that a great UI with good UX is very underrated. Just look at how Blender took off after they revamped their UI. I also didn’t understand Blender until the UI became more friendly. It’s the first impression and barrier that people encounter.

I think you're giving a little too much credit to the trolls going "inkscape bad" or "inkscape website ugly". The website looks GREAT and is perfectly functional.

I'm proud to have contributed to the hat compliment stats.

Full time Ink user. From an artist perspective Inkscape can look and feel great if you choose the right default UI settings. The easiest win for first impressions is to doa community vote on the default look and feel of Inkscape, which proved successful in the case of blender when it hit 2.8.

Great work Martin, exposing Inkscape to a new audience and then taking the feedback to improve the software is an important task that needs to be done regularly. Inkscape on mobile devices would be amazing, but I get why it can't be done the normal way unfortunately, maybe a side project of the organization that captures the spirit of Inkscape, sharing the same code foundation, with the appropriate technologies and licensing. It can have a commercial license to support further development as well.

as one of those commenters I found this very interesting. I didn’t realise my experience as a windows user might be different

Inkscape is my primary vector editor since many years, just love it. Thank you for your work Martin :)

About 8 years ago, I switched back to using Windows as my daily use machine due to various reasons, and I was about to comment on the ugly Windows interface that was mentioned, but what I didn't realise was that I was using such an old version! I had installed 0.48 (at the time, 0.92 was the stable release), due to some changes in the 0.9x release that caused my files at the time to not render properly. Not a big deal at the time, as I was only 1 version out of date. However in the intervening years, it never prompted me about a new version, so I completely forgot about it. Windows doesn't get the benefit of distro-provided application updates like Linux does, so in-app notifications are sometimes all we get. You might find that people complaining about UI/UX are in a similar boat. Installing the latest stable release is night and day (literally... the old version didn't even have an Interface Theme option, nevermind dark mode!). Or they just haven't tried it in a few years, and are basing their feedback from memory.

Really interesting to see everyone's ideas. Interestingly, the thing I would charge in Inkscape wasn't mentioned. If you have Chrome installed Noto fonts can make the Inkscape font drop-down so long it's almost unusable, so I would love something to exclude fonts from the list.

Thanks DoctorMo for the followup video and taking the time to read the comments. 500 comments is a lot to go through! Nuuuu can't scroll while menus are open. Oh well. I'll send a strongly worded email to the GTK team.

And brilliant work as usual Martin 🙂🙏

Thank you for creating Inkscape! ❤ For funding, maybe create a funding goal polling? Like for example: Please choose feature you would like to have ? - Symmetry - UI Revamp Then if people vote for Symmetry "If you want Symmetry Feature, we need x amount of money to hire this person to work on Symmetry while we are focusing working on main development" Please help us achieve this goal, when the funding goal is achieved the symmetry will be worked and finished by x months? Basically it's like crowfunding? So people are likely to donate 😊 I saw some people complaining "I don't want to donate since I don't know what feature they will working on, I will donate if they develop 'x' though" So there's funding for main development (where everyone trust inkscape to improve or create new stuff) and specific feature request (where everyone who is impatient about specific feature, just want to pay then have that feature as soon as possible). I hope it makes sense, I'm bad at explaining.

Superb work Martin! Normally your video show your commitment, but this one is a masterpiece!

Great video, Martin! It's interesting to see Inkscape from that perspective. And the "other counts" section was quite amusing 😆

I'd gladly contribute to any efforts for an asset library, especially when I have more time and resources to dedicate to it. I only recently discovered the feature to import icons after you suggested to contribute the Humanality Project. This is one area where we could massively benefit. Also, I'd be happy to pitch in on Website design. If I could be sponsored to do that work (due to current limitations) then I could do that as a dedicated "thing" 🙏🏾

Thanks for the details. It’s getting us (users) more involved into the project by seeing what others like or complain.

