Filters and effects

How far will each app take you beyond basic drawing?

After you create vector graphics, you’ll very likely want to add effects to them, whether for web graphics or offline designs. Of the suites on test, Inkscape has by far the largest collection of effects, including dozens of shape and volume tricks, which can all be applied to an editable curve or text. There are exciting morphology, materials and texture filters for vector objects as well as a bunch of artistic filters for bitmap images. The effects sit under the Filters menu and there’s also a dedicated Filter Effects editor pane, where you can combine several effects and sort them.

LibreOfficeDraw also provides a vast set of effects, though they’re less artistic and more stationery-orientated. There are nice fontwork effects (cloned from MicrosoftOffice’s WordArt), a way to wrap text around a circle, extrusion and drop shadow tools. They’re not best suited to creative work, though.

Karbon has an Effects menu, but it contains only four entries for basic outline modification. Moreover, Karbon can’t handle SVG effects when opening a file created in another application.

SK1 is much the same in terms of effects: none to add, and no support for importing SVG effects.

XaraXtreme frankly warns you that it’s in an early state of development and thus doesn’t support importing SVG files at all, but there are some interesting tools, such as bevel, mould, shadow and transparency. Better than nothing, anyway.