I am so happy for the continued development of desktop-first, offline, and free content tools. Inkscape, Blender, Godot, Krita, and (still, hopefully not spyware?) Audacity [0]. Without the commercial treadmill, I see these all being solid alternatives rather than the broke-student option.<p>While I am no artist, I have produced several icons and schematics in Inkscape over the years. A true boon that has let me sketch out some ideas for presentations or images for internal applications.<p>[0] I have given up on Gimp.
I recently learned an interesting little fact about Inkscape when looking for an SVG to PNG "converter". First, I knew that, in theory, SVG has a similar complexity to HTML. I didn't know that it is quite difficult to find a high quality standalone-ish (not and appendage of a HTML engine) renderer / engine for the format. Well, Inkscape has one of the most complete around, even implementing some not yet standardized features.<p>For reference: <a href="https://inkscape.org/develop/about-svg/" rel="nofollow">https://inkscape.org/develop/about-svg/</a> section "How does Inkscape implement SVG?"
If anyone is interested to keep updated with Inkscape Development, I highly recommend the Youtube channel [0] of Martin Owens. Martin is an Inkscape developer who added the multipage support, finalized the shape builder tool, and much more.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@doctormo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@doctormo</a>
With the recent-ish addition of multi-page documents, Inkscape is now a full replacement for Adobe Illustrator for my use case (with the exception of CMYK support, but I do print stuff < once a year these days). Congrats to the team!
Thanks! Inkscape is a wonderful project, I've used it for <i>years</i> - I started around the time those jerks at Adobe took CS into the cloud, and unlike GIMP, I found the UI fairly intuitive if you've studied graphic design AND it played well with the OSX windowing system instead of trying to use GTK or KDE or whatever the hell... the stuff I see when I open up GIMP to slap impact font text onto the images I take with my <i>personal</i> cell phone.