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User:Teratornis/Inkscape

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This user subpage contains notes about my experiences with Inkscape.

Welcome

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I invite comments from other Wikipedians. Please comment on the talk page. I have it on my watchlist. If you find it easier to comment on this page, be my guest, but I will usually move such comments onto the talk page after I take them into account on this page.

Introduction

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10:17, 3 March 2009 (UTC): Inkscape is an SVG editor. It is useful for creating diagrams and technical illustrations. Wikipedia does not have enough of these. Wikipedia has millions of users who can edit text, but only a few who can create diagrams. Thus it would be useful to learn how to create presentation-quality diagrams with Inkscape, and to document how I am learning. Not only so I can create some diagrams, but also so I can assess the state of the documentation that tells how to do this. If the documents are good, then anybody can learn how to use Inkscape with little difficulty.

Images to create

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I would like to create some images similar to these (which probably require some skill to do in Inkscape):

Wind power

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Peak oil

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Instructive cartoons

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I might be able to draw crude instructive cartoons by using a set of cartoon character images from someone else, to which I could add captions. Cartoons might make abstract unfamiliar ideas easier to grasp. Cartoons might also seem less like "ranting" when one wants to make a point, for example by showing two characters having a Socratic dialogue. Then it might seem less like the cartoonist is lecturing directly to the reader. Of course this would not be necessary if everyone was a critical thinker.

External editor

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Mediawiki#Rich content says: "MediaWiki also has a simple interface to allow the transparent use of external editors for uploaded files and wiki pages." I knew about using an external text editor for editing wikitext (see: WP:EIW#EditSoft), but I had not thought about trying to use an external editor for files. Perhaps Inkscape is usable as an external editor for uploaded SVG files. Presumably lots of users are already doing this if it is usable. See if I can find them:

John's comments seem kind of fishy, in light of what I see on an image page such as Commons:File:Numerical aperture for a lens.svg, which has links near the bottom that say:

The setup instructions (mw:Manual:External editors) describe the process, and illustrate it with two screenshots, one for wikitext and one for SVG file editing:

The history of the first file starts with: "Image editing with the new external editor feature of MediaWiki 1.5." So this feature has been available for a long time. I will mention that to John Broughton.

See also

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