Inkscape 03: Opening and Saving Files

hi my name is Katie Bart's from sewing Singh Kham and I'd like to welcome you to another extreme beginning tutorial in Inkscape today's topic is opening and saving files [Music] okay our topics today are gonna be on how to open a file and how to save a file in Inkscape so there's several ways to do both so I'd like to walk you through the different options so you can choose your favorite the first way to open a file is to go to the file menu and click on the open command and then you will have a dialog box that will show you a list of files now this button that you will see right here allows you to view your files differently so if you want you might be seeing something like this on your screen which shows you a list of files right if you have this selected you might be able to open large icons and actually see some of the graphics that are in your particular computer right so let's just change this back to list most of you will probably either at list or at details view but if I wanted to open for example circle dot SVG what I need to do is simply click on that file it will show you a thumbnail of what that picture looks like so if I were to change different things down here different file names the picture on this some nail will change so if that's the file you wanted to open all you need to do is click on open itself now open you can see is highlighted a little bit darker than the cancel button so this is considered to be what the colleague default button that means if I were to double click on the file circle SVG it would be selecting the file and clicking on the Open button simultaneously so let's go ahead and double click so it's selected the file and it clicked open at the same time all right so the next way we're going to open a file is to use the file open icon when I click on that particular button again the same dialog box is going to come open and simply again double clicking on the file that you want will open that file into your workspace and it will open it actually in a separate file okay so you'll have two copies of our two windows of Inkscape working on your computer so I'm gonna go ahead and cancel that so I don't confuse you with the screens here the next way to open a file is to actually use the import command so if I go to the file menu click on import you'll see that it actually has a very similar same dialog box and again if I select the particular file that I want to open it will allow me to do that but what makes open different than import is when I use the open command before let's say if I said file opened and I wanted to open this leaf picture right here if I select clicked on open at this point it would open this leaf document in a separate workspace area but maybe I actually want to use this graphic and put some text on this but the text that I want to use for example under file import is this text right here right rather than opening it in a separate document and then having to either copy and paste or cut and paste into another document to make it work using the import command allows you to actually import and open that file in the existing file alright that makes it really handy because maybe you actually want to go ahead and you know size this smaller and make this one larger and if I select them both by holding my shift key down and clicking on Katy I can come over here to the align and distribute properties window I can align vertically and horizontally and now those two files are open but the file name is going to be the first name that I actually opened because importing it into the circle SVG file right now before I exit out of this and show you how to save this file I'm going to duplicate this particular document or graphic using what we call the drag-and-drop method so very quickly I'm going to go ahead and close out of my document without saving and I'm going to go ahead and reopen Inc space so that I can give you another option on opening a file so what I'm going to do is go ahead and leave this file or this window smaller and I'm going to open up my Windows Explorer window and I'm gonna size them both so I can at least see both of them on the screen at the same time when I do that I'm able then to actually select the file drag it and drop it into the document and just like the import command alright so this would be like import to point to point oh I can take this file and also drop that into this particular file by using the drag-and-drop method and a brand new document I don't have a document name specified yet so I'm kind of creating this from scratch but the beauty of using the drag-and-drop method is again it allows you to open multiple files at the same time now let me just go ahead and maximize that window so it takes up the full screen you notice I didn't hit this button over here on the right hand side this is your maximize and restore button I click it again it restores this window to the size it was before I maximized it I like shortcuts so in any Windows program when you double click on the title bar it will either maximize your window or it and if I double-click on that I can restore it to the original size now why is that helpful well if for example my window for some reason I had to move these on my screen better so I could see them both on the screen in my maximized window but it's not visible on the screen that won't matter because I can double click on this title bar anywhere to maximize that window to make it larger holding the control key down on your keyboard while you scroll your mouse wheel will allow you to zoom in on the area and we're going to talk about all these different shortcuts tips and tricks as we go through and continue progressing through our tutorials but maybe again I wanted to go ahead and make this circle larger I'm gonna go ahead and hold ctrl and shift on my keyboard while I drag and that sizes the design again from the center out that we learned in the previous tutorial and right now the circle is selected to select the name Katie what I need to do is hold my shift key on my keyboard and simply click on it and now you can see the marquee is around