INKSCAPE

INKSCAPE Making shapes and pictures in inkscape is easier than html. Inkscape is a free and open source vector graphics editor application. Its stated goal is to become a powerful graphic tool while being fully compliant with the XML, SVG and CSS standards. Inkscape is primarily developed for Linux, but it is cross-platform and runs on Mac OS X (under X11), other Unix-like operating systems, and Microsoft Windows. Inkscape's implementation of SVG and CSS standards is incomplete. Most notably, it does not yet support animation, or SVG fonts. Inkscape has multi-lingual support, particularly for complex scripts, something currently lacking in most commercial vector graphics applications. As of 2008, Inkscape is under active development, with new features being added regularly. Inkscape began in 2003 as a code fork of the Sodipodi project. Sodipodi, developed since 1999, was itself based on Gill, the work of Raph Levien. The basic types of objects in Inkscape are:
 * ** Paths ** —made with the Pencil tool, which allows freehand drawing of paths; the Pen tool, which allows the user to create a Bezier spline node-by-node; the Calligraphy tool, which can be used to draw freehand calligraphic or brush-like strokes, or the Paint Bucket tool, which fills bounded areas of the image. The Calligraphy tool optionally can use pressure and tilt readings from graphic tablets. The Paint Bucket tool works optically rather than geometrically and can assist image tracing.
 * ** Rectangles ** —created using the Rectangle tool. Corners of rectangles can be rounded.
 * ** Ellipses ** —created using the Ellipse tool. Ellipses can be transformed into arcs and circle segments.
 * ** Stars/polygons ** —created using the Polygon tool. Multi-pointed stars can be used to emulate spirographs.
 * ** Text ** —created with the Text tool. Texts can use any of the system fonts, and can be easily converted to paths. Both regular and flowed text is supported. All text objects can be arbitrarily transformed. Text can be manually kerned and flowed along a path.
 * ** Raster images ** —created by importing or pasting bitmap images into Inkscape. Images are linked by default, but they can be embedded into the SVG document using an effect. Images can be traced using an embedded Potrace backend. Inkscape supports PNG, JPEG and BMP.
 * ** Clones ** —create using the Clone operation on existing objects. Clones are verbatim copies of other objects which can have different transformations applied than the original object, and are updated live whenever the original object changes. Deleting the original object causes the clone to be "unlinked" - it becomes a separate object. It is also possible to create chained clones, i.e. clones of a clone, to an arbitrary depth.