Inkscape began as a breakaway: four developers forked a drawing app over SVG
In 2003 four programmers walked away from a free illustration program called Sodipodi because they wanted something stricter: a tool built around the full SVG standard. Their fork, Inkscape, became a widely used free vector editor for logos, cartoons and diagrams that print crisply at any size, with no fixed grid of pixels.
Vector graphics store shapes as mathematical paths rather than coloured dots, so an Inkscape logo can be scaled to a billboard without blurring. The program is free and open source under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later. Its native format is Scalable Vector Graphics, and it can read and write Adobe Illustrator files, EPS, PostScript, PDF and PNG.
The family tree runs back to Raph Levien's GNOME Illustration Application, known as Gill, which inspired Sodipodi in 1999. Ted Gould, Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst and a developer known as MenTaLguY led the split, citing disagreements about goals, about how open the project should be to outside contributors and about technical direction. Sodipodi aimed at a general editor even if that meant bending SVG; Inkscape promised to implement the standard completely. After the fork the code moved from C to C++, gained the gtkmm toolkit and a redesigned interface that follows GNOME's usability guidelines. Version 0.91 finally delivered full SVG 1.1 support.
The toolbox covers primitives such as rectangles, spirals, stars and 3D boxes with adjustable perspective, plus Bézier curves, freehand pencil lines and calligraphic strokes suited to a graphics tablet. Clones stay linked to a parent object and update live when it changes, while a tiled-clones tool turns one motif into symmetrical patterns. Text can follow a path or be converted into editable outlines, and a tracing feature turns photographs into vector shapes. There is even an XML editor for tinkering directly with a drawing's underlying code.
Gaps remain. Support for SVG and CSS is incomplete, and animation is not handled natively. The project has joined Google Summer of Code since 2005, and its source code moved from SourceForge to Launchpad after November 2007, then to GitLab in June 2017. Its geometry engine, 2Geom, has been spun off as a library other programs can use.
Source: Inkscape
