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:

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

Draw rectangle

First, we're going to draw the outline of the tag. It's not important to get the size precisely right because we'll change that in the next section. You can actually size it by doing it initially, but want to show the process for how you can do it for any element.

Select the rectangle tool.

Then just click and drag to create the rectangle.

Resize rectangle

The rectangle isn't the size we wanted, so let's fix that. First, click or click and drag to select the rectangle.

You can see where the Height and Width dimensions.

Just click into those and change them to the desired dimensions. You'll recall we said 3 cm and 10 cm, which is 30mm and 100mm.

Draw hole

Now we need the key ring hole. So, we'll just make a circle. We want it close to the area we want, and we'll center it in the enxt step.

Align everything horizontal

There are all sorts of way to try to get this exact, but the best way is to just let the software do it for you. You'll see there are all sorts of options for alignment and distribution, we're going to have them centered.

Here is what it looks like afterwards.

Add text

Select the text tool and type in your information.

Resize text

Easiest way to resize is to just grab a corner and expand it. If you want to make sure it expands proportionally (so it doesn't just stretch width or height) it will do that if you just hold the Control key while you do it.