I installed Inkscape like ages ago to do small edits on some SVG i had. It worked pretty damn good besides ... some problems...
The whole software is not designed so that some newcommer could pick it up easy. Ugly nested menus, way to specific snap options (which is theoretically good, but only for those who use inkscape on a regular basis! For EVERY other person, this is making things confusing AF, especially because not even all options can be put on at a single place) and generally a feel of lacking features due to them being so well hidden in nested menus or wrong terms that somebody not familiar will simply not find it.
Want an example of how hard this can be?
Microsoft provides the icon pack of visual studio for "free" but it has some lacking icons (eg. Tag has no NewTag variant)
Now, to edit this, you can use inkscape and join those two together so that they form a new 16x16 image
sounds easy right?
well ... it is not that simple afterall, but lets walk through this step as somebody new.
- You will pull both items into the current page
- You try to position them correctly whilst noticing that nothing snaps
- You search the snapping options (not knowing where they are, you ignore the righthand side as in most software, such options are at top whilst tools are left and righthand is current selected properties etc.) but cannot find them
- You google, to see a tutorial to do that and think "great"
- You try to position them correctly and everything still is not snapping
- You google again just to find out that those snapping options in the document properties are not all snapping options and enable snapping in the right bar for nodes too
- You position them correctly and export it
- You notice that the whole exported path is not usable because for some reason it is not in the right size and positoon
- You google how to change the page size
- You fiddle around a few mins until you got it to 16x16 px
- You export again, still not as it is displayed in inkscape
- You check the object just to see that its bounds are outside of the page area (and those got exported too)
- You try to find a way to crop the object to the visible page
- Few minutes later you realize that there is no inbuilt way to crop to the page (but the other way around which are the first few google results that will popup)
- Try to use the rectangle tool to create a rectangle at page size
- Try again because nothing appeared when you first tried
- Repeat step (16) up to the point where you try to just select everything
- Realize that you now have a ton of objects in your page
- Try to find some sort of object explorer, find none and google
- Google solution is not working, search icons on the right to find the treeview explorer
- Removing stuff from the explorer is not possible
- Write a rant
- Open everything in GIMP to do the same
- Be done in 20 minutes instead of 2 weeks of learning inkscape fully
In the end, Inkscape just feels bad!
There is a science field in the IT that is called Human-Computer-Interaction and everytime i think about giving inkscape a try, i notice that the whole software is not build in any way to suit to the average human.
It just feels like some developer put some option somewhere without any actual concept of grouping or awareness of other software available on the market.
I am fairly sure that experienced users can make good use of Inkscape, but as somebody who is not mainly doing such things but rather utilizing (or some may call it abusing) the tool to crop, manipulate etc. existing SVG/XAML paths the whole software feels bloated and not thought through.