Well, everything has a price to pay. To me, you don't pay Inkscape with money but with your time and sanity, which I think are far more valuable.
Great in depth review, by the way
Adam Belis
Visitor
Hey thanks for the review. I contribute to UX of Inskcape from time to time. There are lots of good valid criticisms of Inkscape I agree with.
just a few notes you got wrong about Inkscape.
Dash lines have previews that should give a good idea of what you get. if you want a custom look you can type your values in field and it gives you real-time update
Inkscap's export dialog is very feature-rich. (Exports are all in document, page, selection, and layer, with previews of exports; also multifile and multi-format export.)
Upon closer inspection, it seems the reason the dashed line feels so unreliable for me on Inkscape is that when the caps are square 1:1 looks like a un-dashed line on Inkscape. On Affinity, there are still gaps in this case, although 1:1 still doesn't look like what I would expect from 1:1. On Affinity, the "custom" values for dash lengths are displayed in a custom interface so you can actually have some idea of what the numbers represent. On Inkscape, you just get a field with 4 integers and no explanation. Although neither software provides tooltips for this input, at least on Affinity its purpose is more self-documenting. When I selected on a dashed line on Inkscape and it didn't look like a dash, I assumed it was some bug in Inkscape. When I input 1, 1 on Affinity and I see a small gap, I assume dashes work, but something else is interfering with it.
Inkscape's export "dialog" appears inside a dockable panel in the side pane, which means you can't just press an "export" button to close the dialog. I wouldn't even call a dialog without a response button a dialog, that's just a window. This means every time you want to export something you need to click both the export button to export, and then you're stuck seeing the export panel until you click on a tab to go back to what you were doing. The only use case this helps is if you want to export several things by selecting them one by one. Even then I'd argue that a normal dialog is better, since when the dialog closes, that's an indication to the user that the operation has concluded. Without this indication, you need other means to inform the user they actually pressed the export button. As Inkscape's export dialog needs to be dockable, it has this extra "tab" on its top for docking even when it isn't docked (even though it ALSO has two top tabs: single file, and batch export), and it can't close when you press the export button because that would be unusual for a panel that docks. All of these things need to be designed so to fit the minimum width of the side pane, which means they end up being so tall that you get scrollbars to scroll that panels. If they were real dialogs using a much larger width, that's another problem that users with smaller screens wouldn't have.
Kaixoo
Visitor
You can undock any dialog. Next time you open it, it will still open as a window. I am also a contributor of Inkscape UX and all this feedback is very valuable, so thank you so much!
Discussion of: Comparison: Affinity Designer vs. Inkscape.
Well, everything has a price to pay. To me, you don't pay Inkscape with money but with your time and sanity, which I think are far more valuable.
Great in depth review, by the way
Hey thanks for the review. I contribute to UX of Inskcape from time to time. There are lots of good valid criticisms of Inkscape I agree with.
just a few notes you got wrong about Inkscape.
Dash lines have previews that should give a good idea of what you get. if you want a custom look you can type your values in field and it gives you real-time update
Inkscap's export dialog is very feature-rich. (Exports are all in document, page, selection, and layer, with previews of exports; also multifile and multi-format export.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v__sdJBfu7k
Thanks for reading and for your work!
Upon closer inspection, it seems the reason the dashed line feels so unreliable for me on Inkscape is that when the caps are square 1:1 looks like a un-dashed line on Inkscape. On Affinity, there are still gaps in this case, although 1:1 still doesn't look like what I would expect from 1:1. On Affinity, the "custom" values for dash lengths are displayed in a custom interface so you can actually have some idea of what the numbers represent. On Inkscape, you just get a field with 4 integers and no explanation. Although neither software provides tooltips for this input, at least on Affinity its purpose is more self-documenting. When I selected on a dashed line on Inkscape and it didn't look like a dash, I assumed it was some bug in Inkscape. When I input 1, 1 on Affinity and I see a small gap, I assume dashes work, but something else is interfering with it.
Inkscape's export "dialog" appears inside a dockable panel in the side pane, which means you can't just press an "export" button to close the dialog. I wouldn't even call a dialog without a response button a dialog, that's just a window. This means every time you want to export something you need to click both the export button to export, and then you're stuck seeing the export panel until you click on a tab to go back to what you were doing. The only use case this helps is if you want to export several things by selecting them one by one. Even then I'd argue that a normal dialog is better, since when the dialog closes, that's an indication to the user that the operation has concluded. Without this indication, you need other means to inform the user they actually pressed the export button. As Inkscape's export dialog needs to be dockable, it has this extra "tab" on its top for docking even when it isn't docked (even though it ALSO has two top tabs: single file, and batch export), and it can't close when you press the export button because that would be unusual for a panel that docks. All of these things need to be designed so to fit the minimum width of the side pane, which means they end up being so tall that you get scrollbars to scroll that panels. If they were real dialogs using a much larger width, that's another problem that users with smaller screens wouldn't have.
You can undock any dialog. Next time you open it, it will still open as a window. I am also a contributor of Inkscape UX and all this feedback is very valuable, so thank you so much!