Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS

Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development. Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux. The native format of …

[Roger Greenwood]

"starting at £19"

£19.97 per month (annual plan) is not a trivial amount for hobbyists/amateurs. On the upside if you pay the whole year in advance you get a £1.22 discount. Inkscape does look attractive all of a sudden.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: "starting at £19"

Subscriptions are more for businesses than home users. Even if I pay money for an application I strongly prefer the traditional purchase model. I can upgrade as I need to/want to and I am not getting nickeled and dimed to death.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: "starting at £19"

True, but there are plenty of alternatives for bitmap or vector work for around £ 30 as a one off payment. Personally, I've been using Photoline for years as a Photoshop replacement. For anybody working professionally with tools the monthly cost won't really factor (probably less than they spend on their mobile phone) and they like some of the services they get such as online preview. Doesn't work for me but it obviously for some.

Open source desktop software will only ever "succeed" (displace paid incumbents) if it focuses on fit and finish: I still prefer OpenOffice over LibreOffice because of this.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: "starting at £19"

Adobe's target audience has been companies that do image manipulation not the home/hobbyist. A market that has to convince a purchasing agent to buy not necessarily the person using the software.

Open source, too succeed, just needs to have a viable funding model (even if all the time and money is donated) that fits the scale of the project. Open source by existing creates pressure on the excessively greedy scum like Adobe and Slurp to watch what they do. A noisy few percent of the market not supporting the greedy scums' wares is a problem as there is an alternative to peruse. If the greedy scum get to nasty there are alternatives to bolt to.

Joe Christina has series of YouTube videos on ditching Adobe for photographers and the like. He has a lengthy list of options for Adobe for all OSes. This was triggered by Adobe's scumminess and the frustration of many photographers with their shakedown tactics.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's wonderful to see some real competition out there, but it's still going to have the three main issues that GIMP et al have faced for years

1) Cost doesn't matter when it's the company, not you paying for it.

2) Inertia is a powerful thing in business. No matter how good product B is, if the company has been using product A for the last few years, they're not going to change unless they have absolutely no choice.

3) People are lazy and afraid of change. Unless a rival product works 100% exactly click-for-click like the current system, people won't want to use it. When trying to show somebody how easy a Linux desktop is to use, all it takes it for a button to be labelled "Accept" instead of "Okay" and they go scurrying back to their Windows system because "It's too complicated" and they "Don't understand". Yes, there will be a certain amount of learning involved, but they conveniently forget the hours and days and weeks of training it took to learn Photoshop/Illustrator/Windows. They didn't learn THAT in one afternoon either.

[Steve Crook]

Who cares about business?

This sort of stuff brings useful, powerful software to anyone that wants to use it regardless of the depth of their pocket. If children grow up using it they'll be advocates for it in their work environments and for most normal people, this, Libre Office, Thunderbird and others are good enough.

As for Adobe's subscription model, it's been a boon, have you seen the number of alternatives to Adobe product who're making a big thing out being non subscription alternatives to Adobe. It looks like they've generated an entirely new industry :-)

Some companies have at least seen sense and offer free, un-crippled, non commercial versions. But not Adobe. Yet.

[tip pc]

Re: Who cares about business?

Invest billions, become a verb land you expect it for free.

$}#%^]¥ millennials

Inkscape is free to you but developers gave their time and effort for you to get it free. Hopefully the credit they get for their work increases or justifies their salary which ups they price if the commercial software we buy.

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

Inkscape has it better than GIMP

Photoshop is far more embedded than Illustrator, though. It is much easier to convince people to try Inkscape. Photoshop is basically a verb.

[FatGerman]

Re: Inkscape has it better than GIMP

>> Photoshop is far more embedded than Illustrator, though. It is much easier to convince people to try Inkscape. Photoshop is basically a verb.

Also, GIMP is to Photoshop what a ZX Spectrum is to a Mac Pro. Inkscape is still no Illustrator but it's much closer to what serious users actually want, especially those who are getting fed up with renting their software.

[DrBed]

Re: Inkscape has it better than GIMP

>> Also, GIMP is to Photoshop what a ZX Spectrum is to a Mac Pro. Inkscape is still no Illustrator but it's much closer ...