both objects I can then go ahead once again go to my align and distribute menu and align vertically and align horizontally all right so now I have this object here and I want to save it so let's talk about saving our documents once you have the items exactly the way you wanted sometimes you can I like to save these files periodically so I don't lose any of the work that I've done but initially we first have to give this particular file a name if I look up here on the title bar in the left hand corner it says new document alright that's not a very useful name so the first time you save a document I'd like you to get in the habit of using the save as command using the save as command allows you to come to this dialog box which you can actually type in a name alright and I named this here before but let's go ahead and give it a new name let's call it circle name and I won't have to put the dot SVG behind it because it will automatically but I want you to get in the habit of naming your things capitalize the first initial of the first word in the next word as you can see that that's easy to read I don't put spaces in my final names because then I never have to remember or ask myself did I put a space in that name because if you're searching for it on your computer and you didn't put a space in it but you're searching with it for a space you won't find that file name so you can see in all my file names up here I do not have any spaces in them I just designate the words each unique word with a capital letter and that makes it really easy to read then go ahead and click on before we click on save let's talk about the different file types Inkscape dot SVG is the default SVG file format but I have a tendency to lean towards the plain SVG file format SVG stands for scalable vector graphic in that particular file is important and and we can work on multiple devices because it is a vector file alright so for example I can use a plain SVG file in my digitizing software I can use a plain SVG file in my cutting machine if I'm going to be cutting some vinyl or be kind of cutting fabric for quilt applique for example and it will actually even print out we need to say file print so it makes it very versatile versatile but the beauty of saving it with the SVG format is because it is a vector file the objects in there are scalable and they won't have that pixelating capability now we're going to talk more about how to prepare your documents for saving as a vector file in future tutorials but I did cover it also in the last tutorial so please don't hesitate to go back and review that on how to make your graphics true vector graphics and vector art to work in those other applications so plain SVG is what you're going to use probably 99% of the time the other options that you're probably going to use on a regular basis our Portable Document format so for example if you want to save this as circle name dot PDF you're creating flyers for a a birthday party or a garage sale or something coming up you can save it as a PDF file take it down to your local office store and they can print that file out because it is a PDF file for you whether they want to make a poster or you want just a bunch of eight-and-a-half by 11 sheets made up or even post cards you know whatever it is but portable document formats PDF files can be read by a Mac or a Windows computer and others as well the other file formats you might want to consider or just know that they are here is an EPS format that's encapsulated PostScript many digitizing software applications use that or if you want to take this graphic and bring it back into that they Illustrator Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw you can bring it in as a encapsulated PostScript file which is a vector a more powerful vector file and then the last one I wanted to highlight here is this DXF file format sometimes if you have a silhouette cutter sometimes the outlines of the cutting lines are displayed easier if it's saved in DXF format all right so those particular files formats are what we're going to be using the plain SVG PDF maybe EPS wmf you probably use also we'll talk about that in future tutorials and the DXF so at this time go ahead and click on plain SVG I'm going to click on save and just to make sure it's there if I go here to open recent you can see that circle name dot SVG now is available in this list and it will be located on my hard drive at this point right now since this filename is saved as circle named SVG if I go under the file menu you can see that there's still a save command you would use the save command to give this file this or this document the same name so for example I come over to the circle and I wanted to make this circle let's say teal blue alright I made that change I can come up here to the file menu click on save or even better yet start memorizing these shortcut keystrokes ctrl s for save if I go ahead to this document I press control ctrl s it has now saved this document with the recent changes my background is no longer you know pink or green it is this aqua teal color and that's the way when I open the file that it will come up so I hope you learned a little bit today about opening your files using the file menu the file icon and the beauty of using the import command as well is utilizing the drag-and-drop method of opening a file which is another way of basically importing your files into one file and we talked about using the save command so the first time you save you save as and then subsequently you can just use save when you're going to use the same file name our next tutorial is going to talk about text how to create and manipulate and work with text and there'll be a couple parts to that tutorial so we'll have one or two part series on that because there's a lot to learn are working with text now I want to thank you for joining me and we'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: SewingScene

Views: 318

Keywords: Katie Bartz, SewingScene, Sewing Scene, Sewing, Inkscape, Inkscape Tutorials, Inkscape Beginner Tutorials

Id: Oifsiti_RjE

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018