I have been using many vector programs for decades, dating back to the likes of Freehand and such, I currently work in Affinity Designer.

Becasue of some if hte not yet developed tools in that, folks have sugested I use Inkscape to supliment my work flow. 

While I can clearly see that it has some very powerful and useful funtions, I have never seen a vecore program that I was so lost in. I can pick up most of them in a matter of minutes, like driving a friends car.

However whne i go to look up some overall tutorial guide, it is busy shoing me how vectors work in general, some thing i already know well and what i need is something that tells me how inscape funtions diferently.  

I am struggling and i know ther eisa better way of sorting this stuff out, help!

I don't know of any specific resources - apart from anything else, it will depend on exactly what you're struggling with. But I have written nearly 100 tutorials for Full Circle Magazine (free downloads), which are listed back on the old forum:

http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981

At least it might help if you find yourself struggling with something in particular, as you may be able to find it in the list and go straight to the article on that topic.

(For what it's worth I've also got years of experience of a variety of vector graphics and CAD programs, and I find Inkscape far easier to use than most of them. I had to use Illustrator the other day, and was pulling my hair out just trying to achieve a simple effect. So I don't think the problem is with Inkscape as such, just with different experiences and history)

Thanks ill look into those. And you are right in that whatever you are used to always makes the most sense. I was so glad to walk away from .ai ! 

One thing im being driven a bit nuts with is the opjects pannel, understanding why things are subgrouped so many darn times and why. Without groking that aspect, things often do something i want one time, but not another. 

In generally it is inconsistant results that are driving me nuts. Sometime i get stuck somewhere and a simply copy paste from inkscape doc to the other didnt work!!  And today i wanted to apply a path effect (bend) but every time i went to, the the damn selected item jumped a tad to the left (and the the bend control line where it used to be!  Im all for doing the Time Warp, but i would rather my selevtion stop with the jumping ;-). 

Another time i was doing something that should have been totally straight forward and the selected item kept not only jumping way up many screens up and the left, but also suddenly being very small!

I rarely go anywhere near the Objects panel, but if you're finding things are in deeply nested groups, and you haven't put them there yourself, it suggests you're perhaps loading an image that wasn't created in Inkscape in the first place. In which case the problem is the image, rather than Inkscape.

I rarely use LPEs, so can't really comment too much on that. They're certainly one of the trickier areas of Inkscape. Essentially they only exist as a means to add extra functionality to the program that's not natively available in the SVG format, so they're more complex internally than they would need to be otherwise. In software more complexity means more bugs.

I've never seen an issue with an object moving around and shrinking as you describe. The only thing that I can think of that would make it do that in a single operation would be messing with the "transform" attribute, either directly or indirectly (i.e. via the Transform dialog or some other tool). If, however, you mean that the object was panned and zoomed, then that's a UI issue - I've seen behaviour like that in other programs when someone left a pen resting on their trackpad, or the batteries were dying in their wireless mouse.

Remember, if you do see a bug - especially if you are able to reproduce it - please do report it on the bugtracker ( https://inkscape.org/contribute/report-bugs/ ). Inkscape is Open Source, and the only way it improves is by people contributing back to it. Reporting issues is one way to do that.

yeah these were imported SVG files from Affinity Designer, what was weird was that if i tried to take them out of their nested spots, they would become not visable.

as for the jumping, it was not transform or a rebel pen atack. i could repeat it over and over. If i can find the differnce of when it does and does not happen or something tangeble, i'll definatly take the time to file a bug report.

Hi. 

Sounds you have nested groups. Each group can have their own transformation matrices and also be clipped. Pdf-s usually come with the latter. 

My guess is that after deep ungrouping you ended up with a clipped object ending up outside the clipping area -as a result of removing the transformations.

I don't have affinity designer so cannot test. 

But remember to keep an eye to the bottom indication line on the screen that tells valuable information about the selected objects and check the drawing in outlines only rendering mode too -Ctrl+5 on the numpad tiwice for switching. By default masking is marked with blue contours and clipping objects are marked with green. 

"Worst case" scenario I saw was the graphic on screen was made into a pattern fill. All can be corrected with the help of the indication.

