Index for my Inkscape tutorial series in Full Circle Magazine

Sunday, 29th December, 2019 — Mark

For several years I have been writing a monthly column about the Free vector graphics program Inkscape, for Full Circle Magazine. Many of the articles have also been collated into “Special Editions”. Both these and the original magazines are available to download free of charge.

I used to maintain an index of the articles at the semi-official Inkscape forum, however that has been offline for several weeks now, and may never return. So it makes sense to host an index here, on my own site. The individual articles are listed first, in case you only want some reference material for a single topic. If you are planning to work through the tutorials from the start then the Special Editions may be more useful: these are listed at the bottom of the page.

Individual Magazines

  1. Full Circle Magazine #61: Getting started. Circles, arcs and segments.
  2. Full Circle Magazine #62: Basic keyboard shortcuts. Rectangle tool.
  3. Full Circle Magazine #63: The status bar. Stars and polygons.
  4. Full Circle Magazine #64: The colour palette, and the Fill & Stroke dialog.
  5. Full Circle Magazine #65: Fill & Stroke dialog continued. Gradients.
  6. Full Circle Magazine #66: Introducing paths.
  7. Full Circle Magazine #67: Paths and Boolean operations.
  8. Full Circle Magazine #68: Selections and groups.
  9. Full Circle Magazine #69: Layers and blend modes.
  10. Full Circle Magazine #70: The text tool. Flowed vs normal text.
  11. Full Circle Magazine #71: Text tool continued: controls on the toolbar.
  12. Full Circle Magazine #72: Saving to different formats. Exporting bitmaps.
  13. Full Circle Magazine #73: Clipping.
  14. Full Circle Magazine #74: Masking.
  15. Full Circle Magazine #75: Using bitmap graphics.
  16. Full Circle Magazine #76: Manually tracing a logo (Guidelines, snapping, colour picker).
  17. Full Circle Magazine #77: Manually tracing a cartoon sketch (Bézier tool).
  18. Full Circle Magazine #78: Manually tracing a cartoon sketch, continued (Pencil tool, Calligraphy tool).
  19. Full Circle Magazine #79: Single scan (black & white) tracing using the Trace Bitmap dialog.
  20. Full Circle Magazine #80: Trace Bitmap dialog continued (multiple scans, colour tracing).
  21. Full Circle Magazine #81: Colouring a black & white trace. Bucket fill tool.
  22. Full Circle Magazine #82: Tweak tool (object tweaks).
  23. Full Circle Magazine #83: Tweak tool continued (node tweaks).
  24. Full Circle Magazine #84: Zoom tool, plus other zooming tips.
  25. Full Circle Magazine #85: 3D Box tool.
  26. Full Circle Magazine #86: Spray tool.
  27. Full Circle Magazine #87: Eraser tool and Connectors tool.
  28. Full Circle Magazine #88: Introducing clones.
  29. Full Circle Magazine #89: Clones continued: creating mirrored or kaleidoscopic effects.
  30. Full Circle Magazine #90: Clones continued: using “unset” fills and strokes.
  31. Full Circle Magazine #91: XML Editor (to fix an issue with clones).
  32. Full Circle Magazine #92: The advantages of combining clones with clipping and masking.
  33. Full Circle Magazine #93: Using the “Create Tiled Clones” dialog.
  34. Full Circle Magazine #94: The Scale, Rotation and Blur & Opacity tabs of the Tiled Clones dialog.
  35. Full Circle Magazine #95: The Colour tab of the Tiled Clones dialog.
  36. Full Circle Magazine #96: Finishing the Tiled Clones dialog, covering the Trace and Symmetry tabs.
  37. Full Circle Magazine #97: Grids.
  38. Full Circle Magazine #98: Align & Distribute Dialog: Aligning.
  39. Full Circle Magazine #99: Align & Distribute Dialog: Distributing and other features.
  40. Full Circle Magazine #100: Celebrating issue #100 with 100 Inkscape tips and tricks.
  41. Full Circle Magazine #101: The Arrange (formerly Rows & Columns) and Transform dialogs.
  42. Full Circle Magazine #102: Introducing Live Path Effects: Spiro Spline and Gears.
  43. Full Circle Magazine #103: LPE implementation details, and the Bend LPE.
  44. Full Circle Magazine #104: Envelope Deformation and Knot LPEs.
  45. Full Circle Magazine #105: Construct Grid, Hatches (Rough) and Interpolate Sub-Paths LPEs.
  46. Full Circle Magazine #106: Pattern Along Path, Ruler, Sketch, Stitch Sub-paths and (barely) the VonKoch LPEs.
  47. Full Circle Magazine #107: The last of the LPEs: Power Stroke and Clone Original Path.
