Inkscape Tutorial

Inkscape Tutorial for Engineers, 12 slides in PDF for learning Inkscape.

Inkscape has become my favorite drawing tool after designing with a commercial CAD (computer-aided design) software package for several years. Most of my work drawings nowadays are designed in Inkscape. It is truly an amazing piece of open software.

Inkscape users can be roughly divided into two groups of people. The first group includes artists and creative people who use Inkscape to produce creative work. The Inkscape 1.1 about screen is a perfect example and it’s an amazing piece of art work. The second group of people uses Inkscape to produce technical drawings. Those users may treat Inkscape as a downgraded version of a CAD tool, or an upgraded version of a basic drawing tool. This set of slides is mainly designed for the second group of users.

This set of 12 slides is created in Inkscape when I am learning the software. It helps me become familiar with Inkscape and later serves as a reference for myself. I hope you will find them useful.

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inkscape selector
Inkscape Selector

The first tool on the toolbar is selector, and it has three modes: single click, double click, and second click.

SVG code
SVG Code

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has six shape elements: line, rectangle, circle, ellipse, polyline, and polygon. Inkscape itself has special attributes for shapes like star.

inkscape node type
Inkscape Node

Inkscape has four types of node: corner, smooth, symmetric, and auto. Pen tool is very versatile and it has five modes we can use.

Last updated March 2019

This website contains many Inkscape materials and notes from my blog site. This set of slides was developed in 2019 with Inkscape version 0.92. We will revise it to reflect the current version 1.1. (9/1/2021)

Dmitry Kirsanov’s The Book of Inkscape (2nd ed) is recently published. This is an excellent book to learn Inkscape software.