Troubleshooters.Com®, Linux Library and Productive Drawing with Inkscape Present:
A Tribute to Inkscape
Copyright © 2022 by Steve Litt
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For the past fifteen years, I've used Inkscape to create almost all the diagrams and drawings in all my books and web pages. When it comes to any drawing that needn't be photo-realistic, Inkscape's the best. You should really check it out.
The following are a few of the reasons I value Inkscape so highly:
Inkscape's native format is standard SVG. Note the benefits:
The preceding are just a few of the many benefits of working with an editor whose native format is SVG. Some of the other benefits are discussed in this document, and some aren't.
First I should mention that Inkscape has its own XML editor you can use without even leaving Inkscape. Use that if you'd like.
I'm so in love with the Vim editor that I enjoy editing XML (SVG is an XML dialect) in Vim, so I just exit the Inkscape editor, edit and save the drawing in Vim, and get back into Inkscape.
I had this come to my rescue just the other day. I put a line on a multlayer drawing and couldn't remove it. No problem, I edited the SVG fie, found the only thing that was white and not a rectangle, removed it, and bang, bad line gone!
Inkscape has an amazing amount of features, and most of those features are helpful or necessary on a regular basis. No program this featureful is easy to use, but Inkscape is easier than comparable programs. Just for fun, compare Inkscape's ease of use with Gimp.
Inkscape runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, *BSD, and probably any Unix if it's compiled there. You can go to your customer's site or your friend's house with your drawing on a thumb drive, can continue working on it there. Or, better yet, you can take turns working with it, each on your own copy of Inkscape. Using git to keep track of changes makes such teamwork smooth.
Being able to run it at your customer or friend's site/house wouldn't mean much if Inkscape weren't Free Software. It would be a hard sell to get them to buy it, especially given all the legal entanglements of proprietary software.
But Inkscape is Free Software, GPLv3 to be specific. This means you can legally install it on the computers of a hundred friends, with no duty for you or them to either pay or report.
Inkscape is very well documented. To start with, there's the excellent Inkscape Manual, which you access by clicking Help=>Inkscape_manual. The only problem with that manual is it's out of date and doesn't cover the latest features.Then theres the Inkscape Beginner's Guide, the Inkscape keyboard and mouse reference, and the Inkscape Man Page. There are specialized documents all over the place, including Troubleshooters.Com's Productive Drawing with Inkscape subsite.
The ultimate Inkscape authority is The Book Of Inkscape, which has pretty much everything.
A week ago I stopped using a very good, technically sound piece of software just because their community was so difficult to deal with. I couldn't get my questions answered, even though I did my RTFM and STFW research first, and framed my questions concisely and unambiguously. You'll have no such problems with Inkscape.
The Inkscape mailing list is ultimately helpful. I even got help for making clickmaps, which is waaaaay beyond what most people expect from a Free Software project mailing list. I don't remember ever posing, or seeing somebody else pose, a question the Inkscape mailing list couldn't answer.
When I write a book I use LyX because its styles guarantee a uniform look throughout the entire manuscript. When it comes to things like flyers for my garage sale, you know, things where you need to manually decide the placement of each piece of text, image, and color, I use Inkscape. Inkscape is great for flyers.
Clickmaps are pictures that actively respond to your hovering or clicking various parts of them. The idiomatic use for clickmaps is a group picture of people on which when you hover over a person their name pops up. Same for diagrams that give details, either via text or a sub-diagram, when you hover or click a part. Clickmaps can also change themselves, by growing an object, moving an object, or changing its color. You could have an image with five clickable buttons, and each button toggles between green and red when clicked.
Clickmaps are difficult. Inkscape makes making clickmaps a reasonably straightforward endeavor, assuming you know basic Javascript. If you're making clickmaps with Inkscape and have problems, you might want to consult Troubleshooters.Com's SVG Clickmap Landmines and Animated SVG Clickmap Landmines
If my training clients want their trainees to get diplomas at the end of training, I can easily do that. I make my diploma, and in text I include things like @instructor@, @daterange@, @venue@, and most importantly, @graduate@. This is all easily done in Inkscape, no text editor necessary. I put the data in a YAML file and run a simple program to make a file, substitute YAML file values for @whatever@ tokens, and each graduate has his/her file. I could even have the program print each one, but because of Florida's sales tax laws, it's better to email the files to the client.
Any time you need to create individualized copies of the same picture/flyer/certificate or whatever, Inkscape makes it easy.
Inkscape has an incredibly friendly community, so it's easy to get involved.Try it out. Keep using it. If you like it, you can help out by doing some development, giving the Inkscape project publicity (like this page), or giving them a money contribution. These activities help continue the continuous improvement Inkscape's enjoyed over the decades.
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