Creating a powerful and convenient drawing tool that is fully compatible with XML, SVG and CSS standards is the main goal of the Inkscape project, an open vector graphics editor. Functionally, it is similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDRAW or Xara, uses the W3C standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It seems to me that the developers have coped with their task quite well.
The editor supports features such as shapes, contours, text, markers, clones, alpha channel, transformations, gradients, textures and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, complex contour operations, raster graphics vectorization, contour text, shape-wrapped text, XML data editing directly, and much more.
The program is open source and distributed for free (to compare the price of Corel Draw). Supported systems: 32-bit MS Windows (NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), Linux, OS X. I found a portable multilingual version of the program here. A huge number of free cliparts for the program can be found on this website, and here you will find the wiki of the project.
offsite | download
