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More than three years in the making, the Inkscape 1.0 release of the best free and open-source vector graphics editor software is finally here and it’s a massive update.
Probably the biggest new thing in the Inkscape 1.0 release is the port to the latest GTK3 UI toolkit. This means that Inkscape will not only look better overall, but it will also work on HiDPI/4K screens.
But there are numerous other new features included in this release that should please even the most aspiring graphic designers, freestyle drawing users, and other artists who work with SVG graphics.
Among these, there’s theme support to let users choose between dark or light themes to match their desktops, a new searchable Live Path Effects selection dialog, new Split-view and Xray modes, as well as canvas rotation and mirroring.
On-canvas alignment is supported as well in this major release, which also brings the ability to export PDFs with clickable links and metadata, new palettes, templates, margin guides and mesh gradients.
The list of new features continues with a new extension that lets users create interactive mockups, support for variable fonts, browser-compatible flowed text, as well as more powerful and simplified line-height settings.
With the new PowerPencil mode, artists will finally be able to create closed paths and use pressure-dependent width. Inkscape 1.0 also lets you vectorize line drawings, render and export hairlines, and use SVG2 vector hatches.
Among other noteworthy changes included in Inkscape 1.0, there’s three new path effects, namely Offset, PowerClip and PowerMask, the ability to create duplicate guides and align grids to a page, the ability to create closed arcs, and support for saving the current file as a template.
Some major changes were also made in the extensions system, which is currently migrating to Python 3. This means that some third-party extensions might not work as expected or at all.
Since this is a massive update, a bunch of performance improvements are also in place to enable users to work with node-heavy objects and make using various components and functions much faster.
For more details about the new features implemented in Inkscape 1.0, you can check out the release video below and the official release notes. Meanwhile, you can download Inkscape 1.0 here.
Last updated 4 years ago
