Inkscape
From Mandriva Community Wiki
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Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.
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Functionalities
Inkscape is a very powerful drawing program commonly used to produce icons, logos, and other graphical elements found online and in application interfaces such as buttons, frames, displays and illustrations. Inkscape is not a photo editing application. It is designed to create graphical images and elements to be used in other graphical compositions. When done properly, these elements can appear very realistic like the image of the compact disc below. Users new to such progams should be aware that the learning curve for Inkscape is steep, but there are resources on the Internet to help them get started and learn the basic operations of Inkscape.
Scalable vector graphics have the advantage of scalability. Vector graphics are composed of mathematical expressions. Scalability results from the ability to simply multiply or divide these mathematical expressions by an appropriate factor to achieve the desired size. Enlarging a bitmap image leads to "jaggies" or aliasing which prevents smooth curves or lines from rendering as such. A scalable vector graphic image can be scaled up or down with no loss of quality.
In addition to object creation, SVG images may be altered and manipulated with various transformations, cloned, duplicated, converted to paths, manipulated as paths, filled, stroked, stylized, and stacked in image layers. Inkscape also includes an excellent facility for rendering and manipulating text. Gradients applied to figures in Inkscape can be edited and manipulated, unlike gradients applied in bitmap editors.
The Inkscape interface is consistent and usable. The interface is designed to conform to the GNOME Human interface guidelines as well as universal keyboard accessibility. Users of Inkscape find the interface conventional, familiar, and useful. There are few floating dialog boxes. Keyboard shortcuts and docked toolbars in the editing window provide hands-on adjustment to tools and settings. The tool controls bar at the top of the window change to display the controls relevant to the tool currently selected.
From Inkscape's Wikipedia entry: All transformations (not only moving but also scaling and rotating) have keyboard shortcuts with consistent modifiers (e.g. Alt transforms by 1 screen pixel at the current zoom, Shift multiplies the transformation by 10, etc.); these keys work on nodes in Node tool as well as on objects in Selector. The most common operations (such as transformations, zooming, z-order) have convenient one-key shortcuts.
Inkscape provides floating tooltips and status bar hints for all buttons, controls, commands, keys, and on-canvas handles. It comes with a complete keyboard and mouse reference (in HTML and SVG) and several interactive tutorials in SVG.
The interface of Sodipodi (Inkscape's predecessor) was based on those of CorelDRAW and Gimp. The Inkscape interface has been influenced by that of Xara Xtreme.
In summary, Inkscape is a powerful and useful editor to create and manipulate scalable vector graphic files.