Lpe-s are also highly affected by transformation matrices. Best case there is no transformation of the object in question. Like, objects of rectangles, ellipses will always have those by default but not paths with their default "optimized" transformation settings. 

If multiple nested groups are involved in the path effects it can produce unpredictable results due to transformations adding up.

On top of that, lpe-s are applied on the spot and won't update with all the general modifications of the document and some edits -again, involvong transformations. 

For example, using the pattern along path effect. The pattern object can be linked on the core path but once you resize the document to another size, it can mess things up. 

Resizing the page adds a transformation matrix to the document which may or may not apply to the path effect's pattern path strored in the document's defs section. 

These are just my previous experience, would need to run some tests.

On the object panel I hardly use that too for some reasons. 

First it lags big time. Then there is the problem of labeling. If you perform a boolean operation on the object or copy/paste, an automatic generated object name is used, and not an inherited one that you intended to use. It doesn't make tracking the document structure easier. If your drawing process involves spacer objects, it won't speed up production if you label everything and organise them neat.

Recently I'm drafting on a dailiy basis with a cad software and compared to that complexity of documenting a building it's never anywhere complex in a drawing of inkscape.

(In addition the cad program is a mess and needs serious precaution in that regard of organisation. There layers are intended to be used widespread document-wise. However if you copy something to another document it will inherit new layers as well.)

Aside from the good advice above, when you run into something specific that isn't making sense, try going to Youtube.  There are a bunch of short ones that can walk you trhough a specific situation easily.  For starters, Logos by Nick has done a ton of them.  (and ps the folks that answered you above are some of the best, so please check them out).  Nick is a good starting point, lots of free vids, but also he has a master course, where you can pay to be a student (doesn't look too expensive, but I've not ever done it), and if you do that, you can ask him specific questions to your situation.  ps I love Inkscape, but it does have some kinks that need a little bit of tweaking still. 

Yeah that is what i have been doing and that i normally do when learning something, user forums and you tube videos are a wonderful tool that can acomplish nearly anything.  I even bought Nicks amazing series of videos. one thing that is hard is not knowing if something is not working becasue i have not yet sorted out the inner working of a tool or pannel or such, ir if it is just a limitation of the program or even a bug.  

but in the end, im likely just being whiny becasue im used to knowing how shit works and learning fast and for some reason certain aspects of Inkscape seem to be giving me a run for my money. I'll keep plugging away and sort it out.

Yeah, watch out for those nonstandard Affinity SVGs. Their viewbox/scale is broken (and more).

Tyler, can you elaborate? cause these files seem like a mess

Inkscape is firstly a native SVG editor. No proprietary construction-file type like .ai, .crv, .adfdesign, etc.  SVG is an open W3C standard and the developers are commited to making Inkscape output high quality, standards-compliant SVG code.

Other programs... maybe not so much. 

In the Affinity code, note the lack of object IDs, more complete style information, and general lack of organization. Style information is in the header of the SVG rather than at the object level, and most significantly, the SVG height and width are simply valued at 100%, rather than matched to the viewbox attribute.  Height & width and  viewbox values determine the scaling of the image. This is why the document properties and other features in Inkscape won't work properly with a typical Affinity SVG file.

The Inkscape file shown below was exported as "Plain SVG" (leaving out Inkscape specific elements). The AD file is shown before editing.

I have had success using Affinity files in Inkscape by editing the file header using Inkscape's XML editor dialog, changing the SVG Height and Width attributes to match the viewbox coordinates. YMMV

Really want to get into the weeds?

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Units_In_Inkscape

Have a nice day.

TD

Sorry, I didn't read this entire thread, so if this was mentioned already, I apologize.  I don't know which tutorials or manuals you've looked at.  The current most official Inkscape manual, is technically unofficial.  (I know, we keep trying to work on it, but people-power is always lacking, in open source projects.)  But it can be found from Inkscape's Help menu > Inkscape manual.  It does more than just explain vector graphics.  It tells you how Inkscape works, probably in all the detail you (you, Rivka) want.  Most people do not consider it appropriate for newbies.  But you don't sound exactly like a newbie  🙂

Just for Lazur's interest: People have been working on improving the objects dialog performance lately (and performance on the beta in general). You may want to try out the latest beta from https://inkscape.org/release/master/