New modes were recently added to the Tweak tool for transforming a large number of objects. This is very useful to visually “sculpt” scatterings of small objects.

The new modes are:

• Move
• Move in/out
• Move randomly
• Scale
• Rotate
• Blur
• Duplicate/delete

Discover these features in this video:

see the release notes for more details on this tool.

This post and video by Steren Giannini are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This post will focus on two new features of Inkscape 0.47 :

A Spiro curve is a curve defined entirely by its points, you don’t have to worry about handles. The resulting curve uses the minimum possible curvature to pass through the points. The visual result is that it becomes very easy to build very natural, smooth and nice paths.

The second feature of this screencast is freehand shapes. Basically, before this the pencil tool could only draw lines of constant width, with freehand shapes, you just choose the type of line you want to draw.

Inkscape Labrat by Steren Giannini is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Some new behaviours where added to the Pen Tool.

The first one allow you to draw only straight lines and the second one only straight line segments
that are parallel to one of the coordinate axes.

These features will be useful for artists, and much more to technical designers.

I’ll detail the “Spiro” curves later…

Inkscape Labrat by Steren Giannini is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

A new eraser tool has been created.

This screencast features its two modes:

• The first one is very similar to what we can find in bitmap editors : it just substract to the selected path your drawing.

• The second mode is a “quick erase tool”: any shape touched by the tool is erased

Check it here:

Inkscape Labrat by Steren Giannini is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.