Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
After months of looking at the features added and changed in Inkscape 1.1.x, it’s finally time to move on to the 1.2.x series. As I write, the project has just announced the second point release in this series, which features a number of bug-fixes. Inkscape 1.2.2 can be downloaded from the project’s website (https://inkscape.org/) as usual, with Linux versions available as an AppImage, Snap, or via a PPA. I like to keep multiple versions installed – which is a must if you write a monthly column about the program – so for the past few releases, I’ve tended to use the AppImage. In theory, however, it shouldn’t make much difference which you use.
This month, I’m going to take a look at a couple of the more significant UI changes that have taken place with version 1.2. First, however, I’m going to mention a part of the UI that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed at all: a problem with the icon sets.
When icon themes were added to Inkscape, it seemed like a great opportunity to provide a symbolic icon set for those people who prefer stark simplicity, while keeping the older, more colourful images for users who find it easier to distinguish between different icons if they’re not all similarly coloured. I fall into the latter category, so was disappointed when 1.1 presented me with a mixture of flat, symbolic icons alongside the colorful ones – replacing some of the old standards in the process. Unfortunately. version 1.2 continues in the same manner (top left)
As you can see, the system-level operations – loading, saving, printing, and clipboard – all appear as flat symbolic icons, while other tools and buttons get the more colourful icons of the past. This screenshot was taken with the ‘Hicolor’ theme selected (Edit > Preferences > Interface > Theming > Change icon theme), but a similar problem occurs with the ‘Tango’ theme. If you find yourself in a similar situation, then try switching to the ‘Use system icons’ option: on my Ubuntu Mate 20.04 box, this has allowed me to return to a consistently colorful set of icons in the toolbars (bottom left)
On the subject of icons, following the Theming section in the Inkscape preferences is a new entry labelled ‘Toolbars’. This panel provides a number of extremely welcome controls for changing the size and content of the main toolbars in Inkscape.
First of all are a group of toggle buttons that allow you to turn each of the individual drawing tool icons on and off in the main toolbox. This is great news for anyone on a small screen who wishes to slim down the number of icons to something that better fits the available space. It’s also useful as a means to hide infrequently used tools more generally – at last I can prevent that pesky 3D Box tool from taking up space, and I can hide the Pen and Calligraphy tools to stop me inadvertently clicking them when I meant to choose the Bézier tool. When hiding icons, make sure you know which tool is which, as they all share the same generic tooltip in this dialog. If you do choose to turn off some icons, those tools aren’t lost to you: you can still access them via their keyboard shortcuts. It’s a shame, however, that there’s not a shortcut to temporarily display all the icons, which would let you pare the toolbox down to the most commonly used features while still giving you an easy way to get to the less frequently used ones.
Below these toggles are separate sliders for adjusting the size of the Toolbox (the one on the left, with the tools in), and the Control bar (the two-row toolbar along the top of the window). Being able to adjust these independently is a nice touch.
Finally, there’s a control to switch between ‘Simple’ and ‘Advanced’ modes for the Snap controls bar – but this really isn’t the place you want to visit if you want to toggle that option… at least not until version 1.3 comes out. But to understand that statement, we first need to look at what’s happened with the Snap controls in Inkscape 1.2.
The snap toolbar has been a part of Inkscape since the beginning of the project. By default, it appeared on the right-hand side of the window in the past few releases, but selecting View > Custom would place it at the top. This option has been removed from version 1.2 because the toolbar itself no longer exists. Instead, the snap controls are now hidden in a pop-up menu at the top-right of the Inkscape window.
The controls themselves are so unremarkable in appearance that I’ve had to include the window border and the end of the horizontal ruler in that screenshot, to help you orient yourself as to where these UI elements appear. The button on the left is a simple toggle to turn snapping on and off as a whole – the same effect as using the ‘%’ keyboard shortcut. To the right of that is a pop-up menu for choosing which options should apply when snapping is enabled, and it’s here that things get a little more interesting. Let’s look at this menu in its default, ‘Simple’ mode:
First, we have a checkbox that duplicates the functionality of the snapping toggle, or the ‘%’ shortcut. Also having this option in the menu itself means one less mouse-click if you need to enable snapping and adjust the options at the same time. But the options you can modify are clearly somewhat limited: you can just turn various classes of snapping on and off – for snapping to bounding boxes, nodes, and ‘alignment’ – but you’re not given any details about which snap targets are actually enabled for each of those three entries.
