Inkscape Vector Graphics Editor : Free Alternative of CorelDraw

Looking for free alternative of Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X? Try Inkscape.

Screenshot of Inkscape, from official site

Inkscape is Free (and OpenSource) Vector Graphics Editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.You can get all features of above softwares in Inkscape.

The Vector graphics is a resolution-independent description of the actual shapes and objects that you see in the image. A rasterization engine uses this information to determine how to plot each line and curve at any resolution or zoom level. Hence, Vector Graphics is now getting popular, and with Inkscape you don’t need to purchase any software.

The basic types of objects in Inkscape are:

Paths—made with the Pencil tool, which allows freehand drawing of paths; the Pen tool, which allows the user to create a Bezier spline node-by-node; the Calligraphy tool, which can be used to draw freehand calligraphic or brush-like strokes, or the Paint Bucket tool, which fills bounded areas of the image. The Calligraphy tool optionally can use pressure and tilt readings from graphic tablets. The Paint Bucket tool works optically rather than geometrically and can assist image tracing.
Rectangles—created using the Rectangle tool. Corners of rectangles can be rounded.
Ellipses—created using the Ellipse tool. Ellipses can be transformed into arcs and circle segments.
Stars/polygons—created using the Polygon tool. Multi-pointed stars can be used to emulate spirographs.
Text—created with the Text tool. Texts can use any of the system fonts, and can be easily converted to paths. Both regular and flowed text is supported. All text objects can be arbitrarily transformed. Text can be manually kerned and flowed along a path.
Raster images—created by importing or pasting bitmap images into Inkscape. Images are linked by default, but they can be embedded into the SVG document using an effect. Images can be traced using an embedded Potrace backend. Inkscape supports PNG, JPEG and BMP.
Clones—create using the Clone operation on existing objects. Clones are verbatim copies of other objects which can have different transformations applied than the original object, and are updated live whenever the original object changes. Deleting the original object causes the clone to be “unlinked” – it becomes a separate object. It is also possible to create chained clones, i.e. clones of a clone, to an arbitrary depth.

Additionally, there are more specialized objects:

Spirals—created using the Spiral tool, they have a configurable number of turns and convergence.
3D Boxes—created using the 3D Box tool. The boxes have adjustable perspective and a configurable number of vanishing points. They can be used to assist perspective drawings. 3D boxes are in fact groups of paths and after ungrouping can be further modified.

[ from Wikipedia ]

I suggested this software to a designer friend, whose feedback pushed me to write this review. The guy was excited about the Free Tag of the tool and is very impressed with the features. Now, he is thinking about uninstalling his default graphics editor and opting Inkscape.

A must have for FOSS lovers