A Guide to Inkscape/Introduction

Scalable Vector Graphics

Scaling a bitmap and a SVG drawings makes the differences appear.

A vector object is composed of edit enabled path(s) and geometrical elements (nodes) based on two dimensional vector (x/y) coordinate values. This is very different from raster (or bitmap) images, which are composed from a grid (bitmap) of colored squares. Bitmaps are inherently "pixellated" when scaled larger (zoomed in), while vectors can be scaled to any size, and won't display any pixelized objects.

Some graphic editor programs, such as the GIMP, are known as bitmap or raster (photograph) editors. With Inkscape, you can create and edit vector graphics, and save them as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files or 'save as' over 25 graphic editor based file formats. SVG is an open standard designed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) to create vector based objects.

The Graphic User Interface (GUI)

When you load Inkscape you will see the main interface: