Use Inkscape To Create PDF Documents, Ebooks, Manuals, and More

[Music] this is nick with logos by nick.com and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can use inkscape for desktop publishing purposes to create things like reports manuals ebooks and various other types of pdf documents now granted inkscape probably isn't the best tool for this sort of thing but if you just need to create a simple one or two page document or maybe even a short ebook and you're already somewhat familiar with inkscape then it would probably be more practical than taking the time to learn an entirely new piece of software like scribus or indesign i've used inkscape myself to create manuals and ebooks in the past so i know that it's perfectly capable in that regard before we get started though if you'd like to learn everything that there is to know about inkscape be sure to check out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where i go over every tool and feature in inkscape and i explain what it is and demonstrate how it works i'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out so to get us started here in inkscape i'm going to open up a new document and then set up the documents that we are all working with a similar workflow come up here to where it says view make sure we have custom selected and then come up to zoom and go to zoom in at one to one and then we'll open up the align and distribute menu with this button right here and then open up the fill and stroke menu with this button right here and over here where it says snapping we want to make sure we have enable snapping enabled and we want this one enabled right here that says snap nodes pads and handles we also want this one enabled that says snap to cusp nodes including rectangle corners and the one next to it as well snap to smoothnose we're going to enable that and then over here where it says snap text anchors and baselines enable that and then finally over here where it says snap to the page border enable that as well and also you're going to want to make sure you have snap guides enabled as well but that should be enabled by default but if it's not go ahead and enable that so what i want to do now is set up the canvas so that it's suitable for creating these pdf documents we're going to create so we'll come over here to where it says file click on document properties then where it says display units i want to change that to inches and over here where it says page size we have a list of templates here i'm going to choose us letter which is 8.5 by 11 inches if you want to create something like an a5 or an a1 or maybe even us legal you can use that if you want for this tutorial i'm just going to do the standard 8.5 by 11 inches over here where it says border we want to leave show page border enabled border on top of drawing we're going to enable that that should be helpful when we're creating our design and then show border shadow let's just disable that and then finally over here where it says background color i'm going to change this i'm going to click on the hsl tab and i'm going to come down here to the l row and slide this to the left a little bit if you notice the canvas is becoming darker as i do that and we want the canvas to be slightly darker than white because white is going to be the color of the page we create here so let me close out of that we should be all set now close out of that what i want to do now is create a rectangle to place in this page border here is going to represent the white page of the document so i'll grab the squares and rectangles tool and i'll snap to the top left corner of the page click and drag and then snap to the bottom right corner of the page to create this rectangle there and i want to make this rectangle white make sure your opacity is all the way up at 100 and make sure you don't have an outline around your object otherwise known as a stroke if you do have a stroke added to your object just hold shift and click this red x down here to get rid of it and then finally up here where it says make shoulders make corners sharp we want to make sure we have sharp corners while we're doing this so if this is not grayed out go ahead and click on that we don't want our page to have rounded corners okay so now that we have our page set we need to define the content area of this page we don't want the content to run all the way to the edges here so we want to create one inch of padding going around the document here so to do that let me grab the select tool let me right click on this dot this rectangle here and go to duplicate and i'm just going to make this red so we can differentiate it this is just temporarily and up here where it says width and height or w and h we're going to remove an inch from each dimension so it's going to be 7.5 by 11. before we do this though make sure you don't have this lock icon enabled make sure it's disabled like i have it here so i'm going to change this to 7.5 i'm going to hit tab to skip over to the height and change that to 10 and then press enter and it should now be an inch smaller now what we have to do is center this up on the page so where it says relative to change this to page over here in the align distribute menu and we're looking for center on vertical axis and center on horizontal axis and this right here is going to define where the contents of the page are we don't want to leave this red object sitting here though so we're going to convert this to guides come up here to where it says object and go to convert objects to guides and now we have guides there to reference as we're creating our design so the first thing we're going to do to create the design that i showed you in the beginning of the video is we're going to create some header text or title text up here let me grab the text tool let me click and drag actually i'm going to snap to the corner of these these guides over here and then just click and drag to create a title area i'm just going to title this monthly report and i'm going to change this make this bold maybe make this a smaller size go with something like 20 and if you want to change the font you can do so over here i'm going to leave the default sans font for now leave that now i want to put a page number over here so let me just duplicate this text object i'll right click it go to duplicate and i'll change this let me grab the text tool change this to zero one because this will be page one and let me uh let me make this a little smaller first of all i wanna remove the bold i'm gonna make this normal and then i'll just make this maybe something like 16 that looks pretty good and now we can just place this in the top right corner over here i'm going to zoom in on this to zoom in i'm just holding ctrl and rolling up the mouse wheel to move the page just press down the mouse wheel and move the mouse i just want to manually place this in the corner here unfortunately these text objects will not snap into your guides unless it's the base of the text object like you see here but that's not what we're looking for so we're going to leave that right there as it is let me zoom back out and now i just want to create like a little divider to put right here so i'm going to grab the rectangle tool again click and drag to create like a little rectangle going from one side to the other that's looking pretty good i'll make this something like yellow grab the select tool move this up like that let me zoom in so i can get a little closer there we go that's what i'm looking for and i want to make a copy of this divider and put it at the bottom of the page too so let me right click this and go to duplicate and i will put this divider at the bottom of the page where the bottom of the margin is and now i want to create some content area for our design here what i'm going to do for this particular design i'm going to create two columns of text if you want you could just use one giant block of text i'm going to put a little more design into this so i'm going to use two columns of text here so let me grab the rectangle tool again let me create another rectangle going through the uh through the uh guidelines here and let me just make this red let me bring down the opacity and i want to divide this up into two separate evenly sized and evenly spaced apart rectangle so to do that i'm going to create another rectangle going through the center here like this and i'm going to center that up on the page grab the select tool hold shift click on the object there and go to path difference so those are now two different objects and i'm just going to zoom in i'm going to hold ctrl roll up the mouse wheel to zoom in a little bit position this down here a little further we don't want this we don't want this flush against the guide here because the text is going to be in this red area we don't want the text to be stacked on top of this divider so a little bit of padding in there should help something like that looks pretty good and i don't want these text columns to be this high so i'm just going to take this top arrow and just bring this down i'm going to leave these two text columns right here and i'm going to put some other contents up here which we will go over momentarily so let me zoom in let's break this apart into two separate objects we'll go to path break apart and now we'll go to objects object to guides and we now just created guides that we can reference for placing our text so let's go ahead and place some placeholder text in here i'm just going to copy and paste some lorem ipsum dummy text and let me grab the text tool over here click and drag this corner down to here like that i'm just going to hit ctrl v to paste my text in there now this is a little too big let me let me select all of this and ctrl a to select all i want to bring the size down to like maybe 12. i'm just going to go ahead and add some more text in here now let me just copy and paste more of this alarm if some text now if you notice if you if your text is too long it's going to run to the end of the page here so let me take this little node and just drag this down and as you can see the text is running through the edge here so if your text is bleeding out to the edge just go ahead and select it and delete it and you'll have to continue it on in this column over here this is one of the reasons why i think inkscape probably isn't the best tool for this sort of thing because you got to do a lot of manual copy and pasting with the text if you want if you notice the text here we have this spacing on the right side if you want to make it so that the text runs to the to the edges of both sides uh what you can do is you can come up to the uh justification up here the alignment rather and then change to change it to this option right here and if you notice it spaces the text out so it runs to the edges like that i don't like how that looks personally it looks too like robotic so i'm just gonna leave it as it was before and then we're gonna do the same thing over here create some more text i'm gonna make this box even bigger this time so i don't have to change the size of it and again we're just gonna uh i'm just gonna control paste use this dummy text here let me select all control a to select all change the size of this to match the size of the other text i'm gonna use 12. and for this one i'm going to maybe shorten this by about this much because for this design i'm going to use like a placeholder graphic over here like a chart or some kind of pie chart or something like that go back to the select tool okay so now that part is done what we could do now is create like a text area in here like a like a header section to do that i'm going to grab the white rectangle that represents the page i'm going to right click that and go to duplicate and i'm just going to take this bottom arrow and scale it up like this bring it up to about there let me change the color of this so we can see what we're doing here i'm going to make this like a dark shade of blue like that you can use whatever color you like i'll take this top arrow bring this down and we're going to use this area right here to add some like uh leader text or header text and before i do that though i just want to make sure that this is evenly spaced out between this text object this blue rectangle and this yellow divider i want to make sure all three of these are evenly spaced out so i'm going to click on the divider hold shift click on the blue box hold shift click on the text and come over here to where it says distribute and we're looking for this icon down here towards the bottom right that says make vertical gaps between objects equal go ahead and click on that and there we go so let me uh create some text to put in here i'm going to grab the text tool snap to the left guide right here put that right there i'm just going to use header text i'm going to make that white and maybe i'll make that a little bigger maybe something like 30 32 that should be pretty good and now i want to use this divider for this design i'm going to use this divider down here as well so let me take that divider duplicate that by right clicking it going to duplicate put this over here and i want this divider to be the same width of this text so let me click on the text right click it and go to copy and then click on the divider and go to edit paste size paste with and then i can go ahead and paste this move this over here like that i'm going to zoom in so that the snaps won't get in the way there we go and now i'm going to put some subtext down here so let me click on this right click it duplicate put this down here make this white grab the text tool again and uh sub text can go here let me just stack this next to it like that now