Review: Inkscape
Are you looking for an awesome full featured vector editing program? Don’t want to buy the latest version of Illustrator? Or maybe just want to support open source programs? Have you heard of Inkscape?
Inkscape is an open source, free, vector editing program similar to Adobe Illustrator (very similar from my limited experience with Illustrator). Want to see the scale of what Inkscape can do? Just take a look at some of the tutorials the community has created. Good looking stuff, eh? I started off my exploration of Inkscape with some tutorials, namely the Spiro Swirl tutorial. I love cool looking swirls but some how never get them too look as awesome as I’d like. Problem solved! I actually ended up using one of the swirls I made based on what I’d learned in that tutorial as part of my logo. My entire logo, all versions of it, the large one up on my site, the small one shown here, and everything in between, were created in Inkscape.
What was my experience with Inkscape? Well aside from incredibly useful, it was good. It has all the tools you’d want in an image editing program. You have your layers, various font options, filters, pen tools, shapes, and more. I especially like their calligraphy tool. I really want to spend more time with it and my tablet and hone my calligraphy skills. You can tweak the tools, especially pen/pencil tools to your liking from changing the smoothness to the shape. Some shapes are provided or if those aren’t to your liking you can use one from your clipboard.
My experience with Inkscape wasn’t without problems however. It did crash on me, for no apparent reason. Fortunately it had an autosave feature, and saved the document I was working on so no work was lost. Once I found where exactly it was saving the documents too I was happy once more. I also wasn’t a fan of the zoom. I felt like I couldn’t get the page the size I wanted it, either too big or small. However, that was a minor inconvenience at worst.
When it comes to exporting your document you also have lots of options. Starting with, what exactly do you want to export? The entire page? Just the drawing? Something custom? Then choose your size, and dpi. You can also import just about any image file format you would want to. Inkscape also saves in .svg file format by default so no worries about not being able to open it in Illustrator or your other vector editing program of choice.
All in all I think Inkscape is a great program and a must for anyone interested in working with SVG, and is a great and affordable (by affordable I mean free) alternative to Illustrator.
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