Inkspace Open Source Professional Vector Graphics Editor - Some Resources

I earlier did a brief post on GIMP which is a free open source image editing program much like Adope Photoshop.

Inkspace is a free open source vector graphics program that is much like Adobe Illustrator.

Both GIMP and Inkspace are useful to web designers and web developers. Both are useful for ecommerce.

And both are a lot of fun to learn and use!

Inkspace – Draw Freely from the home page: “Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s free and open source.”

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The Anatomy of the Inkscape Window – This is a brief and very useful introduction to the Inkscape window and all of the controls. The diagrams of the window are excellent. It wouldn’t hurt to start here.

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The best way to learn how to use Inkspace is just to start trying different things.

And the best way to start trying different things by working through the brief Inkscape tutorial: Basic.

This tutorial demonstrates the basics of using Inkscape. This is a regular Inkscape document that you can view, edit, copy from, or save.

The Basic Tutorial covers canvas navigation, managing documents, shape tool basics, selection techniques, transforming objects with selector, grouping, setting fill and stroke, alignment, and z-order. For more advanced topics, check out the other tutorials in the Help menu.

And another good way to get started with Inkscape is to go to Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program and from there to Chapter 1. Quick Start. And go through the chapter with your copy of Inkscape open and go through the chapter’s pages and recreate the examples in your Inkscape program.

There is also a good Wikibooks* online book, Inkscape.

*Wikibooks – Welcome to Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit. Books By Subject with 55,969 pages

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And yet another way to get started with Inkspace is by learning to draw with the Bezier Tool using the YouTube video.
The Bezier tool can be a little confusing at first. So go to Inkscape Tutorial Cartoon Cat: How to Draw with the Bezier Tool and work along with the example in your copy of Inkspace. Here is the link to the cat jpg that he uses and that you will need to put in your work example.

From 0:00 to 6:10 in the video he goes over very clearly how to use the Bezier tool to reproduce the cat jpg’s face in a vector drawing.

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Inkscape keys and mouse reference

This document describes the default keyboard shortcuts of Inkscape, corresponding to the share/keys/default.xml file in Inkscape distribution. Most (but not all) of these keys are configurable by the user; see the default.xml file for details on how to do that.

Unless noted otherwise, keypad keys (such as arrows, Home, End, +, -, digits) are supposed to work the same as corresponding regular keys. If you have a new shortcut idea, please contact the developers (by writing to the devel mailing list or by submitting an RFE).

Contents: Tools | Dialogs | Controls bar | Canvas | Palette | File | Window | Layers | Object | Path | Selector | Node tool | Rectangle tool | Ellipse tool | Star tool | Spiral tool | Zoom tool | Pencil tool | Pen (Bezier) tool | Calligraphy | Gradient tool | Dropper tool | Text tool