After cooking for a few years, Inkscape v0.91 is now available!

Inkscape - Inkscape Version 0.91 is Released!

The Inkscape community proudly announces the release of Inkscape 0.91.

Inkscape is a drawing and painting tool similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, and Xara X, but with features, new tools, and interface style of its own. It emphasizes the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format, but reads and writes a wealth of other formats including PDF, so it is an easy complement to your other graphics and desktop tools. Best of all, Inkscape is created *by* the community *for* the community: Inkscape is 100% Open Source and freely available to everyone in the world.

This release marks the culmination of a multi-year effort to switch to a new internal graphics rendering engine, Cairo. This brings performance enhancements and more accurate rendering of drawings. Thanks go especially to Google for sponsoring much of this work.

A new Trace Pixel Art feature enables creation of vector art from bitmaps, sprites, and icons. A new Symbols Library provides reusable graphics elements - you can even read in Visio symbol libraries. New Snapping options and improved Snap preferences make it easier to quickly place items in the alignments you need. The tools for arranging objects offer several new ways to position the elements of a drawing. Tons of other little improvements have been made across all the other tools as well.

Several new file formats are supported, including FXG, SIF and HTML5 export; and VSD and CDR import. EMF/WMF are now readable and writable for all platforms. And XCF, PDF, EPS, and PS+LaTeX support are improved.

Inkscape has a rich Extension ecosystem, which is well known for bringing clever, cool, and innovative new ideas. Over a dozen new extensions are added in this release, including an Isometric Grid Generator, a Bitmap Cropper, a Text Extractor and a Text Merger, an HSL Adjuster, a Font Replacer, a Voronoï Diagram Creator, and more.

The above barely scratches the surface of all the new stuff included in this release. For the full story, including examples and screenshots, please see our detailed Release Notes: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/0.91

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Inkscape - About

What is Inkscape?

Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics. Inkscape uses the W3C open standard SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) as its native format, and is free and open-source software.

Inkscape has sophisticated drawing tools with capabilities comparable to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme. It can import and export various file formats, including SVG, AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG. It has a comprehensive feature set, a simple interface, multi-lingual support and is designed to be extensible; users can customize Inkscape's functionality with add-ons.

The Inkscape project has a growing international user community, and many learning materials exist to help get you started with your creations. Help and support is provided by the community, and there are lots of ways for you to get involved if you want to help improve the Inkscape project.

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If you are doing vector graphics then you probably already know and love Inkscape. If you don't, then this might be new to you (well not to YOU, but... um... your peers... yeah). In short, it is a MUST have drawing tool. Oh yeah, it's free AND open source too!

And for formats, don't forget that XAML in/out is supported too... :)

 

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