5 Things Inkscape Can Do That Illustrator Can't

in this video we'll be going over some of the things that inkscape can do that illustrator can't now the point of this video isn't to say that inkscape is a better application this is more or less a follow-up on a video I did a couple of weeks ago where I discussed some of the features you'll be missing out on if you switch over to inkscape from illustrator one thing I never touched on in that video though is what you'll be missing out on if you don't switch over to inkscape so let's Jump Right In Here starting with grids so if I come over here to illustrator you can see I have the ability to generate grids on my canvas but they're only based on vertical and horizontal lines if I come over here into the settings menu and choose guides and grids you see that we have some settings that we can change we can change the color of the grid lines we can change them from lines to dots and we could even change the spacing between them but one thing we can't do is create an isometric Grid or grid lines that follow a different angle I come over here into inkscape though I can come up here to where it says file and go down to document properties and if I click on the grids tab over here I have this drop down where I can choose what's known as an axonometric grid now if I click on new you can see what happens on my canvas here we now have an isometric grid on the canvas Now by default these grid lines follow a 30 degree angle but if I want to change the angle of the grid lines I can do so over here in these two input boxes I can just click on these plus and minus icons or I can manually type in my own angle here so for example if I wanted a 45 degree angle grid line now we end up with something like that right there now in illustrator there is a workaround where you can use the rectangle tool to generate a rectangular grid and then transform it so it takes on the appearance of an isometric grid but it's not a true grid and it's quite limited compared to inkscape's actual grid this makes inkscape the better tool to use if you're drawing isometric art in inkscape there's something known as tiled clones which allows you to take a single object and generate lots of copies of it that are all linked together so to show you what I mean I'm going to click on this object here to select it and I'm going to come up here to the edit menu and go to clone and select create tiled clones now in this menu you'll see that there's two different ways that we can do this we can generate our clones based on rows and columns or by width and height so for this demonstration I'm going to show you how to use rows and columns here as you can see I've typed in four rows and six columns and if I click the create button you can see what happens on the canvas here it generates four rows and six Columns of that object and this object is linked to the other objects here so if I transform the original object by scaling it like that you can see it scales the other objects as well I can also change the color and all of the colors will change as you can see there and you get the idea so let me undo that and let me show you the other way that this works now if you look over here you can see we have width and height as well if I choose this option here it allows us to generate our clones in such a way that it fills in an area of our choosing so I've typed in here 600 by 400 pixels and I'm going to click create and you can see what happens here it generates the Clones in such a way that it fills in a 600 by 400 pixel area so let me undo that and show you some of the other options here in this menu because there's a lot to work with I'm not going to go over everything in this menu I just want to show you the main things if I come over here to the scale option first let me set this back to rows and columns if I come over here to the scale option you can see we have the ability to change the size of the Clones as they're generated so we have rows and columns and then we have the x-axis and the and the y-axis so if I change this to 20 for each of these values here I'm just going to manually type in 20. and if I click create you can see it generated those clones in such a way that they become progressively bigger and I'll scale this one down a little bit so you can see it a little better you can see what happens there we have bigger clones as they're generated so let me undo that and show you a couple of other settings here if I come over here to where it says rotation I can choose to rotate the clones before I do this though I just want to make sure I hit the reset button so that we're not scaling them as well I can rotate them based on rows and columns so for say for example if I want to rotate them 45 degrees I can do that by typing in 45 for each of these values here and if I click create you can see our clones are generated in such a way that they rotate 45 degrees each step now let me undo that and I'll come over here to where it says blur on opacity again I'm going to hit the reset button I can choose to generate the Clones with a blur Factor so if I type in 10 here and click create you can see that the Clones are blurred by a factor of 10 percent and then I'll show you the opacity setting as well so let me undo that let me hit the reset button and then I'll come over here to the opacity and I'll change that to 10 as well for each of these values and I'll click create and you can see we have clones that are generated based on a variable opacity going from the top left down to the bottom right now if I come over here to the trace Tab and I click on this button right here to enable tracing this can be used to create clones that Trace over the object beneath it now I'm not going to go over exactly how all of this works here I have several tutorials on this on this channel I'll have it linked in the description of the video if you want to check that out but basically you can use this to trace copies over an image beneath it to create half tone gradients and half tone portraits and the like now that's not to say that you can't do something similar in illustrator but the tiled clones menu just makes it that much easier in inkscape another Advantage you'll enjoy as an inkscape user are some of the advanced controls when it comes to the Align and distribute menu now in illustrator the Align menu has some pretty basic controls here but if I come back into inkscape you can see that we have all of those controls and then some more specifically