When you look at the Inkscape gallery, it’s clear you can get some fantastic results from this program. Rather than moving or resizing shapes, I would draw a new shape, cut the text out of the old one, then place the text into the new shape. Resizing the shape didn’t always treat the text in the way I expected, leading to weird placements. But I was constantly struggling to have my text appear how I wanted it. Inkscape allows you to have text fit into any shape you choose, which seems quite powerful on the surface. You have to create your text, create your shape, then flow the text into that shape. You can put that text into a box, but the text and the shape are always two separate things. In Inkscape, a regular text object forms a single line. In CorelDRAW, you can opt for “paragraph text” that fits inside a box you define. In PowerPoint, there can be a lot of automatic resizing to make the text or box fit. In most graphics programs, you put text into a text box. On posters, you often have to work with paragraphs of text, so this was a major sticking point. It was working with text that drove me nuts. Making a grid was not intuitive, but I chalked that up to unfamiliarity and interference from previously learned software. Making objects and layering was much like I had encountered in other programs. This was about 50% right.ĭrawing was reasonably straightforward. I’ve used CorelDRAW for a long time, so I expected to be able to pick up Inkscape quite quickly. We had used Adobe Illustrator in round one of the class, but this year, we decided to let people try Inkscape in case they didn’t have access to Illustrator.Īt one point, I had read that Inkscape followed some of the same conventions as CoredlDRAW rather than Illustrator. Inkscape has been on my radar for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to sit down and use it seriously until the second #SciFund poster class earlier this year. As such, it’s the freeware answer to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Inkscape is a free software that creates vector-based illustrations.

Coreldraw inkscape