Inkscape

Monday, 14 May, 2012

It’s now new, however for those not in the know Inkscape is the grand-daddy of open-source vector graphics software. There is a strong and continuous development cycle and whilst it is still going to be sometime before a full version 1 release is available, it is an impressively featured and powerful piece of software. As ever, its downloadable as cross-platform and available on Windows as a portable version. It has a extension architecture that supports an ever expanding set of functions.

There is no better advert for a product like this than the images it can produce….. take a look at the Inkscape Tutorials Blog and Open Clip Art library (although not all are created with Inkscape on the latter). I’ve used Inkscape on-and-off for a while (including for DTP jobs where I find it more intuitive and powerful than Scribus, although maybe I need to spend some more time with the latter!) but thought I’d follow one of the tutorials to produce something, so I plumped for the coffee cup with the results below…. OK, it’s hardly going to win anything, but the results are impressive for a relatively straightforward tutorial (besides the crappy handle…. just never quite seem to be able to crack bezier curves). Worth a gentle introduction and keeping tabs on the manual me thinks.