Inkscape is a horrible tool. I want to like it as it is free, open source, and cross platform. I use it in many of my workshops as it doesn’t force people to purchase tools. I really want to like it, I want to support FOSS
The more I use Inkscape, the more tutorials I go though. the more I grow to hate it. I dread opening that tool just to fight with it for a few hours to get what I want. In a lot of cases I would rather open paint, draw a bitmap and then convert it to a vector before bringing it in to Inkscape. its bad. You shouldn’t hate your tools.
The primary alternative is Adobe illustrator. Its the industry standard and its great with a huge community. It also costs $20 USD + Tax + exchange (closer to $28 CND) a MONTH! That’s too much and I won’t pay that much. My budget is closer to $100 CND total. If in the end there are no real alternatives I might have to break down and pay this price.
My question is what do you use (including Inkscape or illustrator)? Do you like it? Why do you like it?
Don’t feel like you have to compare it to inkscape or illustrator I am open to any tools.
I use Inkscape, and I haven’t run into any reasons to hate it … yet. My primary use is as a page layout tool for posters/postcards. (As in MS-Publisher, Pagemaker). I tried using Adobe Illustrator and I found the initial learning curve to be intimidating. Now that I’m more skilled with Inkscape, I’m starting to see the power in AI, but just like you … $20/month is not justifiable when I make 1-2 posters per year.
The better question is: What are you trying to make? That would give some direction other than “I am looking for a vector drawing tool”.
If you send me a sample of what you are trying to make in Inkscape, I’ll take a look to see if I know how to do it easily and I can help you out.
You can code direct to svg, it’s a super intuitive format, every closed
shape is just a many-sided polygon, etc, open up a figure in a text editor.
In all honesty I only had to do that once in an act of desperation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB80-nIZp3A; I get frequently frustrated
with inkscape when wanting to do a quick job, but I feel sometimes it’s
more of a geometry playground than a simple drawing tool. If I get in the
sets-intersections-unions frame of mind things become smoother.
I, too, hate Inkscape, but unfortunately I haven’t found a cheap/free alternative. That being said, I’ve used it a fair bit as part of my export process, going from CAD software → DXF → SVG → laser cutter (maker labs). It’s very tedious and error-prone work. As much as I hate it, I’m happy to show people what I know, so that they can avoid much of the pain I went through.
The laser cutter at VHS uses DXF, and people have said that Inkscape doesn’t export DXF reliably. This is not something I’m familiar with yet.
One nice thing about Inkscape is that writing your own plugins is an option. I’ve considered it, but what I want done isn’t trivial (and hasn’t been done yet), so I haven’t gotten around to it. Primarily, I’d like a tool that removes overlapping lines so the laser cutter doesn’t make two passes. Secondarily, I’d like a 2D bin packing algorithm that allows you to specify holes in parts and preferred orientations.
Also, it’s probably worth stating what your use case is. I know it’s a clunky tool overall, but depending on what you want it to do, you might have different options.
Progress stopped last fall due to waning interest, but I could dig out my roadmap for support for various features.
Start with boxes, and start adding support for irregular shapes, object-with-objects, removing overlapping lines, etc.
edit:
That said, Inkscape can be very very fast for laser cutter design, once you get familiar with the hotkeys and align/distribution commands.
Yeah, rather than dealing with all the kinds of shapes, I would convert all objects to strokes, and then act on the segments of all strokes. But yeah, I’d do it, except it’s not worth a month of my time to do it well, and there’s no dollar incentive to compensate.
Now that OnShape exists, I’ll do all my laser cut sketching in that, and then export as DXF (and touch up in Inkscape if necessary). There are far too many gotchas in Inkscape for me to bother using it for accurate design anymore (but yes, it does work well for some things).
No. I’ve used it for conversions and things to move files between tools, but it’s not even stable enough software to be designing in. OnShape beats all the free options I’ve tried (FreeCAD, QCad, Sketchup) as long as you’re not needing a feature it doesn’t have yet. For example, they can’t import STL yet, so you might use FreeCAD to convert STL to STEP. I haven’t used 123D, so perhaps it’s also good, and OpenSCAD is its own thing; not really comparable.
I also dislike Inkscape. I have spent so many years in Illustrator that it’s hard to get over the clunkiness of Inkscape. But I won’t buy into Adobes new subscription model. For page layout type work, posters, brochures, etc, you could use Scribus. Since buying Rhino3D, I find I turn to that a lot for vector stuff. Its line tools are amazing. It’s not cheap but it’s yours forever - no silly subscription. (I tried to get a donated copy for the VHS but they didn’t bite).
I’ve been using Affinity Designer as an Illustrator replacement recently. Crazy powerful and easy to use; far, far more intuitive and usable than Illustrator imo, and a lot cheaper ($58 US). It’s missing a few features, but none that I care about - and is very rapidly getting those added yet also has numerous great features that Illustrator does not (and that I do actually use).
Mac only, because that’s where all the viable Adobe replacements are.
Mostly laser cut designs.
Currently its the pocket universe panels
Photos of the results can be found in this thread.
The current annoying thing I am dealing with is selecting 100s of small object on top of a larger object. Using the Path=>Difference tool. The problem is that you cant do a difference on a series of objects. It seems you have to do it one by one.
I have done this more then a few times !
I also have used Java Script and http://raphaeljs.com/ to generate SVGs files.
I learned all the quick keys (first thing I do when start using a new tool), and I am fast with it. But I hate the experience. I have had to learn so many tricks to get around its gotchas/clumsiness.
I have also heard good things about Rhino3D too. I might have to give it a another look.
That looks amazing and what I am looking for. I am not a MAC user and probably never will be.
I might be able to help with this specific problem. If you select all your small shapes and use the ‘Combine’ command (control K, or under the ‘Path’ menu) you can the select your large shape and your combined set and use the difference tool en mass as it were (assuming your shapes are in the right layer order). I don’t know if there are some (edge?) cases where this won’t work but I just tried it with 4 arbitraty rectangles. I hope this solves your current problem.
For the last few days I have been using Java-script to create and render the SVG files manually. I have been using a variety of different java-script libraries but I found this one to be pretty good. http://paperjs.org/ .
Ever since we stopped using Coreldraw, I’ve been having lots of trouble with the DXF files. I export them directly from Illustrator. It seems like luck whether or not they work. Half the time no problems, the other times the Lasercad crashes when I click on them to import. Has anyone experienced this problem?
Try DraftSight on the laser cutter computer. It was installed as a possible
alternative to Corel Draw, because it’s from a large company that SHOULD
have their shit figured out in terms of DXF export.
That’s really useful, and possibly makes openSCAD unnecessary for me going forward.