I started to create with Inkscape for fun (now almost 2 months). My main difficulties comes from my background as a CAD user (NX, SW, Inventor, etc). With Inkscape it is a different mindset. For me it is difficult for example to create arrays of features (comparing to CAD), missing a "point" feature, missing option to create nodes at a specific user defined locations on a curve, or creating a tangent curve to another curve, snapping a curve tangent to another curve. Many things seems to me much easier in CAD. Another funny thing that I realized lately was the fact that a gradient color was not bounded to a feature but is applied to all the workspace (meaning that when you move the feature, say a circle) the gradient stayed in its location therefore creating weird things.

I would absolutely ❤️LOVE❤️ an Android version 🤩

Martin, great video 👍 I am Inkscape user for the last 4 years and I’m very very fan! I even started a RU-vid channel last year teaching people what I learnt in Inkscape over years, to help crafters to create SVG files to use with their cutting machine like cricut and Silhouette there are only 3 minor issues I experience with Inkscape which I’ll write in a separate comment (but I’ll update my Inkscape to 1.3.2 first to see if any of those issues fixed before I comment - I currently have 1.3) It was a bit surprising for me that you didn’t use windows for 20 yrs! I believe you are Linux user. Just wondering why do you prefer Linux over windows? Thanks Mariam

Congratulations and thank you, keep doing a great job as you have been doing, never or anything, will please everyone, no matter how hard you try to do it!! Thank you and looking forward to news

I would like to see the "Tools / Bounding box to use: Visual | Geometric" as a toggle-button on the toolbar. I often need to change it and currently I have to open preferences (at least this has a convenient toolbar button), go to the section if not already there, change it, and later do the same to revert the setting.

I love Inkscape but two fairly major problems I come across when designing vector logos is when the division boolean tool and shapebuilder tool cut apart circles, an innumerable amount of nodes are created along the paths. Also, when some fonts are converted to paths, the same thing happens. Really appreciate all the work you put in, Martin :)

Great video, thanks for posting. I started to use InkScape because of it being primarily a SVG editor/creator. I use Mac, and yes, every now and again it does crash, but nowt to shout about really. There is, for me, one annoying thing and that comes down to the “saving” section: I always save a SVG copy and then a PDF copy, but then, when I come to “close” down the program, even without changing anything, it ask to be saved again and it wants to save in the “last” file format (ie PDF). Could there be a way that whenever it asks to save, it saves by default in the SVG format. Please keep up the fantastic work you’re doing and thanks.

Nice to see the integration into an open source "suite" remark. Also: combo of inkscape with blender: been there, done that. Why? Trace and cleanup of bad quality logo - turn into 3d animation;

not sure if it's cool to write feature requests here, but it's been a long time i wanted to ask for Adobe Animate's pencil feature on InkScape. currently, the closest i have to it is the marker tool with the circle point setting and and its stabilization feature. it works alright aside from the bubbles forming whenever there's a hairpin turn during a stroke. but the problem for me is that each stroke will always add a new separate shape into the canvas, which is flexible when working with individual strokes, but quickly becomes a hassle when painting or sculpting shapes, both in performance (too much geometry) as well as usability (i have to manually boolean merge each time i wanna keep everything in one piece, and it's more annoying when i am working with at least one additional color mixed into it). what i wanted to ask for to solve this issue would be to have a marker option or new pencil tool that draws and merges all strokes and shapes of the same color into a single shape, and trimming or splitting different color shapes as needed instead of overlapping. this is much of the same way Adobe Animate works, where it also works with vector-based drawing. in any case, it was nice to watch this :3

Really nice video, I think I can add more adaptive side bar, it's stubborn to not resize down when there's really "unused white space" visually, I have to usually fight with f12 regularly 😅

Development is not free, so for free open source software you could do small ongoing crowdfunding for features. Add popular things to the table for future releases if there are funds for it.

