Inkscape is an award winning and cross-platform software project that provides you with a professional-grade SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) editor application, which sole purpose is to be an open source and completely free alternative to commercial products with similar capabilities, such as Visio, Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator.
Features at a glance
Key features include object creation, object manipulation, fill and stroke, operations on paths, text support and rendering. It includes a pencil tool, a pen tool, calligraphy tool, a shape tool for creating rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars and spirals, a text tool, embedded bitmaps and clone creator.
Additionally, the application allows the user to move, scale, rotate, skew, raise, lower, group and align objects, as well as to manipulate layers. Other useful tools include path markers, dashed strokes, pattern fills, color selector, color selector, gradient editor, node editor, path converter and simplification, bitmap tracing, and boolean operations.
Another interesting feature is the ability to export drawings to the PNG, PDF (Portable Document Format), OpenDocument Drawing, AutoCAD DXF (Drawing Exchange Format), PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and sK1 file formats.
Under the hood and supported OSes
A quick look under the hood will show that the program has been written in the C, C++ and Python programming languages, and its graphical user interface uses the cross-platform GTK+ GUI toolkit. It is a multilingual project that supports the GNU/Linux. BSD, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
Availability
On GNU/Linux and BSD, the application is available for download only as a source archive that must be configured, compiled and installed manually. Therefore, all Linux and BSD users are urged to instlall Inkscape from the default software repositories of their distribution.
Bottom line
Summing up, it you are a graphic designer, an illustrator or a web designer in search for , then we can tell you that Inkscape is the perfect application for you. It will run on your favorite operating system and supports almost all of the capabilities of commercial products.
