Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

By : Christopher Rogers
1 (1)
Book Image

Design Made Easy with Inkscape

1 (1)
By: Christopher Rogers

Overview of this book

With the power and versatility of the Inkscape software, making charts, diagrams, illustrations, and UI mockups with infinite resolution becomes enjoyable. If you’re looking to get up to speed with vector illustration in no time, this comprehensive guide has got your back! Design Made Easy with Inkscape is easy to follow and teaches you everything you need to know to create graphics that you can use and reuse forever, for free! You’ll benefit from the author’s industry experience as you go over the basics of vector illustration, discovering tips and tricks for getting professional graphics done fast by leveraging Inkscape's powerful toolset. This book teaches by example, using a great variety of use cases from icons and logos to illustration, web design, and product design. You’ll learn about hotkeys and take a best-practices approach developed over ten years of using Inkscape as a design tool in production. What’s more, this book also includes links to free graphics resources that you can use in all your projects. Whether you’re a new user or a professional, by the end of this book, you’ll have full understanding of how to use Inkscape and its myriad of excellent features to make stunning graphics for your projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Finding Your Way Around
7
Part 2: Advanced Shape Editing
13
Part 3: Inkscape’s Power Tools

Leveraging linked image files

When we drag and drop an image file, say a photo, for example, from our filesystem into Inkscape (or choose File > Import), we’re presented with several options for placing that file in our document. Figure 10.11 shows the importing process and options.

Figure 10.11 – Importing an image onto the canvas

Figure 10.11 – Importing an image onto the canvas

There are lots of options here, but the most important ones for our purposes are the Embed and Link options. If we choose Embed, Inkscape will make a copy of the image and place it in our file. Embedding the image saves it inside our document, increasing the file size. However, doing this means we don’t need to keep the original (separate) image file around.

This comes with a disadvantage: if we copy/paste this embedded image, each time we paste, it will embed a whole new version of this image, continuously increasing our file size, even though the image is the same! We can get around this in several...