HowTo: InkScape Drawing Program Installation

Due to high demand, this very nice vector-based drawing program has been SourceForge.net's Project of the Month a month ago.

What is Inkscape?

Inkscape is a vector-based drawing program, like CorelDraw® or Adobe Illustrator® from the proprietary software world, and Sketch or Karbon14 from the free software world. It is free software, distributed under the terms of the Gnu General Public License, Version 2.

Inkscape is available from Linux, Windows and Mac OS, check the other package installer here.

Inkscape uses W3C SVG as its native file format. It is therefore a very useful tool for web designers and as an interchange format for desktop publishing.

It has a relatively modern display engine, giving you finely antialiased display, alpha transparencies, vector fonts and so on. Inkscape is written in C and C++, using the Gtk+ toolkit and optionally some Gnome libraries.

What is Vector Graphics?

n contrast to raster (bitmap) graphics editors such as Photoshop or Gimp, Inkscape stores its graphics in a vector format. Vector graphics is a resolution-independent description of the actual shapes and objects that you see in the image. A rasterization engine uses this information to determine how to plot each line and curve at any resolution or zoom level.

Contrast that to bitmap (raster) graphics which is always bound to a specific resolution and stores an image as a grid of pixels.

Vector graphics are a complement, rather than an alternative, to bitmap graphics. Each has its own purpose and are useful for different kinds of things. Raster graphics tend to be better for photographs and some kinds of artistic drawings, whereas vectors are more suitable for design compositions, logos, images with text, technical illustrations, etc.

Note that Inkscape can import and display bitmap images, too. An imported bitmap becomes yet another object in your vector graphics, and you can do with it everything you can do to other kinds of objects (move, transform, clip, etc.)


Inkscape Installation

Inkscape installation is fairly easy in Fedora 8 using yum. Yum downloads around 17MB of package files and installs them seamlessly.

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# yum -y install ikscape
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Binary Execution

Alt+F2, inkscape

Inkscape Webshots





More info are available from FAQs.

HTH