Tavmjong Bah - Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program, 4th Edition

Guide to a Vector Drawing Program

Fourth Edition

Tavmjong Bah

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Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data

Bah, Tavmjong.
Inkscape : guide to a vector drawing program /Tavmjong Bah4th ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-276414-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-13-276414-8 (pbk.)
1. Computer graphics. 2. Inkscape (Electronic resource) I. Title
T385.B297 2011
006.6'8dc22
2011010197

Copyright 2011 by Tavmjong Bah.

All rights reserved. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

ISBN-13: 978-0-13-276414-8
ISBN-10: 0-13-276414-8
Text printed in the United States at Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Second printing, February 2012

First and foremost, thanks to the many authors of Inkscape! Here are the top 15 in terms of commits to the source code since the v0.48 release: Jon A. Cruz, JazzyNico, Krzysztof Kosiski, Diederik van Lierop, Johan Engelen, Tavmjong Bah, Alexandre Prokoudine, Ted Gould, Josh Andler, Chris Morgan, Kris De Gussem, buliabyak, Alvin Penner, he-lix84, Aurelio A. Heckert. A special thanks to the students at Ecole Centrale de Lyon who implemented the new Spray Tool. I would also like to thank Ted Gould, who put me in touch with Joe Brockmeier, who put me in touch with Prentice Hall. And a thanks to all the readers (especially Jon A. Cruz and Loc Gugant) who have sent me comments and corrections.

This book was produced using emacs [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/], DocBook [http://www.docbook.org/], xsltproc [http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/xsltproc2.html], fop [http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/], and, of course, Inkscape [http://www.inkscape.org/].

Tavmjong Bah is a physicist living in Paris whose writing combines his love for technology and culture. An active member of the community, Tav is an Inkscape developer and is responsible for the improvements to the Text Tool between versions 0.47 and 0.48. He represents Inkscape as an invited expert in the W3C SVG working group. His nom-de-plume is the title granted to him by the paramount chief of the Nso, a Cameroonian people.

Inkscape, Guide to a Vector Drawing Program is the guide to the Inkscape program. The shorter, web-based, version is linked directly under the programs Help menu. This book is both an introduction and reference for the Inkscape drawing program. With Inkscape, one can produce a wide variety of art, from photo-realistic 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 directly viewed by all the major web browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer (starting with version 9). With the advent of HTML5, SVG will be easily embedded in web pages. Inkscape is available free for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.

The first third of the book is devoted to twelve tutorials that progress in difficulty from very basic to highly complex. The remainder of the book covers each facet of Inkscape in detail. Updated for Inkscape v0.48, the book includes complete coverage of new features, including: updated Node tool with multipath editing, new Spray tool, improved Text tool, and many new extensions. Advance topics covered include the use of Inkscapes powerful tiling tool, built-in bitmap tracing, and SVG use on the Web including in HTML5. The book includes plenty of tips (and warnings) about the use of Inkscape and SVG.

This book serves as both a textbook and a reference for using Inkscape to produce high-quality drawings. It includes a series of tutorials followed by chapters that cover completely each facet of the Inkscape program. The book is full of tips and notes to enable the user to make the best use of the program.

Inkscape is an open source, SVG-based vector drawing program. It is useful for drawing:

Illustrations for the Web

Graphics for mobile phones

Simple line drawings

Cartoons

Complex works of art

Figures for articles and books

Organization charts

The file format that Inkscape uses is compact and quickly transmittable over the Internet. Yet it is powerful and can describe complex drawings that are scalable to any size. Support for the format has been added to web browsers and is already included in many mobile phones.

Inkscape supports the drawing of regular shapes (rectangles, circles, etc.), arbitrary paths, and text. These objects can be given a wide variety of attributes such as color, gradient or patterned fills, alpha blending, and markers. Objects can be transformed, cloned, and grouped. Hyperlinks can be added for use in web browsers. The Inkscape program aims to be fully XML, SVG, and CSS compliant.

Inkscape is available prepackaged for the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. The program and its source code are freely available. They can be obtained from the Inkscape website [http://www.inkscape.org/].

Inkscape is undergoing very rapid development with new features being added and compliance to the SVG standard being constantly improved. This manual documents versions 0.47 and 0.48.

Following this introduction, there is a set of tutorials. The tutorials are designed to cover the basics of all the important features found in Inkscape and to lead the reader from the beginning to end of the drawing process.

The bulk of the book is devoted to a detailed discussion of all of Inkscapes features, including examples of solving common drawing problems. Both the strengths and weaknesses of Inkscape are pointed out.