The Inkscape Team is pleased to deliver its newest version, 0.40. The development cycle has been particularly long and intense this time, but we feel it’s our best release yet.
The new layer functionality was tough to fully implement but we’re already seeing artists take up
this capability with glee. The text-on-path feature enables some very
elaborate text layout, that folks have been asking about for quite some
time. The new bitmap tracing support opens some very intriguing
capabilities that we’re quite interested to see put into use.
And we’ve closed a larger quantity of bug reports in this release than
in any other (by nearly a factor of two!). We’ll take a quick tour of
the major new features in this article.
Learning Inkscape
If you’ve ever used a vector drawing tool before, you’ll probably find
the buttons and controls pretty obvious. If not, or if you want to
learn the tool in detail, Inkscape includes several handy tutorials
under the Help menu item. New tutorials for 0.40 include Shapes, Calligraphy,
and Tracing.
Layers
The principal feature for this release is the layer
management. Technically, we implemented them as a special
type of SVG ‘group’.
The main use of this feature is to allow sets of shapes to be hidden
and/or locked (unselectable) so you can focus on one part or aspect
of your drawing and ignore others. Being in a layer also limits the default scope of
keyboard selection and search commands to the current layer, which is very
convenient when you have hundreds of objects in your drawing.
This should enable artists to create much more sophisticated artwork
than has been possible in previous
releases of Inkscape.
New layers can be created through the Layer menu. You can also move,
rename, and delete layers via this menu. Note the ‘quick layer selector’
in the statusbar at the bottom of the window; it provides instant visual feedback
(“what layer am I in?”) and is very handy for reviewing the layers in the document, switching
current layer, and toggling the hide and lock status of the current layer (using the two buttons).
It is worth noting that unlike most other vector editors, when you select something outside
the current layer, Inkscape switches to that object’s layer. This feature is somewhat experimental
(feedback welcome!) but it has been quite convenient in our testing so far. Most of the time, you
don’t even need to use the layer switcher, but navigate through layers by selecting objects in them. The new
“select under” mode (Alt+click) is also very useful in this regard.
Text On Path
Another long-requested feature is the ability to place text on arbitrary
paths. In other words, you can write text around a circle, or march it
along a sinusoidal curve.
Here’s how you do it. First, draw a line. Make it as
squiggly as you like. Next, make a text object and write a few
sentences. Now, select both the path and the text, and then in the menu
activate Text > Put on Path. Easy!
You can put text onto stars, spirals, and ellipses just fine.
You can’t put text onto text, but if you convert the base text
to a path, you can wrap another line of text around it! What’s really exciting, however, is that
both the path and the text remain fully editable. You can even put several texts to
one path and freely move or transform them without losing the link to the path.
Bitmap Tracing
A not-uncommon way to create a vector graphic is to cheat – trace it!
In the past, we’ve seen the excellent results
that artists achieve by importing a bitmap into Inkscape and manually tracing paths on
top of it.
(svg here)
Inkscape 0.40 makes it even easier to “cheat”, by incorporating an automatic
bitmap-to-vector tracing tool called potrace. It’s very easy to use: Import
a bitmap into Inkscape, select it, then choose Path > Trace Bitmap
from the menu. A dialog will pop up with options to
control the type of tracing to perform, threshholds, etc.
Randomized Stars
(svg here).
The ability to randomize the shapes of stars was another feature added
in this release, not due to request but just because we could. 🙂 It’s pure fun, but it will definitely have its uses in design and illustration. Rounded stars are especially nice to randomize.
To use this, click on the Star tool, set the Randomized value
to something other than 0 and draw, or select an existing star and Alt+drag one of its handles.
Calligraphy
(svg here).
We’ve had the Calligraphy tool since Sodipodi days, but honestly it
never really worked well. With 0.40, we’ve exposed its internal
settings, and with a bit of tweaking it now is quite powerful.
After clicking on the Calligraphy Tool, look at the controls in the Tool Control Bar. Here’s what the most important controls do:
Width: This is the width of the stroke to draw. Think of it as the width of your pen’s nib.
Thinning: This controls how much the stroke narrows (or widens, if this value is less than 0) when you draw
the pen quickly. For a perfect calligraphy style, set it to 0.
Angle: This is the angle (in degrees) of the pen nib, 0 being
horizontal. Change this to emulate different ways of holding the pen.
