This is Martin Owens. He is a leading developer of Inkscape, a free open-source vector graphics editor. Adobe has lost millions of dollars because of his work. Thank you Martin 🫡
I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:
In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn't considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.
However, one factor that I think most people don't think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I've ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that's a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the "pro" version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they're calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.
I had no idea Inkscape could work with PDFs like that. Thank you!
Great for text, also. Easy to orientated in any direction.. Excellent for quick one-off wiring diagrams.
Just don't try it with a 60MB+, 200 page+ file.
I've always used LibreOffice for that purpose. It's more familiar if you're used to office software vs graphics design software.
This is good to know!
You may not know if you exclusively use Corel, but where do you think Corel stands compared to Illustrator these days?
I'm a pro graphic designer, so you can be as technical as you like.
I've been messing around with Affinity Designer a bit lately, and while it's gotten a lot better over the years (and some features have surpassed Adobe), the little things and workflow stuff is still such a step down I find it hard to want to use it still.
I use both Corel and Illustrator for work but I'm very much more "fluent" with Illustrator. I'd say they have a bit different focus. While I hate Adobe with a passion, I'd say Illustrator is a lot better. My co-worker who works with large format printing, likes Corel more.
Appreciate that perspective. I also can't wait to kick Adobe to the curb someday, but I usually have the same experience when trying alternatives.
Adobe stuff is slowly falling apart though it feels like. It's coasting on the brilliant work of the original devs pre-creative cloud, and while there have been a few genuinely good features added over the years, I hate to say that most new features they add feel like amateur hour to me. They just lack the level of polish and attention to detail that old features had. It doesn't feel like the people making it understand the workflow of a professional anymore. They're also just getting slow. Whenever I open Affinity I'm struck by how much more performant it feels!
Yes, slowly falling apart is a good description. I'm actually thinking of just switching careers. I work in print, so Adobe is pretty much a standard, there are very few viable alternatives.
I do a lot of print design too so I feel it
No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven't looked back since.
I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it's what the company worked for used in house, and I've stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it's more "powerful," but I suspect that really just means it's more byzantine and harder to use. I've never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:
CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won't provide the source.
I've been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it's so favored (I don't want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you've learned it's bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator's, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don't have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can't conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can't bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
That's definitely good stuff. Affinity is also lacking in interface customization I've found.
I fucking loved Corel, I've never really found an adequate replacement for it. Guess I'll be giving InkScape a try, thanks
Have you tried LibreOffice Draw? I love it for that same reason.
I have, but in general I find Inkscape to be superior overall. The last time I tried the LibreOffice component it did not handle multiple pages very well.
Huh, last time I tried I had the reverse impression. But it's been a few years.
I was just needing to rip apart a pdf for content the other day. Good to know.
This functionality with PDFs is natively built into MacOS. One of the reasons I chose a Mac for my latest PC.
At my old job we used Macs for two reasons: Preview and Outlook on MacOS. I know it sounds silly to people who don’t have to work with email or pdf’s as much as I had to, but it was absolutely the right call for the work we had to do.
Also, depending on your use case it’s crazy how much worse Outlook is on Windows. Local indexing is far worse on Windows, and trying to search a big mailbox brings the app to its knees.
That's hilarious, because less than 10 years ago Outlook on Mac was so fucking broken that I started a list of the weirdest and funniest bugs at the time.
Also it seems frankly insane to me that people would actively choose a Mac for this reason, and I say that as an M4 owner. But I guess it's true that for most users the OS barely matters as long as their 2-3 apps and the browser work fine.
Then why do you use this shit software?
It's even worse with the "new " Outlook, so you might need to look for something else anyway
Oh yeah, I wouldn’t use Outlook myself lol, especially the newer version.
Preview? Am I missing something? I hate that you can even navigate through photos with left right arrows, I never use preview for anything if I can avoid it.
Preview is a fantastic pdf viewer and basic editor, which is what we used it for.
Ok …. Your enthusiasm about the pdf ripping has won me over. I’m trying this shit asap