it's looking pretty good let me zoom in just make sure these are evenly spaced apart looking pretty good now i'm going to put some text in here on this right side to do that let me grab the text tool i'm going to start over here on this guideline click and drag like this let me try that again i'm going to click and drag to create this text box ctrl v to paste there we go make that white uh ctrl a to select it all i'm going to make this one slightly bigger than this body text over here so this was size to 12. i'm going to size this at maybe uh 16 see how that looks that looks pretty good i'm going to go ahead and remove some of this that we don't have so much of that in there okay looking pretty good now if you're not happy with the width of this text what you can do is let me zoom in a little bit you can move this over like this and then you can go back to the text tool and take this node right here and just snap it to the right side so that it changes the uh the orientation of it like that now let me grab the select tool i want to center this text up within this blue object so i'm going to hold shift and click on the blue text i mean the blue object and i'm going to change the relative to i'm going to change that to last selected and i'm going to center it up on the horizontal axis like that and now i want this text to to be aligned to the top of this text so let me click and drag over those three objects right there to select them or what you could do is you could just click them one by one while holding shift and then just group them together with this button that says group selected objects or you can just press ctrl g hold shift click on this text right here and then just where it says uh align top edges click on that and that right there is what we're looking for so let me zoom out a little bit let me click off of this to deselect everything now what you could do now is you can import an image in here if you want to do what i did if you want to add some more flair to this design what i'm going to do is i'm going to import my image over here i have it opened up on my other monitor if i can just find it we go i'll bring my folder this is the folder right here i'll bring it into the screen if you just take your image and just click and drag it onto inkscape like that leave the defaults as it is click ok and there's my image i just want to send this to the bottom of the image i'm going to right click this actually no i'm going to come over here to where it says lower selection to the bottom click on that and then i want to raise that one step so it's above the white page so i'm going to click this button over here that says raise selection one step and if at any point you want to see how your design is looking without these guides in the way you could just come over here where it says view and then deselect guides what i like to do is use the keyboard shortcut which is this vertical line right here so i'm going to toggle them off and on to see how they look okay so let me center this up on the blue box right here let me select that hold shift click on the blue box center it up vertically and horizontally like that click off of it to deselect everything take just this blue box and bring the opacity down a little bit so the image shows beneath it then i want to take this image hold ctrl and shift and scale it down like that that's pretty good let me zoom in move this up okay so now i just want to crop this image so that it fits this blue square right here so let me take the blue square right click it go to duplicate hold shift click on the image and go to object clip object clip set and there we go now let me take this and just adjust the opacity so that some of it shows through that right there looks pretty good now let me zoom out i'm going to come over here now to where it says view let me toggle off the guide so we can see how it looks and as you can see our design is looking pretty good now you can use this area here to import like an infographic or a pie chart or something like i did i'm going to leave it blank for now as it stands this design is looking like it's finished so what i'm going to do is i'm going to save it as a pdf document i'll go to file save as i'm just going to title this thing report and for the file save save as type i'm going to change that to pdf right there there we go and i'll go ahead and save you leave the defaults as they are go ahead and click ok ok now the downside of one of the other downsides of doing this with inkscape is that you'll have to design your report or your book one page at a time and then save all of the individual pages as individual pdfs and then use something like pdf sam to merge the pdf document together i'll show you that in just a minute again this is one of the downsides of using inkscape that's why i recommend if you're creating something really long like a 50 or 60 page book probably not a good idea to use inkscape but if you just want to create a one or two page report like this that's fine so let me um let me uh minimize this now let me come back over here to my folder i'm looking for report.pdf what i'm going to do is we're going to save a second copy of this file save as i'm going to save a second a second copy of this just so i can demonstrate how this works report to pdf click save so now what i've done here is i opened up a piece of software known as pdf sam this is a free piece of software i'll have a link in the description if you want to download it this just allows you to merge pdf documents together pretty quickly if you want you can use a web-based solution if you'd like you don't have to download software to do this come over here to where it says merge and i'm going to take these two documents and place them in here like this and it's going to ask you where you want to place this i'm going to place it where it originally was and i'm going to leave everything as it is and click run and there we go so let me open up this document and as you can see here we have a two-page pdf document that we created with inkscape and you can take this text and highlight it and copy and paste it just like you would with any other pdf document and the great thing about this again is since we created this in inkscape this is a vector design meaning you can zoom in on this and you won't get that pixelization you get that the benefit of working with vectors like that so i think that should do it for this tutorial that's how you can go about using inkscape for some pretty rudimentary desktop publishing purposes if you have any questions just leave a comment below and as always thanks for [Music] watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 33,506

Keywords: inkscape desktop publishing, inkscape ebook, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: Cy5v6eVsOpA

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020