Fixation: This controls whether the nib angle varies with the stroke
direction. Essentially, with a value of 1 it makes the nib behave like
a carefully held calligraphy pen, and with a value of 0 it works more
like a felt pen.
And Much More!
Beyond the major changes listed above are many smaller features, usability tweaks,
performance enhancements, and an exhaustive amount of bug fixes. All of them
are thoroughly documented in the Release Notes, but of course the most fun is to discover them in use! 😉
You’ll notice some changes in layout of a few dialogs, for instance. Copy and paste,
grid, gradients, style of new objects, the statusbar, XML editor, EPS export and so on
have all received some attention and show off new ideas that users and developers have
had lately.
For example, a most convenient feature was added to the tool buttons – double clicking
on them brings up the preferences for that tool. Quite handy!
We’ve got a lot to look forward to in the future. Over the next several
releases we’re undertaking a mission to implement full support of the
SVG Tiny spec. This involves supporting SVG animation, <switch> element, anchor hyperlinks, and SVG fonts. We’d also love to gain involvement from more people, so if
you’re interested in joining in, please do!
About the Author
Bryce Harrington is a founder of the Inkscape project, and a long time open source developer. Professionally, he’s a senior performance engineer at the Open Source Development Labs. Graphics were kindly provided by Andrew ‘Brisgeek’ Fitzsimon.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
The SVG for Calligraphy is broken. It’s actually the PNG with its extension changed to SVG. Just so ya know.
A very useful app. A couple things. Potrace works best on black and white material. Autotrace works best on color material. It would be nice if one can decided on which one. Also can Inkscape work with a pressure sensitive tablet?
inkspace looks like set to the leader amongst the open source apps. with the amazing progress of Scribus for DTP, the oss desktop is looking very viable.
i wonder if anyone knows of a natural-media painting program for oss? like Corel Painter? (which can use pressure sensitive tablets). gimp isnt a painitng program, its an image manipulation utility – geared to post processing photos or doing simple image creation for, say, web graphics.
I haven’t seen any [good] natural painting app for Unix. I remember this one for BeOS though, Easel, back in the day: http://www.bebits.com/app/2170 (sample image: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/art/f/r/friedl/swan1.jpg.html )
I like these apps like Painter, Easel, Natural Media too…
Here are some good tutorials on Painter and Natural Media btw:
http://www.designertoday.com/tabindex-13/tabid-27/DesktopDefault.as…
http://www.designertoday.com/tabindex-12/tabid-40/DesktopDefault.as…
There’s a difference… it’s not decimal. 0.forty not 0.four.
I have to say, since the fork from Sodipodi, Inkscape has come on leaps and bounds. In terms of speed, stability, usability, and features (aka everything you could want) it has moved on massively. It definitely shows the guys were right to fork and that the Sodipodi development methodology was stifling the project. I would now list Inkscape among the top 5 open source desktop applications in terms of showcasing the Free Software desktop.
BTW, this page has some links for apps that are natural-media-enabled: http://www.software-x.com/software/natural-media.html
From all these listed there, Pixel32 runs on Unix/Linux, and while its main focus is not natural media, it has some support for it, so it might worth a look.
> with the amazing progress of Scribus for DTP, the oss
> desktop is looking very viable.
Don’t forget TeX (and LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc.). OSS DTP has been viable for quite some time.
> Don’t forget TeX (and LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc.). OSS DTP has
> been viable for quite some time.
I think he means DTP for the masses, which, like most of things on linux, is not quite there. Don’t tell the Inkscape and Scribus people though.. they’re making too much amazing progress.
But Tex is not usable for intuitive productive work from a Designer’s point of view. Time is money and in daily work you have to quickly do the Layout’s. Try this with Tex…..good luck.
For a Painting App., have a look at Krita in Koffice (no released Version until now). It’s on the way from Image editing to Painting.
”
I think he means DTP for the masses, which, like most of things on linux, is not quite there.”
thats not true. thats has huge amount of stuff very much “there”
firefox, scribus, gaim, inkspace, apache, bind, samba, vsftp,d postfix and so on
You wrote:
But Tex is not usable for intuitive productive work from a Designer’s point of view. Time is money and in daily work you have to quickly do the Layout’s. Try this with Tex…..good luck.
For a Painting App., have a look at Krita in Koffice (no released Version until now). It’s on the way from Image editing to Painting.
As you point out that time is money I will point out that if you are publishing a several hundred page report, a novel, disseration, standard technical documentation for a company, using Scribus would be a waste of time and money.
