Since in a vector drawing, objects are stored separately, it's easy to animate them by moving, transforming, etc. You can view or export your drawing at any resolution, and you'll never see any jaggedness or 'zoom blur.' Everything remains crisp regardless of size. By contrast, there's no need to ever 'flatten' a vector drawing (you can export it to a bitmap, though). In a bitmap editor, you are supposed to eventually 'flatten' your image, so even if different objects were on different layers, they're no more. Unless you delete some object, it's always as easy to separate from others and edit as always. The depth of 'undo' is a much less limiting factor in Inkscape than in a bitmap editor. Here are the main advantages of the vector approach:

That's how Inkscape works, and that's its main point of difference from bitmap editors such as GIMP. Moreover, computer can do a lot of things automatically! No more frustrating 'selections', just pick any object and edit it as necessary. This means you can easily separate it from other objects and do whatever you please with it. In a vector format, the actual circle can be stored, along with its properties, as an object. smoothed so that some pixels are half-black, half-white). These kinds of tasks may be difficult even for humans, as anyone who've used The Gimp or Photoshop would attest: you'll have to use complex and unreliable tools to 'select' the circle, and you still cannot do this perfectly if, for example, the edges of the circle are anti-aliased (i.e. It can paint all white pixels blue, but it cannot move or transform the circle because it does not 'see' it. All that the computer knows about the image is that some of its pixels are black and some are white.Īs a result, there is little the computer itself can do with such an image. It stores information about what is the color (and, possibly, transparency) of every pixel of the image - but nothing else.įor example, if you have a PNG image with a black circle on white background, in fact there is NO black circle stored in the image at all: it's only the person viewing this image who can 'guess' that it displays a circle. A bitmap, however, is a very low-level abstraction. The majority of images stored and processed on computers today are bitmaps. Inkscape is a vector editor, not bitmap (raster) editor. Other languages: العربية Català Česky Deutsch English Español Français Italiano 日本語 한국어 Polski Português Português do Brasil Русский Slovenčina 中文

Inkscape vector image with gradient