I installed Inkscape the other day to try to rescale and save an simple SVG for the web.
When I took a look at the text saved in the file, I was pretty shocked to discover it saved the entire path of the file in the file.
In other words, it saves a directory structure that could contain your username, the name of the project you're working on, what company you're working for, etc.
Felt like a pretty shocking invasion of privacy to me. When I throw up an SVG on the web, I don't want it to contain potentially personally identifiable information.
I haven't upgraded yet, but with 1.0 on macOS, I see a relative path in the sodipodi:docname attribute of the root element (not an absolute path, so either something changed in 1.1 or behavior differs between OSes). This is where you are seeing it correct?
Saving as "Plain SVG" does not include this (or any other sodipodi namespace elements, by design). Not great that the default save format includes this, but FWIW best practice is to save as "Plain SVG" for interoperability.
I feel like the main mistake here is that Inkscape uses the .svg extension for what it basically it's own format. While it is essentially .svg compatible, it includes many extensions and metadata necessary for Inkscape to function. You should really save as optimized or plain .svg before publishing anything made in Inkscape.
If it saves an absolute path, not a relative one, won't it break when you move the project to another machine? Or even move the containing folder to another location?
you probably saved it as an inkscape svg instead of an optimized svg. it is a bit confusing, but the former is basically the equivalent to the inkscape-native file format, and the latter will remove things specific to inkscape
Inkscape probably treats the source SVG differently than an optimized output SVG and includes additional data to make editing the file better. Other apps use a proprietary format for their source files that contains this additional information and have to export to an open format for output.
Probably for copyright and license. It's a common feature, MS Office documents include even more metadata, such as how many times the file has been saved.
My problem isn't with quantity of metadata. It's with personally-identifying data. And I can't imagine what the filepath could ever have to do with copyright or license.
Inkscape shouldn't be including this, but just an fyi since you say you were shocked by this: many apps include such metadata in their default save formats.
The main distinction with Inkscape is that most apps have a proprietary save format which you are less likely to publish publicly. Inkscape's use of an open standard for their default metadata-rich save format means that metadata often gets published.
Still, I do think the trove of metadata many apps leave in their files is probably unnecessary and should definitely be addressed (in all apps, including Inkscape).
I agree, this can be shocking for many casual users. I think there is an option to save a "plain SVG" as opposed to "inkscape SVG". Does "plain SVG" also include such information?
As soon as you export your project, Inkscape retains the path to the exported file so that you could overwrite that file when exporting whenever you reopen that project rather than going once again through the whole process of pointing the program to the right folder and submitting output file name.
I love Inkscape. Taught my self how to use this 15+ years ago. Use it 2-10x per year since.
It's always there. It does not change UI much between releases. I dont have to download a cracked version of some commercial tool because I'm to stingy to buy expensive software for a simple task at hand.
Inkscape (and Gimp) have helped me a lot in this regard.
I agree that it's a bit underrated, but I disagree about the complaints. People don't complain about it not being a Photoshop clone. People complain about the UX/ergonomics of gimp being decades behind compared to Adobe's tools.
It doesn't need the same workflows as Photoshop, but it definitely needs to improve them
I will add that copying Photoshop would be an easy all-around win because Photoshop has engineered their UX. I'd say it would be pretty hard to come up with better alternates than what Photoshop has probably.
There are cheaper alternatives to Photoshop that get their UX much better than Gimp. To name two: Gravit (£3/m) or Krita (FOSS), but they're not exactly photo manipulation, though.
Gimp is FreeSoftware (FLOSS), this puts the word "need" in a context where it does not really work like that.
> because Photoshop [in contrast to Gimp] has engineered their UX
This is straight up condescending to the Gimp devs. Sure PS has put more money in UX design, but your saying Gimp dev did not (or cannot) do any of that.
> This is straight up condescending to the Gimp devs.
No, it isn't. There is literally years worth of user feedback and it still hasn't been addressed. It's a common complaint and to say they haven't "engineered" their UX is putting it lightly.
> Please be kind when you get something for free.
Something being free doesn't mean it can't be criticized. Nothing said was unkind.
Every UX is engineered. Maybe not by someone with a lot of experience in it. Maybe not by a team. Maybe not up to your standards. But it _is_ engineered. Basically, saying Gimp did not is not very nice then, especially know the engineer produce it for you for free.
I didn't mean to sound condescending, and if I hurt any gimp devs, I'd like to apologise.