I would use Inkscape for the necessary graphics work and Scribus for professional glossy brochures to magazine articles that allow for a broad use of color and layered composition, but then I would default to TeX/LaTeX/eTeX/ConteXt to do the press quality for bound publication more in-line with heavy on the content and soft on the eye candy.
Linux is shaping up well to attract Windows publication houses to truly consider Linux as their platform.
It won’t draw any OS X publishing houses but that shouldn’t be the focus. They should work together to draw away all the Windows publishing work.
My 3 main applications for pdf publication in Linux:
Inkscape, Scribus and Kile. I used to use LyX but got annoyed that Memoir.class and many other classes aren’t native unless you embed LaTeX code directly, so I switched and learned LaTeX. Kile makes managing 600 or more page publications very efficient and increased my productive more than LyX.
I hope LyX 1.4 gets out soon. It’s way overdue.
It would be nice to have a link to Inkscape somewhere in the blurb, and in the article!
http://www.inkscape.org/
It looks like the new Inkscape is hottt.
or texmacs
It rocks for math docs.
Besides the ones already named (Corel Painter being best known)
* Photogenics (for Windows/Linux/Amiga) — http://www.idruna.com/products_features.html
* Canvas (v7 free linux beta) — http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/canvas/linux/
None of these are OSS though. I’m afraid you’re out of luck for a OSS one of any quality… but for Linux, there’s demos, and Canvas is free (though beta, and old).
Native support on mac will be necessary to gain mindshare for such an awesome looking product.
I’ll give the Windows version a whirl tonight and see how easy this Fink thing is to setup so I can put my dual G5 to work.
I have used this app couple more times in the past (and also sodipodi) It was still a great app without the new features mentioned in this article. But now it seems that it made much progressing and it is promising. I should download now and try out in hurry!
I must say that this is an excellent program! Just about everything about it is done right, the interface is simple but offering a feeling of control. Even this early in-development version is very useful. A shame other open source graphics editors don’t learn their lesson from it.
according to the fink package list, they’re still on .39 and (in unstable)
The whole time, while I was reading the article, I was thinking to myself, no way in hell can a program this cool be free. But hey, this is 2004, OSS rocks, and this is just to good to be true.
Brilliant work from you guys. Keep it up and you will surely have the best painting program out there.
BTW. Does anybody know of a good OSS 3D CAD program (Linux/Windows) like AutoCAD. I’m a draughtsman, and AutoCAD is just way to expensive for personal use.
E
they updated it to .40 in the hour since i last checked
Inkscape is great, but it would be nice to see more development for technical drawings (flow charts, UML, …) like anchor points, better markers, … It seems that the current focus is on artistic features.
The splotch.svg works perfectly on my Linux box in Konqueror using adobesvg as well as ksvg and in Firefox using adobesvg. But the g.svg looks strange – actually it looks broken – and shows no animation. I haven’t tried in IE. linux-magazine oct2004 has a comparison of such programs.
The closest competitor on the web is flash. But it looks like flash is turning into a movie player. I don’t know if svg will take off on the web – despite being xml. Makes me think of those cute and silly MS commercials animated by white outlines being drawn around objects. They could be done using svg.
“BTW. Does anybody know of a good OSS 3D CAD program (Linux/Windows) like AutoCAD. I’m a draughtsman, and AutoCAD is just way to expensive for personal use. ”
Depends on what you’re doing with it.
http://www.salome-platform.org/
[Plenty of CAD Links, various licenses]
http://www.tech-edv.co.at/lunix/CADlinks.html
Thanx for the links. Salome seems really nice, very professional.
E
If you want a nice vector graphics program on Windows, check out http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/ .
Tux Paint is a simple painter, but very funny to use. Much better then MS Paint, for example, and it’s OSS and available for multiple platforms. To be honest, it was desinged for children, but I’ve used it with much pleasure 🙂
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/
I’m working on Krita with the explicit goal of making it the Painter of the free software world, with a dash of Art Rage and DaB. But it’s a long road with few visible milestones. I hope to have littlecms-based colour management done by the end of this week, and then we can go to bigger things.
But the tablet code is already very nice, you can draw a nice, pressure sensitive line already. It just doesn’t have fancy watercolours or oils.
Check out Dia (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/) which is more aimed at creating diagrams (including UML).
