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Inkscape, the powerful open-source, cross-platform, and free SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) editor, has been updated today to stable version 1.3, a major release that introduces new features and many improvements.
Inkscape 1.3 is here a year and two months after Inkscape 1.2 and introduces a new tool called Shape Builder, which lets you create new shapes by combining and building new paths even from multiple overlapping shapes. Best of all, the new shapes will retain their original color, too.
Also new is a Document Resources dialog that can show statistics about your documents and gives you a more efficient way of organizing your Inkscape documents. Moreover, a new Font collections feature will help those of you who have way too many fonts in your collection to better categorize them.
Inkscape 1.3 also brings a new pattern editor that lets you adjust a pattern, adjust pattern parameters like shapes, sizes, and rotation, as well as to change colors for your version of a pattern and adapt the offset.
The Layers and Objects dialog received some improvements in this release to allow you to adjust the opacity or blending mode of a layer by using the slider, as well as to hide or lock objects in a single swipe by dragging multiple objects at once.
This release also makes it easier to quickly adjust the snap settings, gives you more control over margins and bleed of a document when preparing for printing, and makes it easier to select nodes that are hard to select with rectangle selection by holding the Alt key and drawing.
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 what Inkscape will do with each font it finds in a PDF document, and the node deletion logic was improved.
Inkscape 1.3 also makes it easier to find your favorite colors in the palette by pinning them, as well as to customize the size of the color swatches, lets you copy and paste objects from one page to another that will land in the same position, and makes the Filters dialog easier to use.
For more details about the changes implemented in this release, check out the release notes. Meanwhile, you can download Inkscape 1.3 right now from the official website as an AppImage universal binary format that you can use on any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything on your computer.
Last updated 9 months ago