I... Partially agree with you that every UX is "engineered" but that depends on how far we're willing to stretch that definition in the design domain.
I'd hardly call any workflow I design an engineered one (even if I like this field), when compared to something produced by an UX designer (or a team of them) who specialises in the field. Maybe someone put a lot of thought into the gimp UX, but it seems like a wasted effort (or maybe it was just inexperience). I don't know how to phrase this without it sounding insensitive, though. I'm not criticising the people, just this instance of their work, so I hope it inspires them to improve. I'd like to see Gimp become as successful as krita or inkscape (which had UX issues for years, too)
I realise gimp is free, but there also seems to be a general attitude amongst gimp contributors that they think the UX is fine, while most people (in my circles, at least) disagree with that view
I'm a little strict online when I find people just the slightest bit rude to FLOSS teams. It's hard enough doing all that for free. And for me it worked very well: i dont need to know PS, as I know Gimp.
Gratitude and praise it all I have for them. I only criticize in actual places where change is made (issues discussions, etc), and even then I try to be VERY polite.
> People don't complain about it not being a Photoshop clone.
Actually, no. As the person doing tech support for GIMP, I can tell you with 100% assurance that people do complain about GIMP not cloning Photoshop's UI. Quite a lot, in fact.
> It doesn't need the same workflows as Photoshop, but it definitely needs to improve them
Agreed.
> I will add that copying Photoshop would be an easy all-around win
It wouldn't be easy. Nor would it be a win. You would be stuck in the cycle of always following whatever changes Photoshop developers make. And dealing with the same criticism Photoshop devs get. Why would you want that?
And why would you, in your spare time, continuously copy someone else's work? There's no money in this. And it's not fun for sure. So why? Low self-esteem?
> cheaper alternatives to Photoshop... Gravit ... not exactly photo manipulation
Mhm, how about... Not photo manipulation at all and not alternative to Photoshop at all? :)
The alternates I liked aren't complete Photoshop replacements. but then again neither is Gimp? I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
My general workflow is to use Krita and Inkscape (I used Gravit for a while because Inkscape was having some bugs I couldn't cope with), and maybe do some minor final colour correction/grading in Gimp on the final output. I could do all of this without leaving Photoshop. I'm not complaining though, since I much prefer Krita's brush engine than Photoshop, and I've gotten used to Inkscape's quirks. And they're both free!
It's not a matter of self esteem or confidence. If someone does it better, do it even better, or settled for living in their shadow.
The way to doing better is learning from the ones that are good at it already, right?
So why not learn from Adobe, which probably has the largest team of the smartest UX engineers working for them. They're not dominating such a complex market with smoke and mirrors.
And maybe Gimp can learne from Photoshop's mistakes too.
Blender is an excellent example of the process I described above. Their UI/UX was a joke for years, but they tried switching things upe and learned from the competitors. I'd say right now they're better than some (if not all) with of most features in terms of UX, especially for newcomers to the industry. Blender went form the steepest learning curve to one that's easy to get into, and from one of the worst UX/UI designs to one of the most polished in the industry.
It's not about low self esteem at all, it's about bettering yourself (or your project). If anything, that's how you build confidence, in my opinion.
I used Inkscape last week to convert an SVG vector image to EPS, for insertion into a PDF.
The conversion was not perfect. I am using FPDF with an EPS add-on, and after study of the PHP source, I was able to open the EPS with a text editor and reformat it so that it would successfully import.
Unfortunately, it loaded upside down, so I was forced to flip and save again in inkscape, then repeat the formatting. This odd behavior is also present in the (downstream) TCPDF library, which appears to have close to the same code.
Complain as I may, I didn't have to buy Adobe Illustrator.
I must say that as someone who is a very occasional user of vector drawing tools (and mainly uses them for prepping SVG for web) I’m sufficiently impressed by the latest version of Affinity Designer as an Illustrator replacement. I was able to open an .ai file, modify it, and export an .svg which was a perfect drop-in replacement for an .svg previously exported by Illustrator.
It’s still too expensive for me at full price but I nabbed a Mac App Store license when it was on sale a few weeks ago.
I haven’t tried Inkscape recently, but last time I did it failed horribly at the most basic tasks of path editing and SVG prep.
At $25 on sale (which it currently is), a permanent license for Affinity Designer is cheaper than one month of Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe likes to advertise it as $20.99/month, but that's only with a 12 month commitment, and you can't cancel early without paying. Renting Illustrator for a single month will really cost you $31.41.
