Dmitry Kirsanov - The Book of Inkscape, 2nd Edition: The Definitive Guide to the Graphics Editor

Highly recommended, well written, and full of practical examples and insights, this excellent text can make you a pro at using Inkscape.

IT World

Inkscape is a really exciting, interesting, and powerful design program to learn, and The Book of Inkscape makes this learning process fun and rewarding.

Dr. Dobbs CodeTalk

Dmitry Kirsanovs book enables you to sit down with a freshly downloaded version of Inkscape and work in an ordered and logical way through the software features.

Alan Berg, Free Software Magazine

This book is a great guide to using Inkscape.

On Computers

Clear writing and numerous step-by-step tutorials make this manual the go-to reference for artists new to Inkscape and for experienced users looking for detailed information on the applications features.

SciTech Book News

2nd Edition

by Dmitry Kirsanov

THE BOOK OF INKSCAPE, 2ND EDITION. Copyright 2021 by Dmitry Kirsanov.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

First printing

24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

ISBN-13: 978-1-7185-0175-1 (print)
ISBN-13: 978-1-7185-0176-8 (ebook)

Publisher: William Pollock
Production Manager and Editor: Rachel Monaghan
Developmental Editor: Jill Franklin
Cover and Interior Design: Octopod Studios
Technical Reviewer: Joshua Andler
Compositor and Indexer: Alina Kirsanova
Proofreader: Scout Festa
Illustrator: Dmitry Kirsanov

For information on book distributors or translations, please contact No Starch Press, Inc. directly:
No Starch Press, Inc.
245 8th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
phone: 1.415.863.9900;
www.nostarch.com

The Library of Congress issued the following Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the first edition:

No Starch Press and the No Starch Press logo are registered trademarks of No Starch Press, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we are using the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

The information in this book is distributed on an As Is basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor No Starch Press, Inc. shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in it.

This book would not exist if not for the help and encouragement of the NoStarch Press staff, in particular Jill Franklin, Rachel Monaghan, Barbara Yien, and Bill Pollock. I am alsoindebted to the technical reviewer, Joshua Andler, whose suggestionsreally improved the book.

I owe gratitude and respect to the Inkscape development teamdozens ofdedicated volunteers who spent countless hours creating one of the best vector editors now in existence. It was a pleasure and honor to work with you.

Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Alina, for her unwavering support,constant prodding, and the huge work she did compositing, indexing, and proofreadingthe book.

This book is about Inkscape, the powerful, open source SVG-based vector graphics editor. It describes 1.1, the latest version, released in 2021 after almost two decades of development, in great detail, covering all of its features, excluding only those that are experimental or incomplete.

The second, perhaps more ambitious goal of this book is to evangelize the vector way of creating graphics and share the joy of thinking in vector. Once theexclusive domain of professional designers, vector graphics software has become more common and accessible. A vector editor is not yet a standard app in the same way a bitmap editor (like Photoshop) is, but it's gettingthereand Inkscape has been a major cause of this shift.

Much of Inkscape's appeal is due to the fact that it's the only fully open source and cross-platform professional-level vector editor.But that's not all. Simple and accessible at the basic level, Inkscape is also extremely powerful if you digdeeper. It is vast and inexhaustibly hackablefrom customizable keyboard shortcuts(). This book swims the Inkscape ocean from shore to shore leaving no islandunvisited.

gives an absolutelydown-to-the-basics primer on the first steps in the program (installation, opening,creating objects, transforming them, and saving); you can safely skip this chapter if you haveever completed even a small Inkscape project.

The bulk of the book, , is written to be read more or less insequence. These chapters present all aspects of Inkscape's functionality (objects,transformations, style, paths, text, effects, and more) with detailed explanations,illustrations, and practical tips.

The second part of the book (starting from ) contains several complete step-by-steptutorials demonstrating real-world uses of Inkscape, including an animation, a business card, and a complex illustration of a rose in different styles. The book ends with several appendixesthat provide reference information.

Inkscape is a work in progresseven if this progress may at times seem slow. The previous edition of this bookdescribed version 0.47 and was published way back in 2009. Since then, Inkscape has evolved and matured enormously, and this newedition brings the book up to date with that development. Here are the major features that are new in Inkscape 1.1 compared to 0.47:

• Speed! Inkscape's slowness has been the number one user complaint for many years. Version 1.1 brings great improvements in rendering speed and UI responsiveness, especially with filters () as OpenMP multithreading is now supported for all filters.
• New UI. Inkscape has a modernized GUI toolkit based on GTK 3 and a more usable implementation of dockable dialogs.
• No more SVG-incompatible text. In previous versions, creating flowed (auto-wrapped) text made your file non-compliant SVG because Inkscape used an obsoleted draft SVG specification for this feature. Now, Inkscape-flowed text is valid SVG and displays correctly in all SVG-compliant renderers including web browsers ().
• New tools. Eraser ().
• More powerful Path tool. You can now edit multiple selected paths simultaneously.
• Canvas conveniences. You can now use keyboard shortcuts to rotate the canvas for easier editing or drawing as well as mirror the canvas vertically or horizontally ().