Inkscape

Inkscape

Inkscape 0.48.2, showing a red Lamborghini Gallardo
Preview release 0.91 (January 30, 2015 (2015-01-30)) [±][1]
Development status Active
Written in C++ with gtkmm, Python (extensions)
Operating system Windows, OS X, Linux
Platform IA-32 and x64
Size 93.3 MB
Available in 66 languages"List of language files at time of release of version 0.91 - launchpad.net repository". Inkscape. 2015-01-28. Retrieved 2015-08-16. 
Type Vector graphics editor
License GNU General Public License
Website inkscape.org

Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor; it can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos and complex paintings. Inkscape's primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) version 1.1.[2] While Inkscape can import and export several formats, all editing workflow inevitably occur within the constraints of the SVG format.[3]

Inkscape can render the primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectangles, ellipses, polygons, arcs, spirals, stars and isometric boxes), text and regions containing raster graphics. It supports image tracing, enabling the editor to create vector graphics from photos and other raster sources. Created shapes can be subjected to further transformations, such as moving, rotating, scaling and skewing. These objects may be filled with solid colors or color gradients, their borders stroked or their transparency changed. As of 2015, Inkscape does not support SVG animation or full Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) specifications.

History

Inkscape began in 2003 as a code fork of the Sodipodi project.[4] Sodipodi, developed since 1999, was itself based on Raph Levien's Gill (Gnome Illustration Application).[5]

The Inkscape FAQ interprets the word Inkscape as a compound of ink and scape.[6][7]

Four former Sodipodi developers (Ted Gould, Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst, and MenTaLguY) led the fork; they identified differences over project objectives, openness to third-party contributions, and technical disagreements as their reasons for forking. With Inkscape, they said they would focus development on implementing the complete SVG standard, whereas Sodipodi development emphasized developing a general-purpose vector graphics editor, possibly at the expense of SVG.[8]

Following the fork, Inkscape's developers changed it greatly: they rewrote it from C into C++; adopted the GTK+ toolkit C++ bindings (gtkmm); redesigned its user interface, and added a number of new features.[9] Notably, Inkscape's implementation of the SVG standard, although incomplete, has shown gradual improvement.[10]

Since 2005 Inkscape has participated in the Google Summer of Code program.[11]

Up until the end of November 2007, Inkscape's bug tracking system was hosted on Sourceforge. Thereafter it moved to Launchpad.[12]

Features

Object creation

Inkscape 0.48.2, showing a rectangle (selected with the select tool), an ellipse, a star and two text objects

The basic objects in Inkscape are:

Additionally, there are more specialized objects:

Object manipulation

Screenshot of Inkscape 0.45 on Ubuntu, showing outline view

Every object in the drawing can be subjected to arbitrary affine transformations: moving, rotating, scaling, skewing and a configurable matrix. Transformation parameters can be also specified numerically in the Transform dialog. Transformations can snap to angles, grids, guidelines and nodes of other objects. Grids, guides and snapping properties are defined on a per-document basis. As an alternative to snapping, an Align and Distribute dialog is provided, which can perform common alignment tasks on selected objects: e.g. line them up in a specified direction, space them equally, scatter them at random and remove overlaps between objects.

Objects can be arbitrarily grouped together. Groups of objects behave in many respects like "atomic" objects: for instance, they can be cloned or assigned a paint. Objects making up a group can be edited without having to ungroup it first, via an Enter Group command: the group can then be edited like a temporary layer. Z-order of objects can be managed either using layers, or by manually moving the object up and down in the Z stack. Layers can be locked or hidden, preventing modifying and accidental selection.

A special tool, Create Tiled Clones, is provided to create symmetrical or grid-like drawings using various plane symmetries.

Objects can be cut, copied and pasted using a clipboard. However, as of version 0.46, Inkscape uses an internal variable rather than the system clipboard, which limits copy and paste operations to one application instance. Objects can be copied between documents by opening them from the File menu in an already opened window, rather than by opening a second file from the operating system's shell.