Even at full price ($50), Affinity Designer costs less than two months of Illustrator.
Not a professional artist and don't use it often, but it's enough of a value that hobbyists like me can actually use it. Any of Adobe's products, not so much.
I bought all of their products the minute I found out they were still pursuing that oh so old fashioned idea of allowing you to OWN the software you buy from them.
same reason I just bought my 8th(?) copy of photoimpact first one around 2005(?). (two of those for other people's machines so they can use it without worrying about license failures or/and recurring billing)
I don't mind paying for a new license for each new box I want to use it on - because it still works on my xp machine, and each other one - with or without internet connectivity - no license check needed- it just works.
Good to know, this probably explained why the notionally transparent artwork was imported with a white background. But the fact that it’s not a true .ai import I don't think this is ever going to be a concern to me because I never use SVG to typeset flowing blocks of text. The main things I'm concerned about are:
1) Path and style integrity
2) Artboard dimensional integrity
3) Export file quality
In my testing, I was able to open a file I had edited and saved in Illustrator, export it as an SVG, it was an utterly pixel-perfect drop-in replacement for a previously exported SVG. I was also able to confirm that all of the SVG files I care about can be opened directly, edited and exported with no errors. That's enough for me to confidently say goodbye to Illustrator forever. It's robust enough that I know I can deal with the occasional import glitch if it ever does happen.
There are some really annoying things about Designer, though - like how it insists on rasterizing Gaussian blurs, even though SVG supports them as a vector operation...
The upside down behaviour sounds like failure to convert coordinate systems: SVG has its y axis going down from the top left (like pixel coordinates) but EPS and PDF have their y axis going up from the bottom left (like maths plots).
There has to be a better way than dealing with EPS files in 2021 though. It's a pretty archaic format, and poorly and incompletely supported by most programs. Can you use PDF for the embedded image instead? That's what I do when generating PDFs with PDFLatex and friends.
Inkscape is good enough for most cases. And it has been for a long time. Like audacity, like firefox, like musescore, like vlc, like krita, like blender... You don't need to be the best, you just need to be good enough and eventually people will help or pay developers; given enough time it may eventually become the most popular on its category.
VLC and Krita are both great and popular, but I'd guess that VLC is a closer analogue to Blender as far as market share vs. commercial alternatives (e.g. Maya and Cinema 4D in the case of Blender.)
Very excited for the command palette. I wish something like that was accessible in every app. I know there's Plotinus but it feels kind of hacky--high-level support at the toolkit/HIG level for the whole desktop would be incredible.
In the old times I have used Inkscape from curiosity and to free my self from Adobe. After initial interface hick-ups I found it very useful for shape blocking. Nowadays Affinity Designer is 90 percent of my graphic design and part time UI workflow. The rest is in Figma. I hope new version of Inkscape is more responsive under Mac Os, the quartz version was frustrating to work with.
I’m curious as to if other commenters share the pet peeve of, particularly design software that wouldn’t present itself properly in Retina?
For a while Unity didn’t support it and it was definitely one of ‘those things’ about using it I hated until they perfected it. (There was a limited beta window for it as I believe an ‘experimental’ option?)
Design software should definitely ideally match the DPI it’s supposed to be presented in. That’s almost a make or break for myself.
I think in this case the problem is that Inkscape's rendering pipeline is just extremely computational inefficient on macOS. It's not that things don't show properly, it just takes too long to draw all the pixels. MS Excel for Mac actually has the same problem if you fullscreen a spreadsheet on a 5k external display unless you put the display in low res scaling mode.
If I remember correctly, which I probably don't, it's partly also because the macOS display process involves painting something like 2-4x as many pixels as the screen actually has and then downscaling the result because that looks prettier than just drawing the exact pixels directly. But I'm probably misremembering that part.
The scaling issue is that Apple only uses integer scaling factors. So any res that isn’t an exact multiple of the notional “1x” value gets rendered at a higher res and downsampled.
I think it’s more either “lazy” or “pragmatic” (depending on your view) programming to avoid various issues you can get with non integer scaling.
> Though you can tell macOS to launch it in low resolution mode and that does help a lot.
I never knew about this trick. Just tried it and it bumped Inkscape's performance on my 2015 MBP from "not quite usable" to "usable enough" for my occasional design needs. Thanks!