  48. Full Circle Magazine #108: Introducing filters: creating a basic drop shadow filter.
  49. Full Circle Magazine #109: Filters: The Color Matrix filter primitive.
  50. Full Circle Magazine #110: Filters: The Composite filter primitive.
  51. Full Circle Magazine #111: Filters: The Flood and Turbulence filter primitives.
  52. Full Circle Magazine #112: Filters: The Image and Morphology filter primitives.
  53. Full Circle Magazine #113: Filters: Speeding up rendering, and the Displacement Map primitive.
  54. Full Circle Magazine #114: Filters: The Convolve Matrix primitive.
  55. Full Circle Magazine #115: Filters: Diffuse and Specular Lighting primitives.
  56. Full Circle Magazine #116: Filters: Component Transfer primitive (Inkscape 0.91+).
  57. Full Circle Magazine #117: Filters: Using “Background Image/Alpha” and chaining filters.
  58. Full Circle Magazine #118: Some SVG and web politics, installing 0.92, and the “paint-order” feature from SVG 2.
  59. Full Circle Magazine #119: Mesh Gradients.
  60. Full Circle Magazine #120: It’s the 10th anniversary of the magazine, so I made a cake!
  61. Full Circle Magazine #121: The Measurement tool.
  62. Full Circle Magazine #122: New in 0.91/0.92: Finding & selecting objects.
  63. Full Circle Magazine #123: New in 0.91/0.92: The Objects dialog
  64. Full Circle Magazine #124: New in 0.91/0.92: The Symbols dialog
  65. Full Circle Magazine #125: New LPEs in 0.92: BSpline and Simplify.
  66. Full Circle Magazine #126: New LPEs in 0.92: Roughen and Show Handles.
  67. Full Circle Magazine #127: New LPEs in 0.92: Fill Between Many and Taper Stroke.
  68. Full Circle Magazine #128: New LPEs in 0.92: Fill Between Strokes, Transform By 2 Points, Interpolate Points and Join Type
  69. Full Circle Magazine #129: New LPEs in 0.92: Perspective/Envelope, Lattice Deformation 2, Rotate Copies, Mirror Symmetry, Bounding Box, Ellipse by 5 Points, Attach Path
  70. Full Circle Magazine #130: An introduction to Extensions: Colour > Brighter, Colour > HSL Adjust, Render > Function Plotter, Render > Barcode > QR Code, Render > Hershey Text
  71. Full Circle Magazine #131: More extensions: Arrange > Deep Ungroup, Arrange > Restack, Text > Lorem Ipsum, Text > Extract, Text > Merge, Text > Split Text, Images > Embed Images, Images > Extract Image, and a warning to steer clear of anything in the Raster submenu.
  72. Full Circle Magazine #132: JessyInk
  73. Full Circle Magazine #133: Using SVG in a web page. Introduction, exporting as PNG, and linking directly to an SVG file.
  74. Full Circle Magazine #134: Using SVG in a web page. Using SVG files in <object> tags or as inline code. An introduction to XML namespaces with an eye to reducing the file size of exported SVG images.
  75. Full Circle Magazine #135: Using SVG in a web page. Basic CSS animations.
  76. Full Circle Magazine #136: Animating SVG using SMIL (1/2)
  77. Full Circle Magazine #137: Animating SVG using SMIL (2/2)
  78. Full Circle Magazine #138: Creating a self-drawing path with CSS
  79. Full Circle Magazine #139: Showing part of an image in a browser using viewBox and named views.
  80. Full Circle Magazine #140: Showing one group or layer from an image in a browser using the CSS “:target” selector.
  81. Full Circle Magazine #141: Changing the colour of inline SVG using the currentColor CSS keyword.
  82. Full Circle Magazine #142: Introducing some JavaScript into your SVG files.
  83. Full Circle Magazine #143: Using embedded JS scripts to change an object’s style.
  84. Full Circle Magazine #144: Using CSS classes to change an object’s style with JS.
  85. Full Circle Magazine #145: Creating a clickable button with JS and CSS classes.
  86. Full Circle Magazine #146: Extending the clickable button from last time to control a different object, using an external JS file.
  87. Full Circle Magazine #147: Using Inkscape, JavaScript and a browser to create an animated set of traffic lights.
  88. Full Circle Magazine #148: A deeper dive into SVG and JavaScript.
  89. Full Circle Magazine #149: Using JS in the browser to add, remove and re-order SVG elements.
  90. Full Circle Magazine #150: Using JS in the browser to animate SVG objects.
  91. Full Circle Magazine #151: The "transform" attribute.
  92. Full Circle Magazine #152: Using JS in the browser to manipulate the "transform" attribute.

