Inkvec Studio

Inkvec Studio is the desktop app for Inkvec. It turns a raster logo, icon or emoji into an SVG, shows you how close the SVG is to the image it came from, and prepares the result for the web, for print or for a cutting machine. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and everything it does happens on your own computer: your image is never uploaded.

This guide describes the app as it is in version 0.2.0. It covers every screen, and ends with four tutorials that each take one job from start to finish.

The Vectorize tab: the source on the left, the SVG on the right, the quality report in the rail

What is where

The window has four tabs, chosen in the middle of the app bar.

Tab What it does Page
Vectorize Traces an image into an SVG and shows the two side by side, with a measured report. The viewer, Result, Tune
Minify SVG Rewrites an SVG you already have with fewer numbers, without moving it. Minify SVG
Fabricate Turns a drawing into sheets for a vinyl cutter, a sticker, a stencil, a pen or a laser. Fabricate
Batch Traces every image in a folder, one SVG each. Batch

On the right of the app bar are Open…, Recent, Settings, About and Help. Help (or F1) opens this guide inside the app, at the page about what is on screen. The guide is bundled with the app, so it works without a network; Open in browser shows the same page on the web.

This guide, opened from Help inside the app

The Vectorize tab is where most of the work happens. Its right-hand rail has two halves: Result, what the last trace produced, and Tune, the settings for the next one. Above both sit the two settings people most often change, the Denoiser and Editable, and below both a readout of the three numbers that matter (colour difference, coordinates, file size) with Export beside it.

How a trace happens

  1. You open an image. Auto traces it at once with the settings you last used (the Logo preset, the first time).
  2. A small card offers Custom: a few steps, each explained, with your result shown beside Auto's. You can ignore the card; Auto's trace stands.
  3. Every setting you change starts a quick, small draft trace so you can see the effect, then a full trace once you stop moving things. The full trace is what you export.

Getting started walks through this with a sample image.

Inkvec Studio and Inkvec Studio Lite

Inkvec Studio Lite is the same app running in a web browser. It differs from the desktop app in a few places:

  • It cannot add the Windows Vectorize with Inkvec right-click entry or put the inkvec command on your PATH (Settings, Advanced).
  • It has no folder batch: the Batch tab needs to read and write folders on disk.
  • Saving works through your browser's downloads: where this guide says a file is written to a folder, Studio Lite downloads it instead.
  • The denoiser downloads by itself, in the background, the first time Studio Lite opens, and is kept in the browser for later visits (see the denoiser).
  • Preferences and the choices you leave the app with are kept in the browser, not in a file.

Where a page describes something Studio Lite does differently, it says so.

Contents

Using the app

Tutorials

How the tracing itself works, stage by stage, is in How Inkvec works. What it cannot do is in Limitations.

The screenshots in this guide were taken from a development build with sample images. The numbers in them belong to those samples.