Features of Inkscape

It is difficult to assess a program without knowing what it can and cannot do. Here is an overview of the features that are available in Inkscape, as well as features which are planned for the near future.

Current Features

Object creation

• Drawing: pencil tool (freehand drawing with simple paths), pen tool (creating Bezier curves and straight lines), calligraphy tool (freehand drawing using filled paths representing calligraphic strokes)
• Shape tools: rectangles (may have rounded corners), ellipses (includes circles, arcs, segments), stars/polygons (can be rounded and/or randomized), spirals
• Text tool (multiline text, full on-canvas editing)
• Embedded bitmaps (with a command to create and embed bitmaps of selected objects)
• Clones ("live" linked copies of objects), including a tool to create patterns and arrangements of clones

Object manipulation

• Affine transformations (moving, scaling, rotating, skewing), both interactively and by specifying exact numeric values
• Z-order operations
• Grouping objects, with a way to "select in group" without ungrouping, or "enter the group" making it a temporary layer
• Layers, with a way to lock and/or hide individual layers, rearrange them, etc; layers can form a hierarchical tree
• Copying and pasting objects
• Alignment and distribution commands

Fill and stroke

• Color selector (RGB, HSV, color wheel)
• Color picker tool
• Copy/paste style
• A gradient editor capable of multi-stop gradients
• Pattern fills (bitmap/vectors)
• Dashed strokes, with many predefined dash patterns
• Path markers (e.g. arrowheads)

Operations on paths

• Node editing: moving nodes and Bezier handles, node alignment and distribution, etc.
• Converting to path (for text objects or shapes), including converting stroke to path
• Boolean operations
• Path simplification, with variable threshold
• Path insetting and outsetting, including dynamic and linked offset objects
• Bitmap tracing (both color and b/w)

Text support

• Multi-line text
• Uses any installed outline fonts, including right-to-left scripts
• Kerning, letterspacing, linespacing adjustments
• Text on path (both text and path remain editable)
• Text in shape (fill shape following stroke)

Rendering

• Fully anti-aliased display
• Alpha transparency support for display and PNG export
• Complete "as you drag" rendering of objects during interactive transformations

Misc

• Live watching and editing the document tree in the XML editor
• PNG and PostScript export
• Command line options for export and conversions
• Perfectly compliant SVG format file generation and editing

The above lifted from the Wikipedia.

SourceForge Tracker

Feature Requests on the SourceForge.net tracker