14 DAY TRIAL // After being in development for the last 15 years, the Inkscape open-source and free vector graphics editor is finally reaching the 1.0 milestone, proving its maturity with new and exciting features and improvements.
Inkscape is quality SVG editor that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows systems and can be used to create or edit vector graphics like logos, diagrams, illustrations, charts, and anything else in between. InkScape 1.0 is a major release that all fans of the open source software have expected for so long, and it finally brings long-anticipated features and improvements.
Highlights of Inkscape 1.0 include an updated user interface that offers better support for 4K/HiDPI screens and theming support, the ability to rotate and mirror canvases, new options for exporting to the PNG image format, variable fonts (requires pango 1.41.1 or higher), as well as much faster path operations and deselection of a large amounts of paths.
“The user interface has been changed to using a more recent version of GTK+, the widget toolkit that Inkscape uses to draw the user interface on the screen. This new version brings a lot of improvements, especially for users of HiDPI screens. Updating Inkscape for using it has been a large effort that has been anticipated eagerly for a long time, and was a focus of the Boston Hackfest,” said the devs.
First alpha version of Inkscape 1.0 is out now
Among other changes coming to the Inkscape 1.0 release, which should be available later this year, we can mention the ability to control the width of the PowerStroke tool with pressure sensitive touch gestures on graphics tablets, support for fillet/chamfer LPE and lossless boolean operation LPE, and optional placement of Origin in the top left corner of the window.
A first alpha pre-release version of Inkscape 1.0 is now available for download as an AppImage for Linux-based operating systems. A source package is available as well if you want to compile the software on Mac or Windows OSes. More details about the changes coming to Inkscape 1.0 will be revealed in time, but you can check the draft release notes here.
Meanwhile, if you’re using Inkscape, you should know that version 0.92.4 was also released today as a maintenance update that adds support for aligning multiple objects as a group relative to a single object, printing improvemnts, support for writing image data to standard output and read from it, better performance of the measure tool when working with visible grids, and other bug fixes.