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

What is Trace Bitmap?

Put simply, a bitmap is any image made of a grid of colored pixels. Photos from your phone camera are bitmaps, for example. We covered this a bit in Chapter 1, The Inkscape Interface, when we talked about the difference between vector and raster graphics – raster being another term for bitmap.

Thus, Trace Bitmap takes an image of pixels and automatically creates (traces) vector shapes to make a vector representation of the image. This is particularly handy when we have a bitmap that is very simple, such as a black-and-white image.

By selecting the image on a canvas, we can auto-trace it by selecting Path > Trace Bitmap. Figure 14.1 shows the original bitmap logo and the result of the trace.

Figure 14.1 – The bitmap original logo (left) and the traced vector result (right)

Figure 14.1 – The bitmap original logo (left) and the traced vector result (right)

Both look nearly identical except that when you zoom in to the original, you see pixels on the edge. Inkscape has converted this bitmap to...