BS. I am using Photoshop and GIMP for many years; last few years I don't even bother to install PS, it is just a bloated crapware. I do not need pseudo "3D features" or "smart objects" to apply what I need. Things like AnimStack or G'MIC just do not exist for PS, and plenty of other things (btw Liquid Rescale or Continuous Droste works much better then PS equivalent). Advanced scripting in GIMP is uncomparable to anything related to PS.

There is one thing only, related to CMYK colour space (e.g. colour separation for physical press): you have to use Krita for this (e.g. proper importing of CMYK .psd files). It is still doable with GIMP (CYAN add-on recommended), but too much complicated imho. CIE LAB is much more advanced colour space standard then CMYK, but this one is legacy standard. However, we're in 21st century, we depend on digital media and streaming to paperless society.

Speaking od Inkscape vs Illustrator, it has much more accurate tracer then other one. It is also very lightweight. I do not have problems switching from Linux to Windows and back, instantly, in Inkscape (GIMP, Krita, Scribus, MyPaint...), working with same project. I'll rather use Vectr, Affinity or Gravit Designer then Illustrator. CMYK support is also reduced a bit, but again, it is not a bottleneck.

[find users who cut cat tail]

> Inertia is a powerful thing. People are lazy and afraid of change.

That's why you need the everyone uses Inkscape, it's the default for vector drawing approach. You will get nowhere with the inferior replacement for program X mindset. And around here it's true that basically everyone uses Inkscape. Some creative types may do some weird things on their Macs. But it has always been so (and is not going to change), so they don't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

"2) Inertia is a powerful thing in business. No matter how good product B is, if the company has been using product A for the last few years, they're not going to change unless they have absolutely no choice.

3) People are lazy and afraid of change. Unless a rival product works 100% exactly click-for-click ..."

This is not true as I can point you to a great example. Some of the most set in their ways types are Graphic Designers. They must be given whatever high-res billion colour gamut matched monitors, ridiculous amounts of RAM that they'll never touch, and whatever platform they choose (Always a Mac of course). In many organisations they are they only ones outside of the executive suites that are granted these requests. They won't change from what they've always used.

And so it was in the early 2000s when Quark Xpress ruled the roost. It was used by every graphic designer, every print house, every teaching college. Any one who did anything with page layout used it. The issue with Quark is they'd properly rested on their laurels and although the core graphics engine ad colour matching was good things like unlimited undos did not exist. Either you save continuously or you had 4 undo levels to back track - and with graphic design trying something out and back tracking is done quite regularly. There were loads of other stupid things Quark did but there was no way anyone was going to ditch it. It was synonymous with Graphic Design.

But at the end of the millenium Adobe announced InDesign. It complemented their other widely used products, photoshop and illustrator. A few people started trying out trials of InDesign, and readily saw that a modern application that had used modern features and really useful ideas and design language was way ahead of Quark. Sure the core colour separations and some high-end graphic features weren't there, but then again hadn't the print shop just sorted that out most of the time anyway? Print shops started installing it as customers started enquiring about it. That allowed Graphic Designers to install it and send the files natively (or even as print-ready PDFs). Within a few short years Quark ha been replaced as the de-facto page layout program and InDesign went from strength to strength.

Then Adobe decided that everyone needed a subscription, became greedy pissed off a load of aspiring designers and it's now time that products like Inkscape and others became good enough to replace Adobe's crown and allow choice back in the industry again.

[eldakka]

1) Cost doesn't matter when it's the company, not you paying for it.

...

3) ... Unless a rival product works 100% exactly click-for-click like the current system, people won't want to use it. ...

Linus Tech Tips did a video on going to Adobe alternative products to save their $10k/year licensing for Adobe, only a week or 2 ago. I've linked to the summary at the end of the video.

But, basically, their editors reckon that the alternative products were 90% as good as the entire poroduction pipeline of Adobe products. And they have 7 editors, paying about $420k a year for them. 90% as good means $42k loss of productivity, which would have to be covered by either making less vidoes (reduced revenue) or hiring another editor, which means more cost - more wages, more equipment, more office space, etc.