Styling objects

Each object in Inkscape has several attributes which determine its style. All of the attributes can generally be set for any object:

Appearance of objects can be further changed by using masks and clipping paths, which can be created from arbitrary objects, including groups.

The style attributes are 'attached' to the source object, so after cutting/copying an object into the clipboard, the style's attributes can be pasted to another object.

Operations on paths

Inkscape has a comprehensive tool set to edit paths, as they are the basic element of a vector file. The Node tool allows editing single or multiple paths on single or multiple node levels by editing the position of nodes and control points of Bezier paths or Spiro curves. Path segments can be adjusted by dragging them. When multiple nodes are selected, they can be moved, scaled and rotated using keyboard shortcut or mouse controls. Additional nodes can be inserted into paths at arbitrary or even placements, and an effect can be used to insert nodes at predefined intervals. When nodes are deleted, the handles on remaining ones are adjusted to preserve the original shape as closely as possible.

Tweak tool is provided for more high-level, whole object(s) or node editing regions (parts) of an object. It can push, repel/attract, randomize positioning, shrink/enlarge, rotate, copy/delete selected whole objects. With parts of a path you can push, shrink/enlarge, repel/attract, roughen edges, blur and color. Nodes are dynamically created and deleted when needed while using this tool, so it can also be used on simple paths without pre-processing.

Other possible high-level operations on paths include offsetting or insetting a path by a fixed amount. Creating an unlinked dynamic offset of a path which can be fine tuned using the Node tool. Creating a linked offset of a path will update whenever the original is modified. Object converting another shape like a spiral or text into a path, converting the stroke of a shape to a path. Simplifying a path to contain less nodes while preserving the shape, or performing Boolean operations like union, difference, intersection or exclusion on them.

Inkscape includes a feature called Live Path Effects, which can apply various modifiers to a path. Envelope Deformation is available via the Path Effects and provides a perspective effect. There are more than a dozen of these live path effects. LPE can be stacked onto a single object and have interactive live on canvas and menu-based editing of the effects.

Text support

Inkscape supports text editing for both regular multi-line text (SVG's <text> element) and flowed text (the non-standard <flowRoot> element, formerly proposed for SVG 1.2). As of version 0.47, flowed text is not rendered by other applications, due to a lack of an appropriate parallel <switch> structure in the SVG document. The SVG 1.2 Tiny <textArea> element is not supported. All text is directly editable on canvas. Text rendering is based on the Pango library, which allows Inkscape to support several complex scripts including Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Tibetan, etc. Kerning and letter-spacing can be adjusted on a per-glyph basis using keyboard shortcuts. Putting text on path is also supported, and both the text and the path remain editable. Inkscape supports italicized and bold, as well as super- and subscript character attributes, but underlining is not yet implemented.

Rendering

For a long time, unlike many other GTK+ applications, Inkscape used its own rendering library to create graphics, called libnr. From version 0.91 on, Inkscape uses Cairo to render graphics,[13] which brought a significant increase in rendering speed of the application.

File formats

Inkscape's primary format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) version 1.1, meaning that it can create and edit with the abilities and within the constraints of this format. Any other format must either be imported (converted to SVG) or exported (converted from SVG). The SVG format is using the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard internally. Inkscape's implementation of SVG and CSS standards is incomplete. Most notably, it does not support animation. Inkscape has multilingual support, particularly for complex scripts.

Inkscape can natively import from the following formats:

It can import the following formats with aid from extensions:

Inkscape can natively export to the following formats:

Other features

Interface and usability

One of the main priorities of the Inkscape project is interface consistency and usability.[17] This includes efforts to follow the GNOME human interface guidelines, universal keyboard accessibility, and convenient on-canvas editing. Inkscape has achieved significant progress in usability since the project started.

The number of floating dialog boxes has been reduced, with their functions available using keyboard shortcuts or in the docked toolbars in the editing window. The tool bar controls at the top of the window always display the controls relevant to the current tool.

