Krita 4.0 Drawing Program In Development, Pre-Alpha Builds Now Available

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Krita 4.0 Drawing Program In Development, Pre-Alpha Builds Now Available

While it feels just like yesterday when the big Krita 3.0 drawing program update was released with its port to Qt5, Krita 4.0 is already under development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Krita-4.0-Pre-Alpha-Development

[bug77]

For all the praises Krita gets, just the other day I needed to add a red box to a screenshot and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I could select a colour, the tool to draw the box, but when drawing, it wouldn't paint anything. I think I used KolourPaint to get the job done.

[mike44]

Yes the UI seems as complicated as Gimp. They should look at more Photoshop alike workflow.

[Azpegath]

With Krita 4.0 they are replacing their entire vector layer system. Krita will no longer be using the Open Document Graphics standard but rather SVG for vector data. With Krita 4.0, it can read other document formats but will only be saving as SVG layers.

Wow, that sounds... Insane or very clever. Why re-write the entire underlying data format from one standard to another? There must be a huge gain for it to be worth it, or they're just bike-shedding the shit out of this project.

[FireBurn]

Wow, that sounds... Insane or very clever. Why re-write the entire underlying data format from one standard to another? There must be a huge gain for it to be worth it, or they're just bike-shedding the shit out of this project.

I think this is Krita's big departure from Koffice/Calligra they're stating clearly they're a paint program and not part of an office suite. Seems strange they're removing the ability to save back to ODF though unless I'm misunderstanding what they're doing

[gbil]

For me the biggest disappointment is that you can't print from Krita and I just checked 4.0 pre-alpha and there is still no option to print.

[M@yeulC]

For me the biggest disappointment is that you can't print from Krita and I just checked 4.0 pre-alpha and there is still no option to print.

Having implemented this for other Qt applications, this is rather a straightforward thing to do (if I am not mistaken), so this is either a feature that was forgotten, or because of a design decision. Is there a bug report somewhere?

[boudewijnrempt]

For all the praises Krita gets, just the other day I needed to add a red box to a screenshot and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I could select a colour, the tool to draw the box, but when drawing, it wouldn't paint anything. I think I used KolourPaint to get the job done.

Um... That's all there's to it. If you're on Windows, but that's unlikely, right?, you could've been hit by a bug in the Intel OpenGL drivers where for some versions of the driver the canvas just never updates. Unless you intentionally or accidentally changed the default in the rectangle tool to not paint an outline. Krita's gui is just about as straightforward as it gets. Start the application, create an image, paint.

[boudewijnrempt]

Having implemented this for other Qt applications, this is rather a straightforward thing to do (if I am not mistaken), so this is either a feature that was forgotten, or because of a design decision. Is there a bug report somewhere?

Sure, printing is "easy" -- until it comes to printing at a certain scale, or page layout, or color management. Then it suddenly becomes a lot of work, and since nobody has done that work, we've removed the half-baked, easy print option that never satisfied anyone, in the hope that someone who feels that this is a huge disappointment gets out their copy of vi or emacs and starts implementing it.

But they should first check how complicated printing is in Photoshop, GIMP or Scribus... Because this could easily be a multi-month project, one that needs a lot of up-front design work, too.

Besides, we see Krita as an application to create images with; not as an application to scan images with, or print images with. Other tools may be better for that, like Scribus.

[boudewijnrempt]

Wow, that sounds... Insane or very clever. Why re-write the entire underlying data format from one standard to another? There must be a huge gain for it to be worth it, or they're just bike-shedding the shit out of this project.

Of course it's not insane. OpenDocument Graphics is barely used in the real world, and even LibreOffice is moving to SVG. But for us, the important thing is that it improves interoperability with relevant tools like inkscape, and offers features that ODG doesn't have.