Also, since it is a creative industry, collaborating with others, you can't expect other organisations you do business with to "... not everybody out there in the great wider world has the tech savy, or the willingness to deal with your snowflake file format ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

And they have 7 editors, paying about $420k a year for them. 90% as good means $42k loss of productivity

That's some very creative accounting they have there. I had no idea it was so easy to put an exact figure on quality of product. What exactly does "90% as good" mean? You didn't say "Only contains 90% of the features they need" which would be quantifiable. If it has the same tools and produces the same results, how can it be "90% as good"?

"... not everybody out there in the great wider world has the tech savy, or the willingness to deal with your snowflake file format ...

That doesn't really apply here, given that Inkscape uses SVG as the default format.

[Snake]

Re: AC and the LTT video

I was just going to refer to that video myself, AC, but if you watched it you would have learned the answers that you sought.

The 90% productivity is an estimate from the workers themselves, acquired after trying out the alternatives in order to produce the video itself. So this is highly experienced video producers using a product and stating that yes, it works for me, but I [feel] I can't do "about 10%" of what I need to do.

But the most important factor brought up by that video, the most relevant in regards to InkScape and what is constantly dismissed however much I try to remind them, is INTEGRATION.

When you [buy] the Adobe suite you get an integrated solution system, one that not only tries to retain a similar look and feel to one another but also dynamically links apps together, PLUS allows easy collaboration between designers in different locations.

In other words, if you are in InDesign, or Premier, you can quickly open, embed *and* call to re-edit Photoshop and Illustrator files directly from the Id/Pr UI. Once you switch a product away, you as a designer will have to go back into the originating non-Adobe app to do things like adjust layer visibility or any other adjustment, save, back into your designer, and relink to update.

We did that years ago, this is 2020. I don't want to have to go back to 2000.

Plus, if you want/need to share your work with a collaborator, you can sent the file directly, without any possible conversion loss, because pretty much every visual pro uses the Adobe suite. Share a .PSD or .AI file, heck even the .IDD or .PRPROJ file, and you can be pretty damn sure that your collaborator can open it. Because they are almost certainly using Adobe products themselves.

If you, or they, aren't using Adobe, then you'll have to convert. If you even can, in the cases of project files. And conversion can lose embedded things like UI settings, histories, maybe even objects. So you'll spend the time converting only to hope that your recipient will get everything you're hoping they will.

It's like the frustration of a Mac user sending a iWork text file to (any) office, filed with PC's, and expecting the world to be able to read it (yes, I've been a victim of this). Because they can, after all.

So the world sticks with Adobe...because all (the rest of the world) sticks with Adobe. Yes it's a Catch-22 but that's the life we've been forced to lead.

So what other developers do, unless it's so special that it carves its own niche (Premier vs. Resolve), just automatically has a mountain that they pretty much can't climb, at least in professional production circles.

[Korev]

Re: AC and the LTT video

But the most important factor brought up by that video, the most relevant in regards to InkScape and what is constantly dismissed however much I try to remind them, is INTEGRATION.

When you [buy] the Adobe suite you get an integrated solution system, one that not only tries to retain a similar look and feel to one another but also dynamically links apps together, PLUS allows easy collaboration between designers in different locations.

Last time I tried to edit a file in Lightroom "Classic" in Photoshop, LR dumped the file to a TIFF on my harddisc which PS then opened...

But what you say is mostly true though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: AC and the LTT video

Isn't "integration" just marketing BS for "vendor lock-in"?

[eldakka]

That doesn't really apply here, given that Inkscape uses SVG as the default format.

I'm not sure if you are the same AC as to the post I was replying to, but that post explicitly expanded the issue into a more general issue, making the issue greater than just "here's" Inkscape, i.e.

From OP (emphasis mine)

... but it's still going to have the three main issues that GIMP et al have faced for years ...

[Mike Moyle]

"1)...

2) Inertia is a powerful thing in business. No matter how good product B is, if the company has been using product A for the last few years, they're not going to change unless they have absolutely no choice.

3)..."

You forgot:

4) IT departments that have the responsibility for keeping the organization's system's up and running and take the blame when they're not, are loath to bring any new possible points of failure into the mix without either; A - exhaustive testing (for which they often don't have the time or other resources) or; B - The name and address on file of the ultimately-responsible source of the potential vulnerability that they can pass on to the legal beagles if things go flooey.

