Dmitry Kirsanov - The Book of Inkscape: The Definitive Guide to the Free Graphics Editor
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This book would not exist if not for the help and encouragement of the staff of No Starch Press, in particular Megan Dunchak, Tyler Ortman, Kathleen Mish, and Magnolia Molcan. I am also indebted to the technical reviewers, Tim Cole and Joshua Andler, whose suggestions really improved the book.
I owe gratitude and respect to the Inkscape development teamdozens of dedicated volunteers who spent countless man-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 proofreading the book.
This book has two main goals.
First, this is a book about Inkscape, a powerful open source SVG-based vector graphics editor. It describes the stable version 0.47 (released in summer 2009) in great detail, covering all of its features (excluding only a few that are clearly 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 the exclusive domain of professional designers, in the recent years vector graphics software has grown much more visible and accessible. A vector editor is not yet a standard accessory of a computer in the same way a bitmap editor like Photoshop is, but its getting thereand Inkscape has been a major part of this vector revolution.
Much of Inkscapes appeal lies in its being the only professional-level vector editor which is fully open source and cross-platform. Theres more to it than that, however. Simple and accessible at the basic level, Inkscape is also extremely powerful if you dig deeper; it is vast and inexhaustibly hackablefrom customizable keyboard shortcuts (). This book swims the Inkscape ocean from shore to shore without leaving any island unvisited.
gives an absolutely down-to-the-basics primer on the first steps in the program (installation, opening, creating objects, transforming them, saving); you can safely skip this chapter if you have ever completed even a small Inkscape project.
The bulk of the book, Chapters to , is written to be read more or less in sequence. These chapters present all aspects of Inkscape functionality (objects, transformations, style, paths, text, and so on) with detailed explanations, illustrations, and practical tips.
The second part of the book (starting from ) with reference information, including a complete list of keyboard and mouse shortcuts.
Inkscape is a work in progress. So is this book. New stable versions of Inkscape are released approximately once a year, and I will try to keep this book up to date. For the latest updates, visit http://www.nostarch.com/inkscape.htm .
You dont need to be a graphics professional to find this book useful. Even if you are entirely new to vector editors, this book should be a gentle enough introduction to get you started on your vector graphics journey. You will have some new concepts to grasp and some terminology to learn, but that should come naturally if you practice what you learn. As you read, Id recommend that you run Inkscape and immediately try the techniques described in this book.
On the other hand, even an experienced user of Inkscape or another vector graphics program should find enough to chew on in this book. I am writing from two perspectivesthat of a user of Inkscape and that of a developer, and I hope my experience of contributing to the Inkscape project allows me to more clearly see the logic of the programs interface and behavior, to identify its particularly strong and weak points (and to suggest workarounds for the weak points).
This may be your first encounter with vector graphics. Or, you may have used vector graphics before and are now checking to see what else it can do for you. Or, you may be considering Inkscape after having used other vector editing applications and would like to know what sets it apart. Whatever your situation is, you may find some background information useful. What is SVG? What is Inkscape? Where does it come from and where is it headed? What can you use it for? What is Inkscapes place in the world of computer graphics? This introductory chapter attempts to answer these and other questions.
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor . What does that mean?
The majority of images stored and processed on computers today are represented as rasters , also called bitmaps . A raster image is a rather primitive representationjust a lattice of small rectangular areas called pixels . For each pixel, the only information a raster file stores is its color and, possibly, its transparency.
, left), there is in fact no black circle stored in the image at all. Its only you, when viewing this image, who may (or may not) get the idea of a black circle. All the computer knows about the image is that some of its pixels are black and some are white (and a few are an in-between gray).
Figure 1-1. A circle as a bitmap (left) and vector (right)
As a result, there is precious little that the computer can do with such an image without human guidance. It can paint all the white pixels blue, but it cannot move or transform the circle because it does not see it as a separate object. These kinds of tasks may be difficult even for humans, as anyone who has used the GIMP or Photoshop would attest; youll have to use complex and unreliable tools to select the circle, and you can hardly ever do this perfectly if, for example, the edge of the circle is antialiased (so that some pixels on the edge have intermediate values between black and white) as it is in .
Its all different with vector graphics (, right). In a vector format, the actual circle can be stored along with its properties as an object . This means you can easily separate it from other objects and do whatever you please with it. Moreover, with such an image, your computer can do many smart things automaticallyfor example, it can automatically delete all circles, paint all red objects with green, or scale all black circles to twice their size.
No more frustrating pixel selections: Just pick any object and edit it as needed. Thats how Inkscape works, and this is its main point of difference from raster editors such as Photoshop.
Lets look at the most prominent advantages of the vector approach:
Vector images are scalable.
Scalability means you can view or export your drawing at any resolution, and youll never see any jaggedness, pixelation, or unwanted blurring. Everything remains perfectly crisp regardless of size. This is often cited as the main advantage of vector graphics, although in my view, other advantages are no less important.
Vector images are editable at any time.
No matter how complex your drawing is, you can always pick any object in it and edit away. Its a bit like a Photoshop file in which every single brush stroke is placed on a layer of its ownautomatically. Furthermore, in a raster editor, you are supposed to eventually flatten your image, so that all separate layers are merged. By contrast, theres no needindeed no possibilityto flatten a vector drawing (except by exporting it to a raster image).
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