Karbon

Karbon is a vector companion to Krita. Both are part of CalligraSuite, and both are primarily targeted at artists. But unlike Krita, Karbon’s capabilities are very modest. We found it to be a very basic vector editor, with few advanced options. Some simple shape tools do exist, though they reside in the objects pane on the right-hand side of the window, not on the main toolbar. Karbon has quite a decent set of tools for manipulating nodes, lines and curves, and it can arrange and distribute objects and even use layers. There’s also an ‘artistic text’ tool, although it proved not to be particularly artistic: just an ordinary text input tool. You can align text, add basic emphasis, and attach text to a curve, but otherwise very few formatting options are supported. Tracing bitmap images to convert them into vectors is another standard feature you won’t find in Karbon.