And, yes -- part of that is mired in the inertia noted above: "Better the devil you kniow...!", because, with Adobe, et.al., they know the hoops to jump through, etc.

But they ALSO know who to blame and -- if necessary -- who to sue if things go decidedly pear-shaped. With OSS like, say, Red Hat Linux, companies know that the service contract that they're paying for means that, if things SHOULD blow higher than up, there's probably going to be someone at the other end of the phone line when they call, and that there's someone that they can throw under the bus when they're called on by the higher-ups: "They've been doing this for N-years, they should have caught this bug LONG before now, we did our due diligence..."etc., etc. With all-volunteer, decentralized software, who do you point at, who do you go after to recoup the expenses of cleaning up the mess? There's no one and it's probably coming out of your already-stretched resources.

Trust me; as one of those that so many of the El Reg commentariat like to refer to as the "colored pencil crowd", I've run into this with trying to get, e.g., FOSS drafting software for a property manager in our department (because BESIDES being the graphic designer, I'm ALSO the department alpha-geek) who doesn't need the considerable licensing expense and learning curves of full-fat AutoCAD or ArcGIS to take an existing map and say "Put a driveway here. Put a hedge there." But IT won't install software if they can't absolutely nail down the provenance and chain of responsibility for it and, with a VERY limited number of IT grunts supporting the administrative systems of a city of 100,000+, they don't have the spare resources to vet and support a bunch of randomly mismatched software installations all across the system. So there WILL be limited customization allowed, and those WILL be from a VERY limited number of VERY well-established companies.

It used to be said that "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," because companies trusted that they knew who to get on the blower to get problems fixed in a timely manner. Today, that can probably be extended to "Nobody ever got fired for licensing [Microsoft | Adobe | Oracle | RedHat | ...]."

With all-volunteer FOSS...? Not so much. But don't get me wrong; I LIKE and use FOSS where possible at work and at home and I wish nothing but the best for the Inkscape developers. But if they're looking for big uptake from big commercial/government establishments of their all-volunteer-all-the-time software, they probably shouldn't hold their breaths.

[H in The Hague]

"I've run into this with trying to get, e.g., FOSS drafting software"

Which package did you select? (I'm looking for something for occasional light CAD work, so AutoCAD would be inappropriate.)

[Mike Moyle]

Since the person was a total CAD/graphics beginner and wasn't going to need 3D,I was recommending that we try her on LibreCAD.

[H in The Hague]

Thanks, duly downloaded, looking forward with playing with that next week. (I used to use Draftsight, but that's now gone subscription. It's reasonably priced but can't really justify it for two or three drawings per year.)

Have a good weekend and one of these -->

[katrinab]

ON the other hand, students will use it because it is free, then they start work, and deploy it there because they are familiar with it.

[Terry 6]

That assumes that said students aren't introduced to something provided for them through an institutional license, by a teacher who has themselves grown up with that bit of kit. FOSS software always has the disadvantages that; no one is marketing it, no one has much of a track record of using it (a bit Catch 22) and more often than not it's emulating something that's already established.

[davebarnes]

Another option

Affinity Designer seems to be a good Illustrator alternative.

The price is reasonable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe T's & C's

"to read the Terms of Use, you must agree to the Terms of Use"

https://boingboing.net/2020/05/05/adobe-to-read-the-terms-of-us.html

[karlkarl]

"It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS"

"Happy 1.0 to the fruits of volunteer labour"

Not bad, 16 years is obviously very fast in the software world. It has been 30+ years and Adobe has still failed to manage to port Illustrator to open platforms.

Volunteer labour is obviously more effective.

[Snake]

Open platforms

I think you are assuming that Adobe needs to spend the time, effort and money to port their products to open platforms.

From their balance sheets, their "fixed" support of Windows and Mac apparently does them just fine. Adobe seemingly prints money. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, worth in manhours, from the actual port, to testing and then on to technical support, in order acquire the relatively small market share where FOSS desktops inhabit, I guess doesn't make much business sense to them.

[Charlie Clark]

Adobe has still failed to manage to port Illustrator to open platforms.