This is a blunt question, I know, but is Inkscape actually good yet? I just don't hear anybody talking about it, and I hear more about people moving from Illustrator to Affinity Designer. It doesn't seem like it's become the Blender of vector graphics.
I've found that Inkscape, GIMP, and Krita pretty much fill all my graphics-creation needs, and have never felt the need to use a commercial application instead.
If you have a specific need that you can't figure out how to achieve in Inkscape, then asking how to do that specific thing would be much more productive.
As an iOS dev for a living and a mainly MacOS user I have unfortunately found the UI/UX experience of Inkscape and GIMP (especially) to be kinda rough to use, I feel like maybe it’s better on Linux?
I am an artist. Illustrator is my main tool, and has been for about twenty years now. And I've never felt much desire to switch when I look at Inkscape's features.
Apparently it still doesn't do CMYK, never mind deal with spot inks: https://inkscape.org/learn/faq/#how-create-graphics-cmyk-col... - that was a deal-killer the last time I looked at it, probably something like a decade ago, and it's still a deal-killer for me now.
I dunno if that's me saying "it's not any good" or not but it sure isn't me saying I'm willing to spend a few days fucking around with something that can't do something my work requires on a regular basis.
Another barrier is the stark difference in UX paradigms.
Illustrator and Inkscape have very different paradigms. Inkscape draws from the Corel Draw camp, and the barrier to use for anyone skilled in one or the other goes way back.
I have moderate skill using Illustrator and am adept at Inkscape, and that goes right back to Corel being totally capable enough and cheap, and because I basically had licenses bought for me, Corel has always been free.
As Inkscape really began to be robust, I found it simple to step off the Corel train, rarely missing a beat.
CMYK is only for print - but a pro artist is gonna send a lot of stuff to print. Even in this age of a lot of digital distribution:
Someone's gotta do the packaging for almost everything you buy at stores.
Go to a convention: someone designed all the signage for the con, the badges, as well as the individual booths and any amount of what they may be selling. Plus all the fliers and stickers whatnot people want to hand out.
Gotten anything shipped lately? Did it come in a box with more than one color on it? Those are probably a couple of spot inks, rather than CMYK. That's a thing where instead of mixing a color from little dots of the primaries, you load up a tank in the printer with ink mixed to a very specific color.
Got a collection of Pokemon cards? Pull out those extra-rare ones with the foil and gloss and stuff. The precise process for actually putting those on the card varies and may not involve anything resembling "ink" at all but a lot of those are specified as spot inks too.
I could probably come up with more examples but there is a cat milling about my ankles who is very vocal about her need for some playtime. :)
Automated RGB-to-CMYK translation has gotten better over the years but if you are a pro, you will probably have had enough nasty surprises when that fails that you know how to do it yourself, maybe you're even like me and work in CMYK to begin with as a rule so that you never have to fuck around with finessing that translation.
(And yeah, I drifted from CMYK to spot inks, basically there is a whole world of Printing Process that an RGB-only program is unable to do, and while you can come up with workarounds they are all a ton of hassle.)
I use it for lots of stuff, but I have to say, at least the Mac version gets unusably slow in some situations - not even highly complex ones (large hi dpi imported bitmap graphics, etc).
But is it good? Hell yeah. Learn the keys and the quirks its like the vi of vector graphics - your fingers can dance on the keyboard and work at twice the pace you get from mouse driven point and click type workflow. You will note nearly all the "complainers" are people saying "I tried it for 5 minutes and gave up because of X" - if that's you then, yeah. But you probably wouldnt like vi either.
It's by far the best open source vector editor out there. Whatever that means varies from person to person. I don't do vectors for publishing so CMYK support is never on my mind. But other people do and if and how this works in Inkscape can be a no-starter.
For our friends the "is it good enough for me to use, oh and BTW what I mean is can you name a selection of random impressive graphics people, because even better if they use this tool at work" software meta-evaluators out there--I really recommend tightening up the spec a bit and figuring out what kind of project or workplace you want to see it used in to determine whether it's "good" for example.
You could even send out free evaluation copies and see if it sticks in your favorite impressive industry. :-)
Software quality is a function of the effort put into it. A generic “is it good yet?” question is not especially useful. It depends on a lot of things.
Don’t take it personally, I probably read the same question at slashdot in ‘97.
i use it for all my icon creation needs, i like it just fine. it's not what i would call intuitive in terms of workflow but i get the feeling that vector graphics in general just aren't
Color management i.e. CMYK and spots weren't working last time I checked. You can use Scribus to convert colors based on a profile, but color should be handled from the beginning.