we have the ability to align objects based on a grid or based on a circular pattern so let me show you how each of these works if I click on the grid tab over here you'll notice on my canvas I have these portfolio items let's say I wanted to arrange these items in a grid to do that I would select all of them and I would come over here and choose how many rows and columns I would like so let's say for example I want three rows and two columns I could click on a range and now we have two rows and three columns of these objects and they are all aligned nicely in a grid and this works the other way around as well let's say I want two rows and three columns I could change that input value and click arrange again and now we have two rows and three columns as you can see there now if you look down here there's two different ways that we can do this we can fit them into the selection box or we can use a predetermined spacing so let me undo what I've done here and get back to my starting point so I can demonstrate how each of these work now if you notice here the objects that I have selected occupy a rectangular shaped bounding box if you want to create your grid based on this bounding box here you would just choose this option over here that says fit into selection box and click arrange and now those objects will be aligned in such a way that they create a grid that fits inside of that selection box another way that you can do this though is you can use a predetermined spacing between each object so if I choose set spacing over here let's say I wanted these objects to be spaced apart 40 pixels on the X and the y-axis I would just type in 40 for each of these input values here and click arrange and now these objects are spaced apart based on 40 pixels of space between each of them another way in which you can align objects in inkscape is based on a circular pattern so let's say I wanted to take these triangles here and distribute them around this circle in such a way that it follows a circular pattern to do that I would just have to select all of them and then come over here to the circular tab now before going any further it's important to understand that in order for this to work one of the objects you have selected has to be a circle if you don't have a circle selected you're going to get an error message and it won't work so with everything selected here I'm going to click on arrange and you can see what happened here it took those triangles and it distributed them around the circle now if you notice each triangle is going halfway through the edge of the circle and the reason why is because the setting that I have up here in the bounding box is the center point if I were to undo this and base it on the bottom point of the triangle and click arrange again now we have this result right here where it kind of looks like a sun icon it took the bottom point of the triangles and arranged it around the circle just like that one of the more convenient features in inkscape is the ability to use a font without having to install it if you're an illustrator user and you want to use a font you'll have to install that font onto your entire operating system so that it gets loaded into every other application that you use as well which can slow your machine Down based on the application you're using in inkscape though you can bypass that all together by using the preferences menu now if you're a Windows or Linux user you can access that by going to edit and then somewhere down here at the bottom of the menu you should see preferences or inkscape preferences if you're a Mac User though just come over here to where it says inkscape and choose settings what we're looking for in this menu is down here where it says system and then I'm going to scroll down and over here you'll see custom font directories you can use this input box right here to paste the pathway for a folder that contains the fonts you want to use and now when you close out of this menu all you have to do is restart inkscape and that font should populate over here in your fonts menu finally inkscape has the ability to generate Vector barcodes and QR codes to show you what I mean I'll come up here to extensions go down to render and then over here where it says barcode slash QR code I'm going to click on classic to generate a regular barcode and from this menu over here you can use this drop down to choose the type of barcode you want to generate for this demonstration I'll choose the ean5 option and I'm going to type in five numbers here that represent the barcode I want to generate and then I will click apply and then close the menu and as you can see here we have a barcode in Vector form now I can use the nodes tool to change this object the same way I would any other Vector object including changing its color and you could use the text tool down here to change the font for the barcode as well and now let's go over how you could generate QR codes so I'll come back over here to extensions go to render barcode slash QR code and this time I will choose QR code now you can use this menu over here to input the address that you would like your QR code to point to for my example I have my website inputted here and I'm going to click apply close out of the menu and now we have this Vector QR code as you can see here and this is indeed a vector object if I grab my nodes tool and click on it you can see we have all of our nodes there and I can even change the color of the object as you can see there so that should do it for today's video now I didn't cover every single feature that inkscape has that illustrator doesn't so if there's anything else that I missed in this video feel free to leave it in the comments below and as always thanks for watching if you found this lesson useful then consider checking out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the tools and features in inkscape and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work kind of like how I did in this video we even have a private Community where you can ask questions and get help from me anytime you want and best of all there's no monthly membership fees you just pay 17 one time and you're in for Life I'll have some information about that down below if you want to check that out as always thanks for watching [Music] thank you

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 68,013

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Id: jPd-AQ7Re6Q

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023