Hooray spreadsheets

I feel like changing the default palette would do wonders for first impressions. I feel like it has way too many colors for just jumping in and getting work done, and the colors it does have look like they were chosen for math reasons rather than human color perception. In other words fewer colors per gradient and more hue shifting with lightness. Something more like Calm48 by Durk on the Lospec palette list might be nice. Thoughts?

i wish you add brushes like in affinity and illustrator. I am affinity v2 user and using inkscape for trace bitmap to vector

Rather informative video, and a lot of actionable stuff here

I use all Adobe, Affinity and Inkscape. And Inkscape works like charm. Adobe Illustrator is always crashing and Affinity Designer is VERY similar to Inkscape.

lol hard at the end! Thank you!

The important thing while borrowing the upsides of Affinity not to transfer its quirks into the Inkscape 😊. Sometimes completely neglecting other software and developing features from the ground has its benefits as happy accidents and breakthrough features are more likely to be invented this way, I believe. That being said, more Xara features please! 😅

It's the little things that we do a million times a day that become problematic when uncalibrated. The refinement is in the UI workflow more that the overall features. Started my career many years ago as a patent drafter using Adobe Illustrator and developed a certain muscle memory on production level speed vector drawing, that now every vector software I touch has to meet a certain criteria of micro-movements. Particularly, the PEN tool. It has to be so well designed for real time adjustment of the current handle AND it's node that one should never need to exit to re-adjust anything. Doing anything twice is show-stopper. With inkscape the most basic function of pressing the spacebar in the middle of adjusting a handle-bar to move the handlebar's control point is missing. (that's one moment where pressing space is ok to pan the node instead of the page. Alt to kink, space to pan-node).

The public face should be designed to gain users. It's fine to have links to the blog, forum, etc on top, but emphasize marketing the project to new users. If you want to include the blog posts put it at the bottom of the page, after a gallery showing off the tool and what it can do.

All I want is the ability to use the envolope/perspective path effect on a picture, for mockups.

It is very easy to create a mess if you don't know how to work. It is difficult to handle features when there are many and one on top of other. Especially (it seems to me) that this is because when an object is selected you see the bounding rectangle (dashed) and not the "real" boundary. For example when you select a "star" you will see a dashed rectangle around the star (bounding rectangle) and not the boundary of the star.

On Serif's forum there are threads about attempts at getting Serif to support Linux or to get it working through Wine or Proton but Serif is pretty much uninterested in such support because of the Spartan approach they have to everything. The hope out there for Linux users is that Inkscape can be a complete replacement for Affinity Designer so that users don't have to run a copy of Windows just for Affinity Designer. So again the vector brush is something that would help artist complete convert to Linux.

I would be interested to have a better understanding of the constraints/restrictions that are preventing Inkscape from being available on iPad. You seemed to hint it was a legal reason, but I know there have been other open source applications made available for iOS. Then you also seemed to hint at a technical thing being a website or something, but obviously Affinity and other vector graphics programs on iOS. I don't doubt you're correct, just curious to understand a bit more of the detail.

Overall, Inkscape is a competent program, and you cannot complain about the price!

Interesting inside. Just you also think about do similar with CorelDraw ? Maybe interesting 🤔

We tired a few programs but have been experimenting collaborating with using Vectornator ( which shortly later became Curve) for the iPad. We can just doodle ideas and sort out the better ones while sitting on the couch together, as well as start sorting svg curves into somewhat ok color layers or separate line or fill before sharing to desktop Inkscape and InkStitch for processing to Brother embroidery files. They have a reasonable amount of cc0 templates to start from as well. It’s a bit of a work in progress but offers an alternate work flow rather than just sitting at the desktop. Haven’t tried or looked into Affinity, but will.

lol the last things were funny and typical

The audio seems out-of-sync at the start of the video.

Missing Help option with F1 (As many software).

Inkscape is my choice.