If its color management was good and it imports from/exports to pdf well, I wouldn't need Illustrator anymore. I honestly hate illustrator, would be glad to switch, but I'm more likely to move to Affinity than to Inkscape.
I remember using inkscape for laser cutting, something that, I think, should be basic - a few lines a circles, some red, some black. It would crash like every two hours.
I have no real arts skills and this was on Windows, but I walked away with an inpression that it's not a tool I would want to use proffeshionally. That was about 2 years ago
I've been a huge fan of Inkscape for over twenty years, and some of its tools are still unmatched by Affinity Designer. Though, I find Affinity to be way better with the features I need 98% of the time, and more responsive too. But now I can afford to pay for Affinity Designer. Before Affinity, Inkscape was my go-tool for vector drawing, because Illustrator is certainly not an option, even now.
Inkscape is probably not the best nor most convenient vector drawing tool, but it's probably the most affordable and usable to the majority of the planet's population, so it has my fondness and respect.
I just downloaded and tried the new welcome screen, I like the preview icons at the bottom when you change UI theme. Inkscape is improving with every new release!
While I am by no means an expert user, and I have a lot to learn on how to properly use inkscape, I used it for creating some figures for my thesis and it really came in handy. Congratulations on the release!
I love Inkscape, and even more so now that I found the included tutorials. A pleasure to use. Can’t wait until it works again on the latest OS X! (Not whining, to be clear - I fully understand how little Apple cares about making it easy to support this type of software across upgrades).
Congrats to the Inkscape contributors! I'm particularly looking forward to try the new dialog docking as the old one tends to hide the thing that I'm after, worked against spatial memory IMO, and would also frequently not take or offer to "apply" my changes.
So many tools save metadata in the files. This is really common. Is it what you want? Maybe not, but it happens a lot.
A few years ago, there was somebody scraping the web for headshots, and an amazing number of them where photoshop crops that still had the full original image embedded in them, and a number of them were nudes. He posted the more 'interesting' ones. It was part of an article about the dangers of file metadata.
I wish I had the link right now, but it was years ago.
Note: In the shots that he posted, he 'blurred' the faces and identifying tattoos. He wasn't trying to dox people, just trying to alert people to be careful about what you post and share.
I love Inkscape, but since 1.0 there's this problem, where everything is too big on Windows 10 (at least on my laptop). Icons, menus, button etc. have unnecessary padding and UI takes up like 60% of my screen. I still couldn't find a way to scale down UI.
This bug needs to be fixed, otherwise it may not be usable on some PCs. Otherwise, Inkscape is really great.
Inkscape slowness on mac was never an XQuartz problem. All GTK (or maybe it's Cairo) apps are just terribly slow on macOS (even scrolling in meld is janky as hell and meld doesn't exactly do very much), and the new Inkscape is no exception. In fact, by some accounts the XQuartz version was if anything better in this regard.
Plugin API isn't stable yet[0]. After this work is done, plugins will have to be ported to the final API. This will still take some time. I don't it will happen this year.
I'm looking forward to gimp 3.2 which will have non-destructive editing that is one of the last remaining pieces before it will be more acceptable for professional photography.
GIMP has the potential to become even a powerful compositor[1].
Well, I guess for every guy using MS Paint and GIMP for maritime 3D cutaway illustrations, there's another person using Inkscape for cropping. No judgement.
That link. Wow. Kudos to the guy for perfecting his art. I love the end result and I love those kind of engineering cutaways in general.
If coming new to the game, I feel that using Blender to make it in 3D would give you reusable parts that could be resized, coloured and posed from any angle. Allowing the next "similar engineering object" to be made much faster.
But for someone who has already so clearly mastered their process I suspect that the time taken to master Blender and the frustations involved would detract too much from the joy of their work.
I've done both Blender and GIMP-only methods and TBH the GIMP method is nice in that you are stuck with one camera shot decided in advance. Eventually in full 3D I start fiddling with camera angles think about all the animation possibilities and it's downhill from there, time-wise. :-)
Though I have also found that it's sometimes nice to block things out with Blender so that the camera perspective is easy to work out quickly and the main shape lines are all blocked in...
