Inkscape: Encyclopedia II - Inkscape - Features

Inkscape - Features

Inkscape - Object creation

• Drawing:
  • pencil tool (freehand drawing with stroked paths)
  • pen tool (creating paths with Bezier curves and straight lines)
  • calligraphy tool (freehand drawing with calligraphic strokes, tablet pressure/angle support)
• Shape tools:
  • rectangles (optionally with rounded corners)
  • ellipses (optionally circles, arcs, segments)
  • stars/polygons (optionally rounded and/or randomized)
  • spirals
• Text tool (regular multiline or flowed text)
• Linked bitmap images, either imported or rasterized from selected objects (a separate utility for embedding linked images comes with the program)
• Clones ("live" linked copies of objects)

Inkscape - Object manipulation

• Affine transformations (moving, scaling, rotating, skewing), both interactively and by specifying numeric values
• Z-order operations
• Grouping objects, with a way to "select in group" without ungrouping, or "enter the group" making it a temporary layer
• Layers, with a way to lock and/or hide individual layers, rearrange them, etc; layers can form a hierarchical tree
• Copying and pasting objects
• Alignment and distribution commands, including grid arrange, randomization, unclumping
• A tool to create patterns of clones, using wallpaper symmetries plus arbitrary scales, shifts, rotates, and color changes, optionally randomized
• Grid and guide snapping

Inkscape - Fill and stroke

• Color selector (RGB, HSL, CMYK, color wheel)
• Color picker ("dropper") tool
• Copy/paste style between objects
• On-canvas gradient editing with draggable and mergeable handles
• A gradient editor capable of multi-stop gradients
• Pattern fills
• Dashed strokes, with predefined dash patterns
• Path markers (e.g. arrowheads)

Inkscape - Operations on paths

• Node editing: moving nodes and Bezier curve handles, node alignment and distribution, scaling and rotating node groups
• Converting to path (for text objects or shapes), including converting stroke to path
• Boolean operations (union, intersection, difference, exclusion, division)
• Path simplification, with variable threshold
• Path insetting and outsetting, including dynamic and linked offset objects
• Bitmap tracing (both color and b/w)

Inkscape - Text support

• Multi-line text (SVG 1.1 <text>)
• Flowed text in frame(s) (proposed SVG 1.2 <flowRoot>)
• Full on-canvas editability, including styled text spans
• Uses any outline fonts installed on the system
• Can use any scripts and languages supported by the Pango library (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, etc.)
• Kerning, letterspacing, linespacing adjustments
• Text on path (both text and path remain editable)

Inkscape - Rendering

• 256x maximum zoom
• Fully anti-aliased display
• Alpha transparency support for display and PNG export
• Complete "as you drag" rendering of objects during interactive transformations

Inkscape - Miscellaneous

• Connector tool for diagrams
• Collaborative editing over the net ("Whiteboard")
• Live watching and editing the document tree in the XML editor
• PNG and PostScript export
• Command line options for export, conversions, and analysis of SVG files
• RDF metadata (authorship, date, license, etc.)
• Extension support

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki