Tricks and tips

Generic tricks and tips

The tips and tricks are collected to share/tutorials/tipsandtricks.svg and made apart of the release. If you want to contribute further, please add your tips and tricks to the SVN copy of the aforementioned. Also, you can add them below and they will be collected from time to time as a part of that tutorial.

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New Tips and Tricks Scratchpad

Please enter your new tips and tricks here...

New tip

Swatch Palette:

Inkscape doesn't currently have a swatch/colour palette. ??? I think this is out of date, isn't there a swatch palette in 0.42

As an intermediate measure you can create or open a swatch palette in another application (eg in GIMP). Then take a screenshot of the pallette (eg. GIMP has an acquire command in the file menu to do this) and save it as a .bmp file.

Import the bmp file into your current inkscape file, you can then use the inkscape colour picker to select colours from the palette bitmap! Then just delete the bmp from your file when you have finished.

(or you could keep a collection of coloured svg boxes, stored in a separate file)

Adding fill to Shapes drawn with the Calligraphic Pen tool

Quick tut on how to add fill to shapes you've drawn with the calligraphic pen.

upload:filling_calligraphy.svg

Printing or Producing PDFs in ISO A4 rather than US Specific Letter Paper

I've been messing with this for ages, and as it turns out it's got a very simple solution (much easier than emailing your SVG to a friend with Illustrator ;-).

With Inkscape 0.42, if you create an A4 canvas and print it, it will quite happily print properly on an A4 printer. It'll even produce suitable PostScript too. However, if you produce a PDF (either by Save As... or by using the command line ps2pdf or by using Adobe Acrobat) you'll always get a US Letter PDF. I think this is because the PostScript doesn't mandate A4 or suggests Letter, after all, most .ps files will convert perfectly like this. However, you can force ps2pdf to use A4, although sadly not in Inkscape. Do it on the command line after printing PostScript to a file:

ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 myfile.ps

(it'll produce myfile.pdf, which should be an A4 PDF rather than the default Letter).

Hopefully one day, Inkscape will have a dialogue asking you what paper size you'd like when it produced PDFs (much like saving .eps asks you a couple of things). After all, Inkscape just uses ps2pdf to produce PDFs anyway, so it ought to be able to pass in the paper size specification when it does so.

...Coofer Cat