Maybe I'm wrong, I'm a very causal user, but I think the only way to do it is to create a shape that covers the part you want to keep, and then do object -> set -> clip or something like that; it's not exceedingly awful, but it's not as smooth as clicking "crop" and dragging borders.
> Also, there are not 2 workflows, one for rectangles and one for arbitrary shapes, which is a good thing.
I think having a unified workflow is a good thing, and that that can exist along side important special cases.
A tool like inkscape gets a ton of "casual" once-in-a-while use and some amount of frequent power-user use. It's tricky to facilitate both kinds of use, but I think that should be a goal.
What you wrote is not ridiculous like the following statement, but consider "Yeah, you have to draw by using your text editor on an SVG file. There are not two workflows, one for drawings and one for text, which is a good thing."
You could "just" crop by subtracting shapes manually every time, too. Rectangle crops are extremely common so it makes sense to have a tool for that even if it just generates the underlying concept(as with shape-to-path).
If I were approaching the problem fresh, though, I would look into the presentation of the modal functions as the root of the issue. The source of a lot of complexity in image editing software is confusion over layers, masks, groups, and selections - they have some conceptual overlap and can be applied modally(e.g. shape as rendering element OR mask OR selection). If the UI buries the difference it just adds to the confusion.
Tried working with Inkscape on my MacBook this weekend. It keeps freezing up unfortunately. Like to work with it, but it does not seem to be stable enough to do production work with that.
You wouldn't want to port it. There are a billion icons and toolbars which won't fit on the ipad. The whole thing would have to be redesigned from the ground up with a UI similar to procreate that keeps the main canvas free from UI.
And if you put in that much effort, you are going to want to charge for the app. Understandably, iPadOS doesn't have a thriving open source / free culture.
That’s a pretty big ask on a technical level, i’d be very surprised to see that happen anytime soon.
If you’re looking to get out of the adobe ecosystem i’ve had a pretty positive experience using Affinity Designer on my ipad (no affiliation with either company).
Wacom has some much cheaper Cintiq displays these days. I think it's $350 for the 13" and $650 for the 16". I got the 16" recently to update from an old Intuos that finally gave up the ghost after 15 years. The texture of the stylus on the display is a lot better than an Apple Pencil on an iPad, even with a silicon tip (which I also have).
Just bear in mind that the cheaper Wacom displays are not glass screens. I have the 16" cintiq (not pro) and the screen has a few scratches in it already.
The biggest advantage for me is the actual Wacom pen, which was designed to be held and used for a long time comfortably. The apple pencil is ok but I need something with a thicker grip and putting a pencil grip on the apple pencil covers the two touch buttons and stops you from recharging it.
I still have and use an iPad pro with apple pencil 2 but the Wacom pen is 1000x better.
If you are doing drawing, you should give this a chance: https://concepts.app/en/ free version is very good on Windows. But their main platform seems to be Apple devices.
Inkscape is garbage. I downloaded SVG map of the world from Wikipedia. Used bucket fill to change color of one country, it failed (it created new shape that barely resembled country but was inaccurate, as if someone traced it by hand). I mean what's the point of vector graphic app of it cannot do basic operation after two decades of development. It's not like I wanted to do something obscure.
You did it wrong. In a vector drawing program, you do not change colors using the bucket fill. You should learn to use a tool before complaining it does not work.
And just another FYI, but you need to remember that an SVG is a structured document, where the structure may or not be obviously reflected in how it is rendered. I'm not sure which SVG you were playing with, but for instance if I grab https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Politica... and then ungroup the top level (or 2nd level on some objects) I can easily select whole countries "colour" and manipulate and change them. And that particular file has grouped non-contiguous nations like Indonesia or Australia properly associating the islands. But as others have said here - your issue is nothing to with Inkscape but the SVG you have chosen and how you expect it to behave.
Vector images are nothing like bitmap images. You can't take bucket fill and use it like you would in Paint. What you did, it seems, is you used a bucket fill on a group of objects, setting their fill to the same color.
For what it does, Inkscape is one of the very few usable, large open source tools. It has the same problems other OSS projects do (suboptimal UI being one) but it's not tool's fault you expected behavior that's at odds with vector graphics.
When I took a look at the text saved in the file, I was pretty shocked to discover it saved the entire path of the file in the file.
In other words, it saves a directory structure that could contain your username, the name of the project you're working on, what company you're working for, etc.
Felt like a pretty shocking invasion of privacy to me. When I throw up an SVG on the web, I don't want it to contain potentially personally identifiable information.