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Open Source Graphics Software Technology

Inkscape Version 0.91 Released 134

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
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.
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Inkscape Version 0.91 Released More

Inkscape Version 0.91 Released

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  • Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:57PM (#48948837)

    Oh wait, it's free? Clever Inkscape, very clever.

    • Yep... Inkscape is the answer to the open source bitmap editor GIMP... mix the two programs and you have the complete feature list of Photoshop!

      • Re:Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @06:43PM (#48949067)

        Actually Inkscape is more of a competitor to Adobe Illustrator than Adobe Photoshop.

      • Re:Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @07:00PM (#48949165)

        The GIMP *wishes*.

        Inkscape is one of those 'Best of Breed' open source apps where it's pretty much all you need to do the task you're downloading it for. It beats the ever-living SNOT out of Illustrator on simplicity, ease-of-use, and, of course, price. You're not locked into Adobe's new SasS model or a huge license fee, yet can create great looking vector art with fantastic compatibility.

        Compare to, say, PuTTY, or VLC Media Player. They do a single job, and they do it REALLY freakin' well.

        GIMP does not. GIMP's UI is STILL a cluster@#$@ after years and years of development and user feedback, and the last time I checked, it still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.

        Frankly, if you're working on Windows, you are far more behooved to use Paint.Net than you are The GIMP.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HJED ( 1304957 )
          I personally find Inkscape has a lot of missing features compared to illustrator (Although I do use it because I don't have an illustrator licence at home).

        • Software patents (Score:4, Insightful)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday January 31, 2015 @10:15PM (#48949879) Homepage Journal

          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.

          • A lot of countries don't recognize software patents. if this is what was really holding them back, they would release a plugin and tell you not to use it if it was illegal in your country, and of course everyone would use it anyway.

        • I used paint.net for years to play around with game art and it's great. But when I bought a wacom it came with PhotoShop elements which does a lot more. It's not that expensive on its own and you don't need to buy into a subscription. There are plenty of more expensive hobbies. If you're doing these things for a living though I think it's always best to get the best tools. If I made my living in digital art I would probably have an adobe subscription.

        • I tried to like The GImp, it is an amazing app, no doubt about that, but I agree, the UI is.. awkward.

          What ever happened to GimpShop?
          http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]

          I'll admit part of my issue with The Gimp is the long history of using Photoshop 5,6,CS and having to try adapt to their UI - just not happening.

          Paint.net for Windows is very cool though still too feature limited but it has potential, very slim, fast, even follows the Windows colour scheme (yay!) - I hope it eventually has most of Photoshop CS's feature

          • What ever happened to GimpShop?
            http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]

            Thanks for reminding me that this existed. Wish my distro had a package for it. Not that hard to build from source, but a bit tricky to replace the default version. Maybe this time I'll try installing it in my ~/bin and leaving the version installed by my distro alone.

            • I just had a look for myself now to see if it was still active, this is a little worrying: http://www.gimpshop.com/uninst... [gimpshop.com]

              Says the advertising stuff can be disabled though but I'm always suspicious.

              Download Admin

              The installation of gimpshop is managed by DownloadAdminâ. For more information on how DownloadAdmin works, please go HERE.

              Ech, whatever happened to a regular installer?

              • I use gcc and make. What sort of installer do you prefer?

                • copy con setup.exe ? :)

                • Ok, I've had a slightly longer look, and (*cough* slightly customised version of *cough* the GPL notwithstanding) I see no way to obtain the GimpShop sources. There's a .deb but it's version 2.2.11, whereas the Windows version is at 2.8 (like GIMP). The source download link just points you to ftp.gimp.org

                  So, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, GimpShop is dead. Ah well, too bad.

                  • Re: (Score:1)

                    by Anonymous Coward

                    Sources? My understanding was that Gimpshop didn't actually change the sources, but instead hacked the changed the settings (gimprc) and string files (.po).
                    The creator of Gimpshop seems to have given up after having difficulties with other groups passing off their bundles as the official Gimpshop.

                    GimPhoto seems to be aiming to fill the same niche as Gimpshop. The developer of gimphoto wasn't using a revision control system which doesn't inspire confidence.

                  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                    by Anonymous Coward

                    The "GimpShop.com" website is not the official website of the project. According to Wikipedia, developer Scott Moschella doesn't run it.

                    "Not more than a few days after the OS X version was released and spread virally, someone who isn't me bought "Gimpshop.com", put up a site with hot-links to the files on my site and began advertising - LOTS of advertising. Soon, there were donate buttons, my name in the site's title and much more - making it look like my website.

                    I asked that the owner stop hot-linking my f

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          For one domain of Photoshop/GIMP (digital painting), Krita outshines both, and mypaint works as a great lightweight, focused sketching program.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No torrents [thepiratebay.se] of it yet.

    • Tch, I torrent all my open source apps from TPB to give me that thrill free software lacks!

      I just wish they came with cool .nfo files with hot ASCII babes and cool x86 assembler coded intro.exe's!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Oh wait, it's free? Clever Inkscape, very clever.

      You can actually pirate FOSS. Just not in the usual way. Remember, piracy is really copyright infringement, and to infringe copyright means to reject the FOSS license (which puts the code under default All Rights Reserved copyright), then violate that.

      In other words, if it's GPL, simply distribute binaries without source code. Or make a change to it, rebuild and then ship the binaries to that. You're technically going against the license, and the license gran

  • Port it to Qt, please! GTK+ is awful! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 [wikimedia.org] to this hideous, unusable UI [wikimedia.org].

