Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics. Inkscape uses the W3C open standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) as its native format, and is free and open-source software.
Inkscape has sophisticated drawing tools with capabilities comparable to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme. It can import and export various file formats, including SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG. It has a comprehensive feature set, a simple interface, multi-lingual support and is designed to be extensible; users can customize Inkscape's functionality with add-ons.
Key Features:
- Drawing: pencil tool (freehand drawing with simple paths), pen tool (creating Bézier curves and straight lines), calligraphy tool (freehand drawing using filled paths representing calligraphic strokes)
- Shape tools: rectangles (may have rounded corners), ellipses (includes circles, arcs, segments), stars/polygons (can be rounded and/or randomized), spirals
- Text tool (multi-line text, full on-canvas editing)
- Embedded bitmaps (with a command to create and embed bitmaps of selected objects)
- Clones ("live" linked copies of objects), including a tool to create patterns and arrangements of clones
- Transformations (moving, scaling, rotating, skewing), both interactively and by specifying exact numeric values
- Z-order operations (raising and lowering)
- Grouping objects ("select in group" without ungrouping, or "enter the group" making it a temporary layer)
- Layers (lock and/or hide individual layers, rearrange them, etc; layers can form a hierarchical tree)
- Alignment and distribution commands
- Color selector (RGB, HSL, CMYK, color wheel, CMS)
- Color picker tool
- Copy/paste style
- A gradient editor capable of multi-stop gradients
- Pattern fills (bitmap/vectors)
- Dashed strokes, with many predefined dash patterns
- Path markers (ending, middle and/or beginning marks, e.g. arrowheads)
Release Notes
Release highlights
Released on 18 July 2014 .
Inkscape 0.48.5 is a stability and bugfix release with an important new architecture addition. For a complete list of bugs fixed in 0.48.5, see the Launchpad milestone page .
Important bugfixes
- Adobe Illustrator SVG files containing entities can be loaded again
- Support for Poppler 0.26
- Support for Boehm-GC 7.4.0 and later
- Several crash bugs were fixed
- 64-bit compilation is now possible on Windows
