

Opacity is a nice trick to make the intersection of the lines appear more natural, as seen below. Select the two lines of the graph and set the width to 4px, then enable the rounded cap and set opacity to 80%. We may now change the properties of each line independently. You may need to repeat this, since Libreoffice Calc may generate duplicates of the objects when exporting the. Then all the objects that have the same properties will be selected and can be deleted by pressing “del” on the keyboard. The fastest way to do this is to select one and then go to Edit > Select Same > Fill and Stroke. Now let us delete all the data markers that came as default. Our graph should resemble the image below. We only need one, hence the second one can be deleted. You will notice that there are two identical lines forming the horizontal axis. This way, it becomes easier to match the position of different objects using the edges. Otherwise, the line will get thinner as you reduce its horizontal size, and we don’t want that.Īlso, make sure to enable the snapping of objects (the shortcut is “%”). Beforehand, make sure that you have not selected the option to scale the stroke together with the object (button shown on the image below, if you cannot see it, go to View > Show/Hide > Tool controls bar). Just delete the number 12 and the small tick, and reduce the size of the line to match the end of the number 10 tick. Next thing we may fix is the horizontal axis, which goes up to the value 12, although the data stops at 10. While deleting the lines, you may also notice that there is a big white object serving as background for the image it can also be deleted. A common rule of thumb for a clean composition is that if you don’t need something, don’t show it. For the sole purpose of checking the trend of the lines, we don’t need them. The horizontal and vertical guides are only important if we want someone to follow the lines in order to check a value. One of the problems of the standard plots (both from Excel or Libreoffice Calc) is that usually they have unnecessary guides, that don’t really contribute to a better understanding of the data. Double-clicking again outside (in a blank area of the page) makes you leave the group. We have two options to access the individual objects: 1) Right-click on the group and select “ungroup” or 2) Double-click on the group to work “inside” the group.

The figure is composed of several objects grouped together. As we are now working with vectors, notice that it’s possible to zoom limitlessly without losing resolution! Now that our graph is saved in SVG format, it is time to load it on Inkscape. One of the main things to remember in this tutorial is always to export your figures in vector format! If you’re not aware of all the advantages that this brings, take a look at our tutorial on image formats. Make sure to check SVG - Scalabe Vector Graphics. To do this, right-click on it and select “Export as Image”. The first step is to export our graph from Libreoffice in a vector format. But we can easily export our plots to Inkscape, and unleash all the potential of vector editing! Inkscape for editing plots For this, neither Excel nor Calc would suffice, as we would always be constrained by their editing capabilities. However, if we want to take it one step further, we can really obtain any aspect we could imagine. To generate the graph, select the data, and then go to Insert > Chart.Īs on Excel, you can start adjusting your plot directly on Libreoffice. If you want to generate something similar (without manually typing all the numbers), the formulas used where “=A2+2*RAND()” on B2 and “=A2+RAND()*A2” on C2. To start our tutorial, let us use a small dataset and generate a simple scatter plot with connected lines, as seen below. It differs very little from Excel, so you should feel at home after a few minutes.
#Inkscape svg not saving with pattern free
As we saw before, Libreoffice Calc is a common free alternative for Microsoft Excel, and a good way to start working on our data.
