Inkscape notes
Table of Contents
Quickstart
- File > Document Properties to set up the size and orientation of the page.
- (Optionally) put a white rectangle as the background (or set the
page to white,
ffffff
in the properties menu). - Scroll up and down with the mouse and hold shift to scroll left and right. To zoom, hold control and scroll.
- File > Import to import SVG and PNG images.
- Never align anything by eye, there is a simple alignment tool which you should use.
There are some really helpful notes from the Babraham Bioinformatics course here. There are also a lot of very good videos on YouTube
FAQs
How do I get some nice icons for my scientific diagram?
Check out the following sources, but remember to check the licensing if you are going to use them in publications:
How do I get ColorBrewer2 colour palettes?
You can download a GIMP colour palette .gpl
files and load them into
Inkscape by navigating View then Swatches then clicking the files
button. Here are some nice palettes:
How do I add/delete a page?
Click on the Pages Tool and in the menu that is focused there will be buttons to add and delete pages. You can Batch export pages and then combine them later with pdftk.
How do I convert from SVG to PDF/PNG?
To convert from a SVG to a PDF or a PNG using the convert
function
on the command line is fussy, instead you can open inkscape and export
it in either of these formats. Just be careful to set up your page
properties properly so that it starts on a familiar scale.
How do I draw a triangle?
Select the Star/Polygon Tool and change the number of corners to 3.
How do I extract a figure from a PDF?
Suppose there is a figure in a paper that you want to extract. There is a very easy and nice way to do this using inkscape.
- Open the PDF using inkscape. Make sure to import this via Poppler so it preserves the vector data.
- Use Object > Ungroup to split the elements of the page and delete those that you don't want.
- Re-group the remaining material and save it in the desired size and format.
You may also find my notes on WebPlotDigitizer useful.
How do I get LaTeX?
Install the textext package and write a preamble file that works for you. Here is my current preamble
\documentclass{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amsthm,amssymb,amsfonts} \usepackage{color} %% Use the following for Merriweather sans-serif font as the default %% font \usepackage{merriweather} \renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}