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This month, I’ll be covering some more of the smaller additions and alterations in Inkscape version 1.4, starting with a change that will affect your use of the program with all but the simplest of drawings. Creating layers The Layers and Objects dialog is a result of merging two formerly separate dialogs into one, and makes a lot of sense from the perspective of a user. But still hanging around from the days of a separate Layers dialog is the interstitial dialog that appears when creating a new layer – the one that lets you name the new layer, and select where in the hierarchy it will appear relative to the current layer. Here’s how it appeared in every version up to 1.3.2. The big change for most users is that this dialog has both disappeared and been re-designed. Before you get too confused, what I mean is that it still exists, in a re-designed form, but it’s been removed from the way it was most commonly accessed. I’ll wager that most users manage their layers via the Layers and Objects dialog, using the buttons at the top to add and delete layers, and perhaps to shift them up and down in the hierarchy. In older versions of Inkscape, the “+” button would open this interstitial dialog, but no more. Now, clicking on that button (which doesn’t even have a tooltip on my copy of the program) will immediately create a new layer above the currently selected one.
Obviously this results in a loss of control over the name and position of the new layer, but it’s easy to rename the newly created layer by double-clicking on it, and it can be moved in the hierarchy by a drag-and-drop operation. If all you want to do is to move it up and down the list, you can use the arrow buttons at the top, but Inkscape strangely lacks left and right buttons for turning into a sub-layer, or promoting it back to a higher level layer. For those latter operations you have to use drag-and-drop. If you still prefer to use the old dialog, then there are two ways to access it: from the Layer > Add Layer… menu, or using the Ctrl-Shift-N keyboard shortcut. Unfortunately, there’s no setting or other way to make the “+” button in the Layers and Objects dialog open this dialog as it used to, which is something of a shame for those that prefer to use this approach. As mentioned above, the dialog has been slightly re-designed. Nothing major – just replacing the previous pop-up menu with separate radio buttons. I can see what the developers are trying to achieve with this layout, with the second option indented to suggest a sublayer – but it does look a bit untidy. I’d have perhaps left the radio buttons aligned, but indented the text or prefixed it with a line or arrow. Still, it’s one less click to change from the default placement than with the older version, which is an improvement.
I have mixed feelings about the change to the “+” button. In cases where layers are temporary, or not important enough to be explicitly named, it can make for a faster workflow. In other cases, splitting the creation, naming and placement into three steps will make things slower. Given that the Layers dialog already has an ‘options’ section, would it have been so hard to add a setting to let the user choose their preferred mode of operation? Or at least allow a Shift-click on the button to open the old dialog still. Templates A couple of new templates have been added to the File > New from Template… dialog. They’re named “Zine Booklet (US)” and “Zine Booklet (A4)”, and they’re the result of developer Martin Owen’s daughter’s interest in creating “zines” with her friends. To some (older) people – such as myself – the word “Zine” conjures up thoughts of small run, counter-culture publications, often centred around specific bands or hobbies. Zine is short for “magazine”, which makes a lot of sense given that these tended to be both physically smaller and with a lower page count than the usual news-stand fare.
Perhaps taking their inspiration from those earlier zines, the templates in Inkscape are a quick-and-easy way to create a small 8-page booklet from a single sheet of paper, with just a single cut and a little folding. The two variants are to accommodate a starting sheet of either US Letter size (11“ × 8.5”) or DIN A4 size (297mm × 210mm). In either case, the resultant zine is 1/8th the size of the starting page – so A6 in the DIN system, and… well… I guess you’d need to do the math for the American version as I don’t believe it’s an officially named size. On selecting either of these templates, you’ll be presented with a layout something like this (you may need to zoom out in Inkscape to see it all at once): There seems to be a lot going on there, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. The pages in a row at the top are the ones you work on. Put your content there, making sure to remain within the page boundaries, or clip content which overspills the left and right sides. If you don’t, nothing will break, but you may end up with parts of one page appearing on another unintentionally.
The first pair of pages are used for the back and front covers of the zine in that order. Bear that in mind, because it’s easy to start with the design of your front cover and automatically think it needs to be put on the first available page. The subsequent pairs of pages are the insides of the zine, in the expected order. As you add things to the pages you’ll see it automatically reflected in the 8-page layout at the bottom – with the content of pages 1-4 flipped vertically. And yes, you can remove the preset labels in the middle of each page – they’re just there as guides to make the final layout a little more obvious when you first open this template. With your content complete, here comes the very important part (which could really do with some explanation on the template itself): you want to print only the single composite page from the bottom of the template – the one labelled as “Print Sheet”. The easiest way to do this, if you’re printing from within Inkscape, is to switch to the Pages tool and click inside the Print Sheet section so that it’s selected. Then you can set the print range to “Current Page” in the print dialog.
Alternatively, you may wish to export the zine for printing from another program or on another computer. Select the File > Export menu entry, then in the dialog, ensure that the Page button is active. That should show a list of all the pages in the template – select only the “Print Sheet” option before exporting to your preferred format. Once the page is printed you need to fold it into eight. First, make a long mountain fold along the length of the page, folding it in half to form a long thin shape with pages 1-4 on one side and the remaining pages on the other. Open it back out before continuing. Now fold it in half along the width with a mountain fold, so that you have pages 3-6 on one side, and the rest on the other. With it still in half, fold each side back on itself with another “valley” fold so that you end up with a small concertina of paper with the printed content on the insides. Open it out a little so that you can get some scissors into the doubled-up section in the middle. Now comes the cut. This is shown as a dotted line on the template, and is easily done with a single scissor cut from the folded edge down to the valley folds. You should now be able to easily fold the zine as shown on the image in the template to produce an 8-page booklet. Trust me, it’s easier than it sounds.
I really like this addition to the program. It’s a simple thing that can make for such a fun way to introduce kids to the idea of graphic design, publishing, and Inkscape itself. Import/Export There has been a small but useful change to the File > Export… dialog: if you enter a path for the export that does not exist on your filesystem, Inkscape will try to create the missing folder hierarchy, rather than showing a warning. I suspect that most people choose a path using the file selector, in which case this probably won’t ever kick in (since the file selector shows you only paths that already exist). But consider the use case of picking a base path with the file selector, then manually adding the name of a subdirectory for your export into the field in the dialog. This will now do the right thing, and use the subdirectory if it already exists, or create it for you if it doesn’t. Just watch out for typos (and case-sensitive filesystems), or you might end up ‘losing’ files to locations you didn’t intend! A new import filter has been added for Affinity Designer files (*.afdesign). Affinity’s programs are a common alternative to Adobe’s Creative Suite, for those people who want a commercially supported product, but prefer a more traditional software licence rather than the subscription model that Adobe enforces now. Therefore it’s great to see support added to Inkscape but, as is so often the case, the format is not officially documented, so there are likely to be gaps and bugs in the importer. If you have access to *.afdesign files and find there are problems with importing any of them, please do file issues via https://inkscape.org/report so that the filter can be improved further.
An old import filter sees a return with version 1.4. The CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) importer was removed in version 1.0, but has been reinstated now. This is an old format, but it’s an ISO standard so might be useful for interoperability with some other software or when dealing with archival material. Finally, the PDF exporter now supports internal links between sections within the same file. See the Full Circle Magazine contents page as an example, whereby clicking on an entry jumps to the relevant page in the PDF. This is a really great addition that will greatly enhance Inkscape’s capabilities as a PDF authoring tool. That’s all for the smaller, little publicized additions and fixes that I’ll be covering. Next month, I’ll start to look at some of the bigger headline changes that arrived with Inkscape 1.4.