Illustrator has more features. Are any of them useful for laser cutting? IDK.
Creating/Editing/Troubleshooting is going to be faster in Illustrator. Once you are a true master. Which is the catch. This will probably take years of full day, daily use.
I use Inkscape because free and it doesn’t lack any features I need/use. I’ve read a lot of how to do it in Illustrator threads and while I have sometimes thought, that’d be nice, I have seen nothing Inkscape can’t do.
Or engraving? Could be.
It’s very possible to do photo-realistic work in both programs. Very few people in the laser world though are actually using either program for illustration (or advanced Illustration). It seems to be mostly drawing out shapes, adding text, and grabbing from google and image tracing (image tracing will almost never yield results as good as you can do by hand).
I just used a file from a Google image search the other day where I thinks to myself, that’s not an svg it has to be a png or other raster. It downloads as a svg and I thinks to myself, it must be a raster embedded in a svg. I open the file and thinks to myself, wow I didn’t know you could do that with gradients.
I’m still thinking to myself, to start with an empty file and to create something photo-realistic must take a bit of time. Me thinks that is the reason you don’t see it much in the laser world. Better to take some fantastic, amazing, superb photo and make a puzzle out of it.
Silhouette has a design app. You need the Business Edition to be able to export SVGs, but a lot of people on here use it.
I use a combination of Inkscape, Affinity Designer, and Silhouette Studio, depending on what I’m working on. I like Silhouette’s trace function best, although Inkscape is probably better for really intricate things, and working with text is probably the easiest there. If I’m laying out text, shapes, etc., I typically opt for Affinity Designer. I find it to be more user friendly than Inkscape. And if I need to do some nitty gritty editing, I go with Inkscape, but that’s probably just because I’m most familiar with Inkscape.
I have a lot more experience with Adobe products than anything else, but I do my best to avoid supporting subscription-based software models that don’t offer me any real benefits vs. stand-alone purchases.
Thought I’d share this link
Adobe wants us all on Creative Cloud now and they have a 40% off sale…
https://commerce.adobe.com/checkout/email/?items[0][id]=036CF793360AE5A8CAF03A3C0536B3A1&items[0][cs]=0&cli=creative&co=US&lang=en&trackingid=K7SLVRRD&mv=email
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