Features of Inkscape

Here is an overview of the features that are available in Inkscape.

See the roadmap for an outline of planed features, as well as Launchpad[1] for detailed ideas for improving Inkscape.

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.