All vector transformations, scale, rotation and positioning (minus skewing) have keyboard shortcuts with consistent modifiers ( Alt transforms by 1 screen pixel at the current zoom, Shift multiplies the transformation by 10, etc.). These keys work on nodes in Node tool as well as on objects in the Selector Tool. The most common operations (such as transformations, zooming, z-order) have convenient one-key shortcuts.

Inkscape provides floating tooltips and status bar hints for all buttons, controls, commands, keys, and on-canvas handles. The hint messages are dynamic: A given object can display up to four hints while editing it with just one tool. The hints update based on two items—the tool being used, and the type of object/node/handle being edited—text, shapes, paths, node types, etc. It comes with a complete keyboard and mouse reference (in HTML and SVG)[18] and several interactive tutorials in SVG.[19]

The interface of Sodipodi (Inkscape's predecessor) was based on those of CorelDRAW and GIMP. The Inkscape interface has been influenced by Xara Xtreme.

Platform support

The latest version of Inkscape is available for Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms.[20] Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available for Windows PCs.

Inkscape on OS X typically runs on XQuartz, although the underlying GTK+ toolkit can be compiled to run natively under Quartz.[21]

Inkscape is packaged for all major Linux distributions (including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE).

Version history

Inkscape 0.48.1

See also

References

  1. "Inkscape 0.91 Release Announcement". The Inkscape Team. 2015-01-27. Retrieved 2015-01-27.
  2. "Roadmap". Inkscape Wiki. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
  3. "Inkscape Features". Inkscape.org. Retrieved 11 September 2014.
  4. "FAQ". Inkscape Project. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  5. "Linux.com Interviews Lauris Kaplinski". Linux.com. 2001-09-24. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  6. "FAQ". Inkscape Project. Retrieved 2016-02-10. What does 'Inkscape' mean? [...] The name is made up of the two English words 'ink' and 'scape'. Ink is a common substance for drawings, and is used when the sketched work is ready to be permanently committed to paper, and thus evokes the idea that Inkscape is ready for production work. A scape is a view of a large number of objects, such as a landscape or ocean-scape, and thus alludes to the object-oriented nature of vector imagery.
  7. Compare -scape
  8. "Announcing new project (sodipodi mailing list)". 2003-11-06. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  9. "Inkscape Sodipodi Comparison". Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  10. "Frequently asked questions - Inkscape Wiki". Wiki.inkscape.org. 2012-07-29. Retrieved 2012-11-09.
  11. "Google's Summer of Code". Inkscape wiki.
  12. "Inkscape moving to Launchpad".
  13. "Release notes/0.91". Inkscape Wiki. Retrieved 2015-08-15.
  14. 1 2 "PDF Creation Software". PDF Bible. Retrieved 15 November 2011.
  15. "What formats can Inkscape import/export?". Inkscape Wiki. Retrieved 2015-08-16.
  16. "Extension repository". Inkscape Wiki. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
  17. "Inkscape FAQ, How did Inkscape start?". Inkscape Project. Retrieved 2015-08-16.
  18. "Inkscape keyboard reference". Inkscape Project. Retrieved 2015-08-16.
  19. "Inkscape tutorials web page". Inkscape Project. Retrieved 2015-08-16.
  20. Download, InkScape website
  21. "Open Source Macintosh Packages". Flyn Computing. 2006-12-29. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
  22. "Inkscape". inkscape.org.
  23. "Release notes for 0.91". wiki.inkscape.org.

Further reading

  • Benjamin, Donna (February 22, 2010), Beginning Inkscape (1st ed.), Apress, p. 400, ISBN 1-4302-2513-0 
  • Kirsanov, Dmitry (September 29, 2009), The Book of Inkscape: The Definitive Guide to the Free Graphics Editor (1st ed.), No Starch Press, p. 476, ISBN 1-59327-181-6 
  • Bah, Tavmjong (May 6, 2011), Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program (4th ed.), Prentice Hall, p. 504, ISBN 0-13-705173-5 

External links

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