Special Editions

These can all be downloaded via this page.

  • Inkscape Special Edition #1: Prequel article, plus parts 1-7 in one handy download
  • Inkscape Special Edition #2: Parts 8-14 in one handy download
  • Inkscape Special Edition #3: Parts 15-21 in one handy download (Updated in January 2017 – parts 22-24 were split off into Special Edition 4)
  • Inkscape Special Edition #4: Parts 22-28 in one handy download
  • Inkscape Special Edition #5: Parts 29-35 in one handy download
  • Inkscape Special Edition #6: Parts 36-42 in one handy download
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Ubuntu 12.04.3 EDID checksum error

Monday, 23rd December, 2013 — Mark

A colleague of mine came into work to find that his dual monitor setup on Ubuntu 12.04.3 was no longer working correctly. The main monitor (connected via HDMI) was being detected okay, but the secondary monitor (connected via a VGA cable) was appearing as “Unknown” and limited to a resolution of 800×600. He was also seeing errors about the “EDID checksum” in his logs.

After a bit of searching on the internet we tried various ways to fix the problem, from the obvious re-seating the VGA cable to the less obvious installation of “mesa-utils”, but to no avail.

The thing that finally worked – as is often the case with computers – was to turn it off and on again. Obviously that was one of the first things we’d tried: the computer had been shut down, the monitor turned off, then monitor followed by computer switched on again. But that alone wasn’t enough to fix the issue.

What was actually required was to completely unplug the mains lead from the monitor. Simply pressing the power button on the front isn’t enough for the monitor’s processor to do a full “reboot”. Pulling the power cable (and VGA lead for good measure), leaving it for 30 seconds, then plugging both back in fixed the issue immediately. Ubuntu could recognise the monitor once again, and it was automatically set to its intrinsic resolution of 1280×1024.

So if you find yourself with an EDID checksum error, before you get too deep into the world of xrandr or Xorg.conf files, try completely removing the power from the monitor. It just might save you a lot of time and effort!

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Full Circle Magazine, Issue 66

Monday, 29th October, 2012 — Mark

The latest issue of Full Circle Magazine, featuring Part 6 of Mark’s Inkscape tutorial, is now available for free download.

Full Circle Magazine is a free publication which focuses on Ubuntu and Linux in general, though the Inkscape tutorials are largely applicable to Windows and MacOS users as well.

Posted in Linux, SVG, Tech. No Comments »

The Ubuntu Shopping Lens Debacle

Wednesday, 26th September, 2012 — Mark

It seems that Canonical are attempting to raise some money by inserting affiliate links into your Unity Dash when you type in a search term. Currently the main target for these links is Amazon, but I’m sure others will be added over time.

I’m not a fan of the Dash at all. I find it slow and cumbersome to operate with a mouse, and frustratingly ineffectual when I try to type a search term. Of course it doesn’t help that my 1980s vintage clacky keyboard lacks a Windows key, so all the “just hit the META key and type…” posts are useless to me. My dislike of the Dash aside, however, I think adding affiliate links to the desktop is a great idea. Free software often struggles to become financially self-sufficient, so more experimentation in this area is a good thing.

Except that the implementation in Ubuntu was an obvious PR disaster from the outset. Did they really think that people would be happy that the search terms they use when looking for files and applications on the local disk are also being sent to Amazon and other retailers as a matter of course? Mark Shuttleworth was quick to point out they’re not “putting ads” into Ubuntu and Jono Bacon posted that no user-identifying data is sent, but that just ignores the fact that there could be user-identifying data in the search terms themselves.

