Yes, Inkscape has a powerful command line interface and can be used in scripts for a variety of tasks, such as exporting and format conversions. For details, refer to the manual page (online, or via the Help > Command line options command, or by man inkscape on Unix).

Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

Inkscape was started as a fork of Sodipodi, in late 2003, by four Sodipodi developers: Bryce Harrington, MenTaLguY, Nathan Hurst, and Ted Gould. Our mission was creating a fully compliant Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing tool written in C++ with a new, more user friendly (Gnome HIG compliant) interface and an open, community-oriented development process.

The name is made up of the two English words 'ink' and 'scape'. Ink is a common substance for drawings, and is used when the sketched work is ready to be permanently committed to paper, and thus evokes the idea that Inkscape is ready for production work. A scape is a view of a large number of objects, such as a landscape or ocean-scape, and thus alludes to the object-oriented nature of vector imagery.

Inkscape includes an extension called Function Plotter. It can be used to create sine curves or any other function graphs. To access it, go to the Effects menu, and then the Render submenu. Other software, such as Xfig, KiG, or KSEG can also be used to create complex curves and then export to SVG for use in Inkscape.

If you are a developer, grab the code and start hacking on whatever draws your attention. Send in a patch when you're happy with it and ready to share your efforts with others. We also need writers and translators for the user manual and interface internationalization (I18N) files. We take contributions very seriously and follow the principle of "patch first, discuss later", so it is highly likely your efforts will appear in the development codebase swiftly.

Feel free to contribute your own banners or buttons for promoting Inkscape. The best ones will be linked here.

Dia is for technical diagrams like database charts, class diagrams, etc., whereas Inkscape is for vector drawing such as logos, posters, scalable icons, etc. SVG is a useful format for creating diagrams, though, so we hope as Inkscape grows as a fully-featured SVG editor, it will also be useful for making attractive diagrams too. Several of us hope Inkscape will become a useful technical drawing tool and work on features with that goal in mind.

Inkscape will need to mature a bit further before this can be considered. Specifically, better support for embedding (Bonobo) is needed, and the Gnome-Print subsystem needs to be tested more thoroughly (help very much appreciated here). If you can compile a recent version of Inkscape and help us with testing it would be very useful.

Inkscape wants to be a complete SVG-compliant vector graphics editor. Apart from standards compliance, our primary goals are stability, performance, state of the art vector graphics features, and an efficient and innovative user interface.

You don't need to know much, if anything, about Inkscape internals to create a useful extension. Aaron Spike, the author of most Python extensions that come with Inkscape, wrote a helpful web page (including a series of tutorials) on creating extensions in Python (Perl and Ruby are also supported).

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 [2]. In short, this means you are free to use and distribute Inkscape for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without any restrictions. You are also free to modify the program as you wish, but with the only restriction that if you distribute the modified version, you must provide access to the source code of the distributed version.

If you don't have access to a shell/command line (usually the case with third party hosting services) then you may find you can use Martin Geisler's phpShell software to achieve the desired result (unless SAFE MODE is not set for php). Installation problems are sometimes weird and hard to diagnose.

Resource Tuner Console, a command line batch processing version of the resource editor is available for download. More on RT Console...

Yes! While Inkscape does not have all the features of the leading vector editors, the latest versions provide for a large portion of basic vector graphics editing capabilities. People report successfully using Inkscape in a lot of very different projects (web graphics, technical diagrams, icons, creative art, logos, maps).

We provide binary packages for Linux, Windows 2000/2003/XP (fully self-contained installer), and OSX (dmg package). We know that Inkscape is successfully used on FreeBSD and other Unix-like operating systems. Note that Windows 98/ME is no longer supported.

https://answers.launchpad.net/inkscape/ is the best place to ask for help in troubleshooting an Inkscape issue. The Inkscape-user mailing list is also an excellent place to ask for help, although it may be harder and take longer to get a question answered than through the Answers site. Sometimes people join IRC thinking they can get a quick answer, however this can be very hit and miss, as generally whomever is active on IRC at the moment probably doesn't know the right answer for you.

