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

[bug77]

Then your error was simply in not realizing that the same applies to krita :P although it's come so far away from it that you can't really tell anymore, Krita started out as a GIMP fork called Kimage Shop and then Krayon, until it was ultimately renamed Krita and aimed to compete with Corel Painter (quite convenient for me considering Krita had become a pretty good software when I was first starting getting into digital painting)

Well, Krita is installed by default, that's why I tried it first. But it's ok, it worked in the end, just a freak incident.

[boudewijnrempt]

Hype! Does switching to SVG instead of ODG bring any performance improvements?

No -- the actual drawing of the vector layers is still done in the same way: it's the same objects and classes, but now they load and save svg. That's important because we already had several features, like drop shadows, that couldn't be written to ODG and were lost on loading/saving. There were also some problems with vectors being slightly different after save/load, and that should be better now as well. The main thing is interoperability, though. SVG is the only real possibility for exchanging vector data with other applications.

[boudewijnrempt]

Since you seem to be quite knowledgeable about it, and you mentioned inkscape, I was wondering: what about Karbon? Is Krita going to supersed it? (Or is it already the case?)

Well... After Krita got separated from the Calligra codebase after I more or less ported all of Calligra to Qt5, there has been little activity in Calligra. There was one guy who proposed to become the new maintainer of Karbon, but after a few commits, he seems to have disappeared. There are still some features in Karbon that I want to enable in Krita, but realistically speaking, unless someone as crazy as me takes over Karbon maintainership, it's not going to fly.

Krita is a digital painting software, but is feature "parity" (or close to) with inkscape an objective?

Compatibility, yes, but for more complex things, you'd still need Inkscape. As Dmitry, the guy doing the SVG work, said this morning in irc:

"for simple editing of SVG objects we are going to provice very nice tools. But for doing advanced things like vectorizing and other stuff you will need to use inkscape."

Last but not least, how about SVG 2? Was the standard ever finalised? I did not hear only nice things about it; the last time I read something about it was with this sad (but nice) bog post.

Well, that says it all... We want to have SVG-2 support in the new text tool, and we're closely following Inkscape's SVG-2 text gsoc project, with the intention of learning as much as we can of that.

[M@yeulC]

Thanks again for the detailed answers boudewijnrempt. I look forward to the next releases of Krita, which is IMO rapidly becoming one of the best examples of Free Software Done Right