Mark Shuttleworth’s answer, early in the comments on his post, seems a little short-sighted to me:

…the Home lens of the Dash is “search everything”. If you want to search locally only, use the hotkey to specify the specific scope you want, like Super-A for apps, or Super-F for files.

So if I don’t want to send my search terms to Amazon, I have to search each separate scope individually (remembering a few more keyboard shortcuts along the way). That sucks.

It looks like there may be an option to disable these searches coming along as a result of the backlash. But even that solution is overkill – it becomes all-or-nothing, you either get affiliate links or you don’t. Wouldn’t it be better to just put a button at the bottom of the local search results to “Search our online shopping partners”? Perhaps beside a more general “Search online” button to perform a search using the user’s preferred search engine. No information would be sent out until one of the buttons was pressed, allowing the user to keep their local searches local, but making it trivially easy to perform affiliate and other searches when they want to share their search terms with the world.

I hope that Canonical, and other Free software vendors, can find sustainable ways to make money. But treating your users’ data – and that includes their local search terms – as anything less than confidential by default is not the way to go about it.

Posted in Linux, My Green Life, Tech, Things I Hate. No Comments »

Full Circle Magazine, Issue 63

Saturday, 28th July, 2012 — Mark

The latest issue of Full Circle Magazine, featuring Part 3 of my Inkscape tutorial, is now available for free download.

Full Circle Magazine is a free publication which focuses on Ubuntu and Linux in general, though the Inkscape tutorials are largely applicable to Windows and MacOS users as well.

Posted in Linux, Miscellaneous, Tech. No Comments »

It’s not over ’til the fat Chumby sings

Tuesday, 1st May, 2012 — Mark

I’ve written about my Chumby on this blog in the past (and this one, too). Alas! Chumby Indistries is effectively no more, the staff having moved on and any worthwhile intellectual property in the hands of a corporate trustee.

Fortunately the servers are still serving, so my Chumby is still working as well as ever. There will come a day when they’re switched off, but one advantage of the Chumby’s open source nature is that a couple of the users over at the Chumby forum have been able to create ‘untethered’ versions of the firmware which don’t rely on the Chumby Industries servers. I’m sure I’ll lose some functionality when the servers go dark, but at least my squishy little friend won’t turn into a brick.

Make Magazine has a long and interesting interview with Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang talking about his time a Chumby Industries, and more. It should be required reading for all those Kickstarter projects hoping to create the next big thing in hardware…

There’s a certain irony to Chumby Industries closing down, right at a time when other people have raised millions of dollars with a similar idea. Yes, the Pebble Watch may be more portable than a Chumby and fill a slightly different niche, but the idea of a clock/watch that can switch between various single-purpose applications and feed you with information from the internet makes them more similar than different. There’s clearly a demand for such “third screen” devices and I think the Chumby was simply an idea ahead of its time.

So while my Chumby still works as Bunnie intended, I’ll continue to enjoy the eclectic delights it offers up. With luck an untethered firmware will extend its life even further. Chumby Industries may be gone, but Chumbys live on.

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End of life for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

Wednesday, 11th April, 2012 — Mark

Today I turned on my computers at home and at work to be presented with an alert telling me that the operating system on them, Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”, has reached its end of life. This event has reminded me just how frustrated I am with some of the decisions Canonical has made in the transition to their Unity interface…

I’ve been a Ubuntu user since its first release, choosing to live life on the bleeding edge of the regular six-monthly releases, rather than relax with the LTS releases. Generally this approach worked well for me, until the problem trilogy of 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04.

  • 10.04, “Lucid Lynx”, was an LTS (long term support) release which used the old Gnome 2 interface. It’s still supported for another year, until April 2013.
  • 10.10, “Maverick Meerkat” was a normal six-monthly release which used the Gnome 2 interface. Support has just expired for this version.
  • 11.04, “Natty Narwhal” was a normal six-monthly release which used the Unity interface and is supported until October 2012.

Back in 2010 I went through my usual two upgrades, the first putting me on an LTS release, and the second taking me back off that track to the six-monthly cycle. I had expected to upgrade to 11.04, but then Unity happened.

I’ll admit that I’m one of the people who doesn’t like Unity. In its current form I find it far less efficient than the workflow I’d established with Gnome 2. It doesn’t work with my preferred choice of focus-follows-mouse. Most of all, it’s fundamentally broken with my multi-monitor setup (something that the developers are actively addressing, though, so I might be in luck with 12.04). That last point meant that upgrading to Unity just wasn’t an option, regardless of my opinions of it as a user interface.