There is a limitation in the way Inkscape imports raster/bitmap images (e.g JPEG, PNG, TIFF images): it cannot read the image resolution. Inkscape assumes a 1-to-1 relation at 90dpi, so any imported image with a different resolution will appear to be scaled. For example, an image of resolution 180 dpi, when imported into Inkscape, will appear twice as big (180 = 90 x 2) in absolute units as it is in other programs.

Yes. Inkscape does not yet support all features of SVG, but all files it generates are valid SVG (with the partial and temporary exception of flowed text, see below). All standard-conformant SVG renderers show them the same as in Inkscape. If they do not, it's a bug. If this bug is in Inkscape, we will fix it (especially if you help us by reporting it!).

The main parts of SVG that Inkscape does not support yet are filters (except Gaussian blur which is supported starting from 0.45), animation, and SVG fonts. The rest mostly works, though of course there are bugs that we're always fixing. For a comparison of Inkscape and other open source SVG tools on the W3C SVG test suite, look here.

That depends on X. We accept Batik and Adobe SVG plugin as authoritative SVG renderers because they are backed by some of the the authors of the SVG standard and really care about compliance. This may not be true for other renderers. So if you are having a problem with some renderer, please try the same file with either Batik or Adobe, or better yet, with both (they are free and cross-platform). If you still see a discrepancy with Inkscape rendering, we want to look into it.

In many cases, this is simply because the feature in questions is not yet implemented, or is being actively worked on right now. But there are other reasons, too. AI is not the only game in town. Even though it currently enjoys a near-monopoly position, there still exist, for example, CorelDraw and Xara - which are also quite different and, in the opinion of many people, superior to AI in usability. Inkscape has borrowed a lot of user interface ideas from these fine editors.

In most cases, no. They're used for two very different things. Inkscape is used for creating vector drawings, such as laying out a poster or creating a fancy logo, whereas bitmap editors are for working on raster images, such as touching up a photograph. In many projects, you would need to use both Inkscape and a bitmap editor (such as GIMP), for example, to add bitmap effects to an image exported from Inkscape.

Inkscape started as a code fork of Sodipodi. The main reasons were differences in objectives and in development approach. Inkscape's objective is to be a fully compliant SVG editor, whereas for Sodipodi SVG is more a means-to-an-end of being a vector illustration tool. Inkscape's development approach emphasizes open developer access to the codebase, as well as using and contributing back to 3rd party libraries and standards such as HIG, CSS, etc. in preference to custom solutions.

Inkscape can natively save as SVG, SVGZ, PDF (version 0.46), Postscript/EPS/EPSi, Adobe Illustrator (*.ai), LaTeX (*.tex), and POVRay (*.pov). With the help of extensions, Inkscape can open/save as PDF, EPS, AI, Dia, Sketch and some others. In version 0.46, PDF import is native (no extensions required) and much improved. Inkscape can natively import most raster formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.) as bitmap images, but it can only export PNG bitmaps.

The codebase Inkscape inherited from Sodipodi was C/Gtk based. There is an ongoing effort to convert the codebase to C++/Gtkmm. The ultimate goal is to simplify the code and make it more maintainable. We invite you to join us. Just don't mention Qt. :)

Yes. When you do File > New (Ctrl+N) or start a new Inkscape session, Inkscape loads the default template document which stores page format, grid and guide parameters, snapping and export settings, etc. It can even contain any pre-created objects. You can save any document as the default template by writing it to ~/.inkscape/templates/default.svg on Linux and [inkscape dir]/share/templates/default.svg on Windows. If you save it under any other name than default.

Inkscape SVG files use the Inkscape namespace to store some extra information used by the program. Other SVG programs will not understand these extensions, but this is OK because the extensions only affect how the document is edited, not how it looks. Extensions must not cause any rendering problems in SVG-compliant renderers.