    The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter ru

    • The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish.

      There's nothing polite about derogatory hyperbole. The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all. In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms. I don't think that can reasonably be described as "utter rubbish".

      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.

      Developing GTK+ apps on OSX is not as easy as it should be, but in my experience, at least, it's not all that difficult, eith

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Have you ever even tried to use Inkscape or GIMP on Windows or OS X? You're absolutely wrong when you say "GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms". Running Gtk+ apps on either platform is an awful experience. I'm not even joking when I say that Java apps using AWT and written back in 1997 still give a better cross platform experience than Gtk+ does today. At least those programs will start. I experienced the same problem as the GP with Inksc

      • Re:Port it to Qt, please! GTK+ is awful! (Score:4)

        by bmo ( 77928 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @08:11PM (#48949447)

        The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.

        He wasn't comparing GTK+ to single-platform frameworks. He was comparing GTK+ to Qt. He said that Qt is a far better framework if you want cross platform, and he's right. And Qt is hardly just a "windows or OSX" framework. Qt really wipes the floor with GTK+ for cross-platform /especially/ if you want an application to run on Windows, OSX, Linux, Sailfish, Embedded Windows, Windows RT, Android, and Blackberry, QNX, and VxWorks.

        --
        BMO

      • he portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.

        What exactly do either of those have to do with a discussion of Qt vs GTK+?

        In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms.

        I've use GTK+ apps on both Windows and OS X and they do not work "quite well". Many OS X GTK+ apps still require pulling in X11 which adds extra hassle and more dependencies whereas Qt does not have that issue (even if Qt apps still don't look completely native on OS X).

        • Well another post suggests that Gimp *no longer* has an X11 requirement. So perhaps it's the skill and dedication of the porter not to bring in a kitchen sink of dependencies.

          I've used several Gtk+ applications on Windows XP such as Geany, Pidgin and GIMP. All integrate more than adequately without issue, save preferring a weird file dialog instead of the Windows native one.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bmo ( 77928 )

            >weird file dialog

            It's not "weird." It's standard GTK+. It's the GTK+ file dialog. If I were to pick a single reason to never use GTK+ it would be the file dialog which represents /everything/ that is wrong with GTK+, especially since absolutely nobody in the GTK+ community wants to fix it. It's been that way for years and years, and people who point out that it sucks get told to fuck off.

            --
            BMO

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        MacOS X and Windows are both second-class citizens. They work poorly and inconsistently, and are not well-maintained ports. You can't build a Windows or MacOS X version of a GTK+ application and expect it to work properly. With Qt, you can. Nowadays with GTK 3.x, even non-Linux and non-GNOME are no longer catered for properly. This isn't new. Windows support was mediocre back in 2004 and it's still mediocre today. MacOS X is arguably worse. Case in point: copy-paste was broken in Inkscape the last f

        • Thanks for that informative comment. I haven't had such terrible luck running GTK+ applications cross-platform, but you (and others) have clearly had some very bad experiences. And I readily admit that getting GTK+ to work on OSX is a pain. It really is too bad that the support isn't better. There are some good ideas in the GTK+ toolkit, and Cairo is nice for graphics work, but I agree -- developers ultimately want something that "just works".

    • 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.

      I've been using it on OS X for several years - it's clearly not a native OS X app, but works just fine. And for me personally, the new version is really excellent since I have a lot of old Corel Draw/WMF (yuck) files floating around.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )

      I'm just a designer, and I've never done any C++ programming,

      You don't particularly need to know C++

      Qt has bindings for even Lua if you want.

      --
      BMO

  • Underrated Inkscape tool: Vectorizing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) Works for Slashdot on Saturday January 31, 2015 @06:25PM (#48948985) Journal

    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.

  • 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.

  • Inkscape plays nicely with Inkcut - vinyl cutting (Score:5, Informative)

    by chaosdivine69 ( 1456649 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @06:44PM (#48949083)
    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... [sourceforge.net] 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by featurelesscube ( 1107925 )
      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/ [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... [goinkscape.com] 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 rea

  • Video demoing the new features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bryce ( 1842 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @07:02PM (#48949181) Homepage
    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/... [libregraphicsworld.org]

  • popular libraries are "standards" now? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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.

  • Windows Users - Performance Tweak (Score:5, Informative)

    by ZeroNullVoid ( 886675 ) on Saturday January 31, 2015 @08:30PM (#48949517)

    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... [launchpad.net]

    This may also apply to some versions of The G.I.M.P.

  • 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?

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by osu-neko ( 2604 )
      Huh. The glitchy desktop is the thing I hate most about Windows. I need Windows for some of the software I need to run under it, but gods I wish I could replace the buggy platform I'm running them on with one of the stable, spiffy desktops I use when I boot into Linux (and still have them run well; sorry WINE).

  • Inkscape is awesome... but... (Score:3)

    by Mystery00 ( 1100379 ) on Sunday February 01, 2015 @02:56AM (#48950465)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by MSG ( 12810 )

      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.

      What the fuck is it with design people acting like their profession is the only one there is?

      There's a whole world of professional work to be done for design on the web, in mobile apps, etc that doesn't need CMYK.

      • The design profession normally includes printing, those brand colours and logo on your website or mobile app still need to be printed at some point.

    • Who the hell prints in 2015?

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