by: Nash Ville
According to the blog entitled “Vector Graphics” which was posted by Neil last December 2, 2004 at www.eightlines.com, the author mentioned that he just found this program called InkScape which appears to be an open source vector drawing program.
Inkscape is a program for viewing, creating and editing 2D vector drawings. It is an open source Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio and other drawing programs. Its supported SVG features include text, paths, layers, ellipses, gradients, grouping, rectangles, transforms, basic shapes, node editing, bitmap images, alpha blending, svg-to-png export, freehand curves, and many more. And, as an added bonus, both vector and bitmap objects can have alpha transparency and can be arbitrarily transformed. Graphics can also be printed and exported to png bitmaps.
“Vector" drawing in InkScape means that when you create a shape like a rectangle, it retains its identity. You can easily go back and resize it, change its color, or move it around without disturbing the rest of the drawing. One of Inkscape's distinguishing features is that it stores its drawings in a web-friendly XML format – the SVG format – which is a standard that is gaining support worldwide, in proprietary and public software alike. The open source community is now adopting this format for everything from desktop icons and company logos to web page animation and artistic illustration.
The main motivation of Inkscape is to provide the open source community with a fully XML, SVG and CSS2 compliant SVG drawing tool. Its additional planned works include conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful features added through an extension mechanism, and establishment of a friendly, open, community-oriented development processes. In addition, this application runs on Unix (including Linux), Windows and Mac OS X; however, the primary development platform is Linux.
With the introduction of Inkscape, the world of vector graphics will definitely continue to become more interesting and compelling. Finally, I would like to commend the developers of InkScape. And, I am looking forward for greater things to happen to this software application. More Power and kudos!