The ‘alignment’ option is a new addition, which makes it easier to position objects relative to others by displaying temporary alignment guides and optional dimensions as you drag objects around the canvas.
Note that the dimensions aren’t enabled by default – usually you just get the orange and red guides shown in the screenshot. For users who just want things to align neatly but aren’t worried about the specific dimensions, that’s fine. But if you do want to see the numbers as well, you need to enable the ‘Show snap distance in case of alignment or distribution snap’ option in Edit > Preferences > Behaviour > Snapping. Excuse the pun, but couldn’t the developers have come up with a more ‘snappy’ title for that option?
You’ve undoubtedly noticed the ‘Advanced Mode’ link at the bottom of the pop-up. Clicking that reveals something more like the snap controls bar from versions past (shown left), with many, many snapping options to choose from.
I won’t describe all these options – most of them have been covered previously in this series. If you want complete control over what parts of your drawing should act as snap targets, then this is the place to come. And if you just want to return to the more straightforward (and limited) set of three toggle buttons, the ‘Reset to simple snapping mode’ link at the bottom of the pop-up will do that.
But that’s where the first of my issues with this UI arises. Clicking that link doesn’t just switch you back to the simpler view, it also resets your snap settings. You may have spent some time setting up just the right combination of snap targets for the way you work, but switch back to simple mode and all your selections are thrown away. You might assume that toggling, say, the Nodes button in simple mode would do the same thing as toggling the Nodes checkbox in advanced mode – i.e. just turn your entire combination of options on or off. But that’s not the case: as soon as you switch back to Simple mode your individual combination of choices is lost entirely and replaced with whatever defaults the developers have chosen.
Simple mode also fails to offer options for snapping to ‘Grids’, ‘Guide lines’ and ‘Page borders’ – all fairly common snap targets that beginners might find useful, but which have to be accessed via the advanced mode. This means that, for many users, a trip to advanced mode will sometimes be a necessity, without it being obvious that returning to simple mode for day-to-day use will lose their settings.
I quite like the idea of a pop-up for snapping options. It’s certainly a lot clearer to have a title alongside each option, rather than the slow hover-for-a-tooltip that was often required over almost every option in the toolbar from earlier versions. But I feel a better UI would have been to make the sections in the advanced mode collapsible. That would allow users to reduce the list down to the main toggles for a simpler interface, but let them expand each section out for full control when needed. Here’s a quick mock-up of how it might appear in practice, with a couple of the sections expanded.
With what’s currently in Inkscape 1.2, however, I really can’t recommend the use of Simple mode at all. If you need to use snapping then it’s almost inevitable that you’ll need at least one option from the Advanced menu at some point, so my advice at the moment is to only use the Advanced mode, and never switch back to Simple mode at all. It may seem more complex initially, but it still beats having your selections thrown away without warning.
So, back to the conundrum of the ‘Snap controls bar’ option in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Toolbars. I’d pretty much ignore it, use the link at the bottom of the pop-up snap menu to enable advanced mode, and then leave things alone. But if you don’t like the new pop-up menu at all, it’s worth knowing that the option to switch back to an old-fashioned snap toolbar is probably coming in version 1.3 – at that time the setting in the preferences dialog will gain a third option to let you use the toolbar rather than the pop-up.
While talking about snapping, it’s worth pointing out a few more snap-related changes that have taken place in 1.2. One relatively minor difference is that the snap settings are no longer stored as part of the document itself, but are stored globally for Inkscape as a whole. To be honest I doubt this change will really affect anyone in any practical way, and it makes sense to take that Inkscape-specific metadata out of the SVG file.
One less well-known feature that has been removed is the ability to set snap tolerances for some individual snap types. It used to live in the ‘Snap’ tab of the Document Preferences dialog, but given that snapping is no longer a per-document feature, that entire tab has been removed. In theory it was nice to be able to prioritise certain snap types, by giving them a larger target radius so that they would kick in as your pointer wandered towards the target without requiring too much accuracy in your aim. In practice, however, it was likely a rarely used feature that won’t really be missed.
On the plus side, the removal of that tab has also meant that a couple of rather hidden snap target types have now been promoted into the pop-up menu instead. Previously the options for snapping perpendicularly and tangentially were in the Document Preferences, but now live as part of the ‘Nodes’ section in the Advanced pop-up. But that adds yet another reason to only use the Advanced mode, and skip the Simple option entirely.
Next month, I’ll continue to look at – and offer an opinion on – some of the other UI changes that have taken place in the program with this release.