To which particular desktop environment? And how much will people pay to use it? It's cheaper for all concerned for those who need it to install a Windows VM for the purpose.

[Muskiier]

Reminds me of CorelDRAW

Like CorelDRAW on the PC, still great software but AFAIK it still doesn't run on iOS.

[Lee D]

I keep trying to use Inkscape but my needs are limited and yet it's rarely capable of performing.

One of the things I want to do is import and break open PDF format maps (not complex, simplified maps that you'd find in a brochure or advert), delete unwanted elements, save the result as a SVG or similar. Or grab a scalable logo out of a PDF.

It's a job that I used to use Serif for. I'd never touch Adobe, far too expensive. But the affinity software just whinges after install and never runs, it's been like that since their beta period for me, and they have no solution (three different machines, three different versions of Windows).

It's perfectly capable but it's a "go away and have lunch" operation - it imports, you wait. It draws, you select (and it comes in as a huge group). You ungroup, go have a cup of tea. You return, select again, ungroup again, another cup of tea. Then it runs like a stunned sloth while you try to edit, delete and save.

I'm going to literally download it now and try:

- Windows, 64-bit, .EXE.

- Install (DON'T ADD TO MY SYSTEM PATH, what is this, 1980?)

- Run.

- Ungroup

It's slightly faster but it's still clunky.

[tip pc]

“ But the affinity software just whinges after install and never runs, it's been like that since their beta period for me, and they have no solution (three different machines, three different versions of Windows).”

Definitely the affinity software, can’t possibly be something you’ve done over 3 different pc’s that’s causing the issue.

All other Windows affinity users must also Be experiencing the sand issue yet Affinity haven’t bothered to do anything about it.

[Charlie Clark]

I've found Photoline to be very useful when working with PDFs.

[tip pc]

Affinity

She has just shelled out 3 x £23.99 for the Affinitg suite, luckily on App Store so I can use via family sharing.

Saves me spending ages getting cs5 working o. What ever the latest macOS is.

I’ll give that ink thing a blast though.

[Will Godfrey]

As I said before

I've been using it for years. Does everything I want, and that's before this upgrade.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

I can't get on with Inkscape; I've tried quite hard but it doesn't work the way I work. I had the same problem with CorelDraw and most CorelDraw derived software. Inkscape is also missing a few critical features.

Gimp I get on with a lot better - it's consistent and where it's incompatible with Photoshop the Gimp way is often better, once you've got used to it. (Although, my God, do its file dialogs take forever to open.)

[Terry 6]

Casual user

I've used Inkscape for odd bits and bobs for years.

I can't remember what I used before and by and large it does all I could ever want for my limited uses.

But it does have idiosyncrasies that make using it a bit harder than need be. I can't compare to other s/w. Maybe they're the same.

Things like; the drawing space ("page") is by default a small rectangle within a larger one. Which has to be zoomed in to fill the programme window, but doesn't quite fill it. And it's default orientation is portrait, while my tablet is landscape. But changing the orientation is not obvious. (The option is buried under "File-Properties if my memory serves me correctly). The " resize page to selection" command is in edit, if my memory serves me correctly- but that changes the page size to a selected object, as far as I can see. You can't select the workspace and resize the page to fit that.

And tablet sensitivity is a default to "off" and even more difficult to locate ( luckily this only needs to be done once.)

These things need to be more obviously ( intuitively) located.

On the whole it's a brilliant job by these volunteer enthusiasts. But it does suffer that usability effect; developers are seldom the best designers. (Come to that, half the time neither are designers imo) What's obvious to them may not be so logical to the average software user.

The "where would you expect to find the page orientation command" type of question may not get asked.

Instead a good engineering decision is made that groups x feature with y, because they're of a class. But this may not be the way that the actual end user classifies these things..- maybe, arguably, it should be in edit. Just as maybe "select al in layer" could arguable be in the layers menu, ( Doesn't Photoshop Elements do that - anything to do with layers is in the layers menu, at least in my ageing version 9).

Which is not to take anything away from this brilliant product.

[Bibbit]

Tempting

As I’m tight-fisted I’ve been running AI in a Windows VM with my legit copy of CS5 installed for years. May give Inkscape a go.