Guides and Snaps Use | Inkscape

This is the sixth part of Inkscape for Students the series. After previously we learn Drawing and Coloring, now we will learn about drawing once again but with guide lines and snapping mainly to help us place objects and make copies of them tidily. Let's exercise!

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Tools

Guides, the fine lines to line up your objects either horizontally, or vertically, or diagonally.

Snaps, Shift+5, the automatic snapping of objects either to another object or to guides.

The Basics

Practice these before doing the exercises:

1. Click drag ruler to bottom, you made a horizontal guide.

2. Click drag ruler to right, you made a vertical guide.

3. Click drag ruler corner, from top-left to bottom-right, you made a diagonal guide.

4. Click Snap button (Shift+5), you enabled / disabled Snapping.

5. Move a rectangle to a guide line, it snaps.

6. Hover cursor to a guide line, Delete to delete it.

7. Press Shift+Backslash to hide / show guide lines if any.

8. Create a rectangle, press Shift+G, to create guide lines automatically following its shape and size.

Exercise 1

Create two horizontal guides, top and bottom.
Create 3 objects with same height side by side between guides.

Exercise 2

Write three letters on top of each objects.
Create vertical guide on each of three objects.
Use SNAP BOUNDING BOXES, enable SNAP MIDPOINTS OF BOUNDING BOX EDGES, fix each vertical guide to fit middle point of each object.
Fix the position of each letter to align center of each object.
Feel the snapping.

Exercise 3

Create two more horizontal guides inside the first two.
Shrink each letter's size to follow the new two guides.
Feel the snapping.

Exercise 4

Create five rectangles to the left touching exactly each others.
Duplicate them to bottom.
Change the forms to circle, triangle, pentagon, and star with the help of vertical and horizontal guides.
See example below.

Exercise 5

Create a picture like below with all techniques above and icons you can download below. We will create banners to promote computer applications useful to us namely Inkscape, Firefox, and LibreOffice.

First, create the first artwork like this with guides, centering and snapping.

Then, duplicate the first artwork, but edit them with another icons and text and colors like below.

Finally, export the artwork either as a whole all banners in one or individually per banner with Ctrl+Shift+E. Below is the example of PNG export final result with 96 dpi.