"I haven't been using Windows in 20 years" You and most of the rest of developers. That is a problem. I use both system families, because i must, and then when switching it would be really unwieldy to be locked more into one of the systems than necessary. I haven't been using Inkscape recently (simply haven't had any vector editing tasks) but when i did use it years ago i was noticing that it's... well it's sort of slow on Linux, if you've used Xara everything else is slow, but Inkscape on Linux was the sort of normal and expected kind of slow, though a little unpleasant in how it would always update the top edge of the screen while you're doing something and not what you're manipulating. But it was GLACIAL on Windows. The redraw and screen update. What's up with that, there's no hard reason it has to be that much slower on Windows right? And has it gotten better? I suppose it might have... so difficult to tell given how much of a monster my CPU is today compared to back then. The logo and other art for my old project, actually done by me in Inkscape back in the day now puh 14 years ago or so, so the logo is several hundred translucent shapes on top of each other, just pushing and pulling the hues and little highlights all over the place, and Xara does that with ease, Inkscape on Linux was a bit of a torture, and Inkscape on Windows was just horrendous. Fundamentally, open source software barely working on Windows is to me almost just as bad as proprietary software barely working on Linux, both of these types of problems can make the software untenable.

Yeah inkscape works flawlessly on Linux and looks great, and is very fast and stable. On Windows 11 it's okay, it's no slouch either but a bit more buggy and error prone. However this is due to the fact of the windows operating system itself being antiquated and behind the times and buggy itself. .net ain't great

• No additive blending • Variable line thickness is a bloaty, hard to control path effect instead of normal property of all lines Those are actual problems that have finally caused me to drop Inkscape for Affinity after years of use. I would also love to be able to define palette entries and then use those as colors, with all objects referencing them changing when the color is changed. That's super useful. Affinity does it badly, but Inkscape does it not at all. But I need additive blending and line width, I can fake color palettes Inkscape OR Affinity.

The UI in Inkscape is better than affinity. Much better.

Just had a look at the website, I like design but then again I don't like modern web design.

So they don't use the software cause the website looks bad? 😂 The website looks and functions flawlessly. I am a Corel power user (professional) and Inkscape is more stable even on Windows. But why such a long delay for CMYK support. I understand it's an open source project, but this is the most important thing a professional needs. BTW thanx for this amazing tool.

Please desktop program developers see what happens in other operating systems.

I'm so lost about why Inkscape refuses to show the outline of objects and instead always throws up a bounding box with resize handles pretty much regardless of which tool you use... and even if you use the node tool, you get nodes but no outline! I don't care about the bounding box most of the time, I just want to see the shape outlines (especially if its buried under a thick stroke).

Don't know what happened with inkscape, i couldn't export, had to reinstall the software again, the a lot of problems with template and layers. Also there are two UI. Its working worse than ever

Can u make toggle on and off layer grouping button?

I like inkscape but after years they don t support cymk for printing work. But inkscape support Linux that is my prefer

Hi, so you know if there were an inskscape for android ( not a waterdown version, but just like Affinity is on te Ipad) I would toss my Ipad in an heartbeat. Affinity designer is the only reason i bought my Ipad mini, because I'm more an windows/android person and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Actually this comment can be used as a poll. Like this comment if you're like me.

Better UX design? 😅

I think whole heartedly. You should try and grow your development team. Why? Well alot of affinity users are aware of inkscape, and were happy to pay once for a version. I don't see that as a problem to help your team if you avoid subscription. Perhaps you'd get to a level where you'd go back to free Copy the stuff you like (not verbatim. I mean, like OHHH PEOPLE like this functionality of affinity or illustrator! Well let's try to make it for inkscape. Etc

Seriously, dude. Inkscape looks very nice. But then again, I think macos looks crap.

BTW: I think Inkscape needs a full UI reset like Blender which allowed Blender to really take off.

Well done, great analysis. I apologize for my unrelated rant about Gimp in the last video.