Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program, Third Edition

Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program, Third Edition, is the guide to the Inkscape program, with coverage of versions 0.46 and 0.47. This authoritative introduction and reference features hundreds of useful illustrations.With Inkscape, you can produce a wide variety of art, from photorealistic drawings to organizational charts. Inkscape uses SVG, a powerful vector-based drawing language and W3C web standard, as its native format. SVG drawings can be viewed directly in browsers such as Firefox and Opera. A subset of SVG has been adopted by the mobile phone market. Inkscape is available free for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. Systematic coverage of the entire Inkscape program begins with eleven tutorials ranging in difficulty from very basic to highly complex.

The remainder of the book covers each facet of Inkscape in detail with an emphasis on practical solutions for common problems.The book is filled with valuable tips and warnings about the use of Inkscape and SVG. Find dozens of Inkscape illustrations from the book in the online color supplement found at http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/.

Updated for Inkscape v0.47, this new edition includes complete coverage of new features, including updated Pen and Pencil tools with new spiro, polyline, and sketch modes; the new Eraser tool; and the new Snapping toolbar with improved snapping. Advanced topics include the use of Inkscape’s powerful tiling tool, built-in bitmap tracing, and SVG use on the Web.

Complete Coverage of New and Improved Inkscape 0.47 Features

• Complete vector drawing program supporting the W3C SVG standard

• Three path-drawing tools (Pencil, Pen, Calligraphy)

• Five shape-drawing tools (Rectangles, Ellipses, Stars, Spirals, 3D Boxes)

• Linear and Radial Gradients

• Pattern fills

• Tweak Tool for fine adjustment of paths and colors

• Eraser Tool with both Vector and Bitmap modes

• Sophisticated snapping for precision drawing and aligning objects

• Extendable through scripting; over a hundred scripts included

• Live Path Effects for tasks such as adding patterns along a path while maintaining complete editability

• Over 200 pre-built SVG filters for adding textures, manipulating color, and so forth

• A tiling tool to create complex tilings with thirteen different symmetries

• Clipping and Masking objects

• An integrated spell checker

• Built-in bitmap-to-vector tracing

• The ability to export to more than a dozen graphics formats, including PDF and PostScript

• The ability to import from more than two-dozen graphics formats, including PDF, Adobe Illustrator, Coral Draw, AutoCad, and XFig