Inkscape

The Power of Simplify: The Simplify command (Ctrl+L) creates amazingly life-like generalizations of the original forms, preserving the general outline but reducing the number of nodes, melting sharp corners and introducing very natural-looking distortions. The screenshot demonstrates a bunch of clipart shapes (column on the left) and several successive levels of simplification applied to them.

The shape tools are much more convenient to use in 0.38. All the numeric controls are now in the top panel (its content switches when you select a different tool). Besides, you can now drag the shape handles (the small white diamonds) right in the shape tool: drag to draw, drag a handle to reshape, click an object to select, press Esc to deselect.

Inkscape is available in many languages (although not all of the translations are equally up to date - translators wanted!). This is the recently updated Russian translation of the interface and the Basic tutorial.

Inkscape now features a complete support for both letterspacing (uniform spacing between letters) and kerning (arbitrary shifts of letters inside a text object, both horizontally and vertically). This capability is already available via hot keys (Alt+<, Alt+> adjust letterspacing, Alt+arrows kern), and soon we'll add a GUI for these adjustments. In SVG, kerning information is stored in the dx and dy attributes which are now fully supported.

Almost all the icons in the Inkscape interface are extracted from an SVG file (share/icons/icons.svg) when the program starts. That is, if you don't like some of Inkscape's icons, all you need to do is edit that file. This screenshot shows some new icons we did for 0.38. Drawing icons is a lot of fun!

This is our new multi-stop gradient editor... and some of the things it is capable of. (Source file: gradient.svg.)

Inkscape's About box is also nothing else but an SVG file created in Inkscape itself.

The scale/rotation handles and the rubberband selection rectangle now use inversion and are therefore much more visible and easy to work with. Compare Inkscape 0.37 (left) and the latest 0.38-CVS (right). Note that our inversion uses a smart composition formula, and the inverted elements are therefore perfectly visible over 50% gray which would render regular inversion invisible.