Inkscape is part of WinLibre 0.3( http://www.winlibre.com/en/ ), a free/open source Software distribution for Windows.
Inkscape is really a cool app you can use in your every day graphic job !
——
WinLibre is a rigorous selection of free, legal software for Windows 98, 2000, XP :
– WinLibre packages this quality software in a complete and coherent product
– WinLibre software meets your essential needs : Office, Internet, Multimedia), Design, Tools
– WinLibre automates and simplifies their installation
I found a few on freshmeat as well, take a look:
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=cad§ion=projects&Go.x=8&Go.y=13
Doesn’t this remind you of Xara (www.xara.com) from the RISC OS and Windows?
I like the idea behind Krita, and I wish you luck. I’ve been reading the mailing list for the last 5 or 6 month to stay up to date, but it would be nice to hear more from your project outside of the mailing list.
Well done to the inkscape guys, it really is maturing at a rate!
One thing though, surely the preferences dialogue could do with some “Gnome HIG love”?
http://www.osnews.com/img/9049/preferences.png
http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.40-CVS-dcber…
which wm, which desktop enviroment?
thanks!
One thing though, surely the preferences dialogue could do with some “Gnome HIG love”?
I agree. This is a great program, and I’ve already done a little work with it, but some of the dialogs could use a redesign, such as when designing gradients, where you need to move sliders and use buttons rather than manipulate the gradient directly. It takes too much time to do a quick gradient.
I’m sure it’ll come, and with a 0.40 release there still is a bit of room for growth all the way up to 1.0.
Good luck. 🙂
thanks everyone for the links to OSS painter programs (pixel32, etc) … i didn’t know these things existed.
i think the point about OSS viability for DTP has been answered. i did meet design oriented wysiwyg processes .. suich as pagemaker or Impression publisher*.
as it happens i’ve used Tex, and Lyx for years. other tools i use in the normal “workflow process” include:
* dia – diagramming – excellent
* psutils – for psnup, for ps2pdf, for ps2eps
* pyblioghaphic – a useful gui to manage bibtex files
* acroread – for those occasions when bad ps files need to be regerated via ps->pdf->acroread_print_to_ps .. don’t ask my why, it just seems to sanitise some ps file.
which reminds me – in theory postscript files are great. in practise they are flaky and cause my softwarte to break or my printers to break. in contrast pdf files rarely do this – you can think of pdf as a subset of ps.
* (for the acorn archimedes, fantastic application for its time, ran from 3 floopies, no HD and 1MB Ram and was very very far ahead of its time)
http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm
http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/artworks.htm – cf inkscape
Industrial theme / Gnome and the Window border looks like the Human one from Ubuntu (with the Industrial colors of course)
Ooops – sorry – i opened another screenshot by accident – so forget my post.
Sorry for adding noise – but this is a very nice article and a joy to read.
I hope to see many more like this on OSNews.com.
Inkscape is cool but it is really not suitable for small graphics like icons. Scaling down makes images blurry and hardly viewable.
You could see the icons on one screenshot and they looked quite nice, now try to scale them to 32×32 and you see what I mean.
That’s why KDE defaults to BIG sizes of icons. On the other hand, GNOME icons are made with GIMP and are not scaled but made for smaller sizes.
Anyway, a great article
Cheers,
gamehack
You CAN design great lookin icons with Inkscape: Adjust the grid and document size to your icon resolution. Change the pen width to 1. Draw precisely in the grid cells. This way you wont have any aliased graphic.
Pierre-Jean
“BTW. Does anybody know of a good OSS 3D CAD program (Linux/Windows) like AutoCAD. I’m a draughtsman, and AutoCAD is just way to expensive for personal use.”
I would recommend qcad. http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html
It’s GPL and runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Very full featured.
Does anybody know about OSS bugeting aplications like Presto for Building and Construction.
Thanks for the Qcad Link.
Does anybody know about OSS bugeting aplications like Presto for Building and Construction, of course compatible with Presto files.
Thanks for the Qcad Link.
I would love to use this app on my Mac, it seems very functional and results look great.
It’s eXPerienced gtk2/metacity theme in GNOME
Hey! The windows .exe binary went up from 7 Mb (0.39) to a whooping 19 Mb! I suspect it’s that tracing feature… is there any possibility that this feature is removed, or a lightweight version be compiled? My computer doesn’t have a lot of memory…
It’s not bloated. It just has all libs statically compiled.