This tutorial is the 2nd of the Inkscape for Students series. Below you will learn about graphics formats, the graphic format SVG, and how to open & save graphics, including how to insert ones in a document. Let's learn!
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In This Series
Preamble - Introduction & Table of Contents
Getting Started - Download & Run The Program
Graphic Formats
What is a graphic
format? Computer processes graphics, sounds, and programs as
information, can be created and stored, and these information are
distinguished by certain formats. For graphics, computer user works with
photos or drawings with formats like PNG, JPEG, and SVG among others. In a computer, photos or drawing are displayed as files with names such as scenery.jpeg, icon.png, design.svg according to each graphic format. Inkscape can open and save wide choices of graphic formats below:
Formats to Open:
- PNG
- JPEG
- SVG
- Adobe Illustrator's AI
- CorelDRAW's CDR
- AutoCAD's DXF
Formats to Save:
- PNG
- PostScript
- EPS
Inkscape as a computer program has its own graphic document format which is called scalable vector graphics (SVG). SVG to Inkscape is like AI to Adobe Illustrator and CDR to CorelDRAW. When you drew and saved a document in Inkscape, by default it is in SVG graphic format. This SVG format has many benefits and among them is it is widely accessible by any computer user with graphics or web browser programs. For example, you will see SVG is the format of many logos of many articles on Wikipedia -- you can download them and open them in Inkscape.
Open and Save
- To open a graphic document, click menu File > Open.
- An Open File dialog will appear.
- Click the file and click Open button.
- Picture opened.
- To save a graphic document, click menu File > Save.
- Choose a graphic format.
- Choose a folder as a place to save it.
- Click save button.
- Picture saved.
Insert
To insert a picture into an existing document, you do:
- Open your computer's file manager.
- Find a picture.
- Drag and drop it to Inkscape document.
- Picture inserted.
Summary
That's the basics of basics of computer graphic design with Inkscape. Here you learned what are graphic formats, how to open, how to save, and how to insert them. Next time you will learn about fonts, how to get and use them. Happy learning!