Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum.
I've had inkscape on my computer for ages, but hadn't really tried to do much with it until recently. Then one day I decided "Hey! I have this great tool called Inkscape, and I'm only using a small part of it's capability" "Maybe it's time I learned to use it more effectively." So I bought an e-book and started going through the lessons in the book. Trouble is, a lot of topics were barely touched on, glossed over, impossible to follow,or just totally left out. I quickly found that Internet learning resources were more helpful than my book in many cases. I found this forum, and often look here when trying to find solutions for problems, or to try and find a better way of doing something in one of my lesson assignments. Now, I've decided to take the plunge and join the forum. I hope I'll be able to contribute as well as learning from you all. Thanks for being here, and for the forum posts that have been such a help and inspiration.

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I had a kind of similar story. And what I found, is that once I joined the forum, it motivated me to try more and different things. My skills continue to grow, and I find myself using Inkscape almost every day....just for fun! If you're interested, in the Competitions forum, some of us have been challenging ourselves with mostly simple things. They're not really competitions, it's just that they fit best in that forum. I enjoy seeing how others create the same general subject, and I learn a lot that way

Hi Brynn, and thanks for the warm welcome.
I saw the post "let's draw Hoilday clipart" and it's actually one of the things that decided me that it was time to join the forum. It sounds like so much fun. I still need to find an image host that recognises svg as an image format, hopefully a free image host, and I need to figure out how to optimise my Inkscape drawings for sharing. I'll hop on over to the competitions sub-forum or whatever a forum within a forum is called, and see what's new.

The only true host that I know of, that accepts SVG is: http://www.imgh.us/index.php Or if you're doing professional level work, you might be interested in setting up an account at OCL: http://www.openclipart.org/ (looks like the site is experiencing some problems at the moment, but that very unusual, in my experience). And the other option is file sharing sites, like MediaFire, et al. Many other options are discussed in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7.

I'm not sure what you mean by "optimize for sharing"?

You could also show off your work in the Finished Work, and Work In Progress forums, whether you decide to participate in the "competitions" or not. (You can't actually host your images in the forum, but you can insert them in messages.

Thanks for the info on image hosts.
By "optimise for sharing" what I mean is, removing unused gradients etc, and useless meta-data that will bloat the file, but serve no purpose.
For example, one of the drawings I was working on for clipart contains 100+ gradients, but only about 20 are actually used. It took some experimentation to get blending I liked using gradients, so there are lots of them in the file that aren't being used for anything. I don't know what other useless data may also be present in the file because of my trial-and-error process, and I thought it would be best to clean-up files like that before sharing them.

File menu > Vacuum Defs.
(Yes, a very non-conventional terminology. When I first started using Inkscape, I had no idea what "vacuum" might mean in computer graphics.)

Oh thanks, that will be a big help.
I'll try and "vacuum" my files before sharing them.
(I never would have figured out what "Vacuum defs" was for.)