The Verdict
Vector drawing applications
Inkscape is the most generously featured of the drawing programs that we’ve tested. As often as not, when you select a drawing tool, an extra toolbar or sidebar opens up showing you the many detailed options on offer. It’s a difficult task for the developers to create an interface that gives access to the masses of features and options, and we feel that they have only been partly successful in this area. From time to time, you have to hit the documentation to figure out how to do something, and the trick of adding many dialogs to the sidebar feels like a kludge. That said, the shortcomings of the user interface are of a type that mainly impairs the initial attempt to carry out an action rather than in general use. Even for less artistically inclined Linux users, it’s worth knowing about Inkscape for those occasions when you need to add some text to an image or something like that.
Krita surprised us with how comprehensive its vector drawing facilities are at this stage. It ticks every box for the basics you’d expect for vector drawing, and the user interface is our favourite. When it comes to creating diagrams rather than drawings, we’d probably choose another program, although Krita could probably scrape by in those cases if the requirements are basic. The ace up Krita’s sleeve is that it seamlessly integrates its more famous features as a bitmap art package with those as a vector based one.
LibreOffice Draw is our first choice when it comes to making charts and other business-orientated diagrams. It enables you to quickly drop shapes and symbols on to a page, label them and connect them together. It also excels when it comes to graphical documents that involve a lot of text. It has reasonable, basic facilities for making drawings, too, and the whole thing’s wrapped up in an attractive and efficient interface.
Ipe is a handy little drawing program. Diagram creation is the area in which it is strongest. Most of the features are quickly available from the user interface and yet it goes into quite a lot of detail.
Xfig is a drawing program with a long history on Unix-type operating systems. We’re sorry to say that, although it’s a competent vector drawing program, the user interface is archaic, and it’s difficult to find anything that it offers that other programs don’t provide in an easier-to-use package.