Inkscape

Inkscape is a free, opensource, vector graphics software. Having been less than version 1 for slightly less time than OpenSSL was, it is has now achieved "production" status with version 1. It can be downloaded for your system from Inkscape.org.

Uses

It is useful for a lot of different things, but the initial focus of this article is going to be for creating designs to laser cut.

Getting started

• Install software. I'll leave that to you. I'm running on a Mac, so screenshots will be from there, but you can translate.

Caveats

I'm largely self taught on Inkscape. So there might be things in this documentation that are a terrible way to do something. That's the joy of a wiki, update it with a better way if you know of one. Otherwise, this is what works for me.

Fix some defaults

Units of measure

Listen, I get it, we live in America. But "freedom units" have little place in precision and even less place in the software designed a decade ago by a Chinese software development company. So, you'll want to change your defaults to metric, or specifically, mm.

• Change the Document Properties to mm

• Change the grid units to mm

Really getting started

Create a new file

Standard stuff. File -> New. Now, you're going to see this big box on it. This is just your canvas, it is not something that is part of your drawing.

Basic controls

Now, if you're expecting

• Zoom out: - (i.e. hyphen, minus)
• Zoom in: + (i.e. plus sign)
• Other basic controls:

Let's make a key chain tag

One of the most basic laser items, so good to start. Our key chain tag is going to have 3 simple elements:

1. Be a small rectangle, 3 cm x 10 cm
2. Have a hole for the key ring to go through
3. Have a name on it

Draw rectangle

Resize rectangle

Draw hole

Align everything horizontal

Add text

Resize text

Align horizontal again

[[ |250px]]

Create layers

Move things to easy to remember layers

How to view layers

Save your file

Stroke To Path

Save your file as DXF 14 too