Title:	Introduction to Sodipodi	Article available in:
Author:	Olivier Boyaval
Translator:	Olivier Boyaval
Software:	Sodipodi 0.28

Warning : This article was originaly writen in french and this translation is in progress. Moreover, some figures aren't translated et some screen copies are made with the french locale of Sodipodi.

Sodipodi is a free software of the category of the programs of vectorial drawing. Although bieng still at the development stage, it offers already a great number of functionalities and a speed which make it to be usable to drawing any picture.

This goal is to implement all the functions of the SVG file format.. Today it implements only the basic functions of the SVG format specifications. For those which doesn't know it, SVG would be the standard for the exchange of fixed or animated vectorial drawing in two dimmensions. It is based on the XML standard and was created by the W3C (that one even which specifies the HTML standard).

Specifications of SVG standard : Official (in English)

For Sodipodi, the SVG format is not only one format to save the files but it's also used in internal by the application. It's even possible to edit the XML fields of the image with the integrated XML editor. The advantage of the SVG format use is that facilitates the exchange of files with the other applications in particular with Sketch, another free application of vectorial drawing. Another advantage is that it could become the standard format to carry animations 2d over Internet (currently the place is occupied by the format owner "Flash" of the Macromedia compagny).

The choice of SVG format wasn't made randomly and Sodipodi wil be a good candidate for the creation of drawing and animation to this format. However, at this time, the functions of animation are only envisaged in the future evolutions.

For the functionnalities, we can find all the main functions of this kind of software :

• Drawing of line, rectangles, circles and other forms.
• Free hand drawing.
• Drawing of curves.
• Vectorial texts with possibilities of transformations into curves
• Modification of the color, thickness and style of stroke.
• Modification of forms filling.
• Management of the colors with transparencies and gradients.
• Various transformations.
• Management of groups of graphic objects.
• etc...

It shouldn't be forgotten that Sodipodi is still in the development stage and that remains to him a long road before having all the functions of some commercial softwares. Thus, there is some number of missing or partially developed functions. These missing will be filled gradually with the time.

To finish with this review of Sodipodi, we can also to tell the possiblity to integrate the Autotrace application directly in Sodipodi. This applications allows the conversion of image know as "bitmap" (ie created by The Gimp) into vectorial image.

Through this article, we will make a fast presentation of its possibilities and its current limitations. The version used in this article is the 0.28.