That’s my real gripe. If Unity had first appeared in 10.10 then I would have found that it didn’t work, stuck with 10.04, and still have until 2013 for Unity to get fixed, or for me to find an alternative. So please, Canonical, if you decide to make any more significant changes that may stop people upgrading by failing to work with their not-very-exotic hardware, at least do it in the version immediately following an LTS release.

Posted in Linux, My Green Life, Tech, Things I Hate. 3 Comments »

A Decade of Free Museums

Friday, 2nd December, 2011 — Mark

There’s an article running on the Guardian’s website written by former Culture Secretary Chris Smith to celebrate 10 years since he put the necessary motions in place to remove the entry fee from many of Britain’s museums and galleries. For me the most important part is from the very first paragraph:

…free admission is all about giving everyone, no matter what their means, the chance to see the greatest works of art, science and history that our nation has.

I’m a firm believer that culture and education should be accessible to all, regardless of their financial status. It’s also why I love The Proms and Shakespeare’s Globe – although they’re not free, they both offer the chance to see world-class performances for as little as £5.

But I don’t think it’s enough to see great works of art; it’s important that people have access to the tools they need to produce their own creations – whether artistic or otherwise – and the opportunity to learn how. It’s why I’m excited about the possibilities offered by the Raspberry Pi – a real computer for as little as $25. It’s why I’m a huge advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). And it’s the reason that my webcomic is created entirely using the FOSS program Inkscape, and why I make the Inkscape source files available for download in the hope that people can learn something from them.

Free museums and galleries, or cheap theatres and concerts are wonderful, but a raft of cheap or free (and Free) software and hardware will mean that some of those visitors will become more than just consumers of culture. They’ll become creators.

Posted in Linux, My Green Life, Tech, Things I Love. No Comments »

Bring back the GNOME 2 Clock applet

Monday, 21st November, 2011 — Mark

One thing I missed from my previous list of gripes about Ubuntu 11.10’s interface was the loss of the GNOME 2 clock applet. It fell through the cracks, not because I’m happy with the replacement, but rather because my list was long enough already and it wasn’t the most pressing issue.

But I was reminded of how flexible and useful the GNOME 2 clock applet is by Monty Taylor’s post on the subject.

I don’t need information about multiple timezones as there are only a couple of people overseas that I’m in regular contact with. I can do the maths on my fingers, or Google for their local time if I need to. But those approaches both interfere with my workflow and distract me from the task in hand. With the GNOME 2 clock it just took a single click to check their local times, or to bring up a handy calendar.

It’s a minor thing in isolation, but the fact that Monty’s post is titled “Death by a thousand cuts” is no accident. The move to Ubuntu 11.10 brings with it lots, and lots, and lots of these minor things. Each one is a slight annoyance in isolation, but when combined they can quickly become too much for a user to take.

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Joe Consumer has the Same Unity Problems as Me

Friday, 11th November, 2011 — Mark

The recent Ubuntu Developer Summit included a session on Canonical’s user testing of Unity and Ubuntu. Have a read of the results over on OMG! Ubuntu! Here’s my favourite bit from the introduction:

Although a small number of testers are used in the qualitative testing, they are selected very specifically to best demonstrate the target audience of Ubuntu. They are a mix of Windows and Mac users who spend at least 10 hours a week on a computer. They tend to know how to download music, attach peripherals and other fault sedate computing affair [sic].

Perhaps this is one caveat in the data accrued thus far: the focus has been with “Joe Consumer” representatives and not those more advanced or all ready [sic] familiar with Linux.

So the testing isn’t aimed at more advanced users, or those already familiar with Linux. I’d count myself in both those groups. Yet interestingly the main issues they found with with Unity and the Dash were exactly the same as my complaints. Okay, my list also add a few extra techy issues, but for the main part my problems with Ubuntu 11.10 aren’t due to me being an ‘advanced user’ who is ‘already familiar with Linux’ – they’re the sort of problems that affect even Joe Consumer.

The article tries to put a positive spin on the results, but I can’t help feel that in producing a system which elicits similar complaints from both Joe Consumer and advanced users, Canonical may have managed the incredible task of uniting geeks and noobs into one coherent unified group, bound by the issues they face using Ubuntu these days.

Unity indeed!

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