Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: graphics

Cool Inkscape Jazz

I turned a coworker onto Inkscape recently.  Inkscape is a free open source vector graphics program that is great for making illustrations.  Don’t know if it will stick for him but it definitely has for me.  Despite a few kinks in the Windows interface around dropdowns (mainly in the font dialog), it is a very slick piece of software and a joy to work with.
Along the way, I should mention a couple other pieces of software.  Inkscape is fantastic but it definitely plays a particular role in the team of applications I use both for documentation purposes at work as well as general fun with graphics.
Paint.NET is useful for graphic manipulation and effects.  While Inkscape is capable of including bitmap graphics such as pictures as part of your illustration, it doesn’t do a whole lot of processing of regular images.  It mostly works for generating illustrations made from geometric shapes and is great for text as well.  Paint.NET is a great free, open source pixel manipulator that I use for effects and saving screen captures.
I also have to give a nod to two of Google’s free products, Sketchup for simple 3D object generation and Picasa for organizing pictures and doing basic touchups.
Here are a couple examples of things I’ve made using them:
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So here are a couple of my favorite pointers when it comes to using Inkscape.  Hopefully they’ll be as useful to you as they have been to me.

Guides and Tutorials

First of all, Inkscape comes with excellent tutorials under its help menu.  Start there.
After those, the first place I go for a reminder or a refresher is a Quick Guide to Inkscape.  The guy who wrote it is prolific on the subject, I see his posts everywhere.  But this guide is short, sweet and to the point with good examples.  Good job.
There is also a free online version of the published Inkscape manual.  This is definitely a more in-depth reference for those advanced features like filters.
As for third-party resources, three good ones are Screencasters at heathenx.org, the Inkscape tutorials blog and Nicu’s howto.  Screencasters is probably my favorite as they walk you through the entire by showing it in video.  The “splat” with my name on it above is from one of their tutorials.
I also use the “glassy button” effect quite a bit (seen in the third picture), which is shown in this tutorial on YouTube.  The only difference I do from this tutorial is that instead of trying to draw a Bezier curve to make the rounded glassy edge, I draw an ellipse that I just use the bottom curve from.  That keeps the curve symmetric, since my hand drawings aren’t.  If you want to get really specular on the glassiness, try doing multiple stops on your white gradient.  The one above employs three or four stops.

Other stuff

One thing that I recently discovered that looks interesting but I haven’t yet used is a tool that makes animated slide presentations from inkscape pictures.  It’s called JessyInk and looks promising.  I believe you need to have an svg-aware browser to view them.  This means that in IE you need to load something like Adobe’s SVG viewer plugin, or in Firefox you may need to enable SVG viewing (had to do this on one of my installations but not another…weird) by going to about:config and setting svg.enabled to true.
That’s about all I can think of for now.