| guide | Inkscape, the powerful open source, cross-platform, free SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) editor, has been updated today to stable version 1.3, a major release introducing new features and many improvements. |
Inkscape 1.3, which comes a year and two months after Inkscape 1.2, introduces a new tool called the Shape Builder that lets you create new shapes by combining them, even from multiple Overlapping shapes create new paths. Best of all, the new shape retains its original color.
Also new is the Document Resources dialog, which displays document statistics and lets you organize your Inkscape documents more efficiently. Additionally, the new Font Favorites feature will help users who have too many font favorites better sort them.
Inkscape 1.3 also brings a new pattern editor that lets you tweak patterns, adjust pattern parameters like shape, size, and rotation, change colors and adjust offsets for your pattern versions.
The Layers and Objects dialog has received some improvements in this release, allowing you to adjust a layer's opacity or blending mode with sliders, and to hide or lock objects by dragging multiple objects at once.
This release also makes it easier to quickly adjust snapshot settings, gives you more control over the margins and bleed of a document when it's ready to print, and makes Alt-and-Draw easier to select rectangular selections for hard-to-select nodes.
Last but not least, the Live Path Effects (LPE) dialog has been redesigned for quick and easy access; the PDF import functionality has been rewritten with a new dialog that gives you an overview of Inkscape How each font found in a PDF document will be handled; node removal logic has also been improved.
Inkscape 1.3 also makes it easier to find your favorite colors in the palette, lets you customize the size of color patches, lets you copy-paste objects from one page to the same location on another, and lets Filter The Toolbox dialog is easier to use.
For more details on the changes implemented in this release, check out the release notes. In the meantime, you can download Inkscape 1.3 right now from the official website, which is an AppImage universal binary format that you can use on any GNU/ Linux distribution without installing anything on your computer.