sK1 is an open-source, cross-platform illustration program that seeks to be a substitute for professional proprietary software like

CorelDRAW CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). T ...

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

. Unique project features are CorelDRAW formats importers, tabbed multiple document interface,

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

-based engine, and color management.

History

A small team led by Igor Novikov started the project in 2003, based on the existing open source vector graphics editor

Skencil Skencil, formerly called Sketch, is a free software vector graphics editor, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Its first public version, Sketch 0.5.0, was released on October 31, 1998. As claimed on its website, "Skencil is imp ...

. sK1 is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...

of the Skencil 0.6.x series which used Tk widgets for the user interface (this version had been dropped by the main Skencil developers who were working on a branch of the program based on

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

). In 2007 the sK1 team reverse-engineered the CorelDRAW (CDR) format. The results and the first working snapshot of the CDR importer were presented at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 conference taking place in May 2007 in Montreal (Canada). Later on the team parsed the structure of other Corel formats with the help of CDR Explorer. Export into CDR and CMX file formats was presented at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2019 conference taking place in May 2019 in Saarbrücken (Germany).

Target audience

Since the project was started by a small team of

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

professionals in

prepress Prepress is the term used in the Printing and Publishing industries for the processes and procedures that occur between the creation of a print layout and the final printing. The prepress process includes the preparation of artwork for press, media ...

, it was unambiguously focused on full support for

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

CMYK The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...

color model and

color management In digital imaging systems, color management (or colour management) is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printer ...

at the expense of developing some advanced functions for illustrators. Informally the project is positioned as a free open source alternative to the commercial

Functionality

Compared to

Inkscape Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Other formats can be imported and exported. Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectang ...

, sK1 has a limited feature set, adequate for simple sketching, while its user interface remains clean. Drawable objects include circles and ellipses, rectangles, text, Bezier curves, and straight lines. Those can be transformed in typical manners and aligned in multiple ways.

Supported formats

; Import: * CorelDRAW v7-X4 (CDR/CDT/CCX/CDRX/CMX) * Adobe Illustrator up to version 9 (based on PostScript) * Postscript (PS) and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) * Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) * Windows Metafile (WMF) * XFIG * Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) * Skencil/Sketch/sK1 (SK, SK1, SK2) * Acorn Draw (AFF) * PLT - HPGL cutting plotter files * CorelDRAW palettes (CPL and XML) * Adobe Swatch Exchange palettes (ASE) * Adobe Photoshop palettes (ACO) * Xara Designer palettes (JCW) * GIMP/Inkscape palettes (GPL) * LibreOffice palettes (SOC) * Scribus palettes (XML) * sK1 palettes (SKP) * Adobe Photoshop files (PSD) * GIMP files (XCF) * Images BMP, PNG, JPG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, PPM, WEBP, XBM, XPM ; Export: * AI - Adobe Illustrator 5.0 (based on PostScript) * PDF - Portable Document Format * PS - PostScript * SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics * SK/SK1/SK2 - Skencil/Sketch/sK1 * CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile * WMF - Windows Metafile * PLT - HPGL cutting plotter files * CorelDRAW palettes (CPL and XML) * Adobe Swatch Exchange palettes (ASE) * Adobe Photoshop palettes (ACO) * Xara Designer palettes (JCW) * GIMP/Inkscape palettes (GPL) * LibreOffice palettes (SOC) * Scribus palettes (XML) * sK1 palettes (SKP) * PNG - Portable Network Graphics

Side projects

;UniConvertor : an application for conversion of files from one vector format into another one. In fact it is a part of sK1, rewritten as a standalone code and being developed by the same team. UniConvertor is also used by

for opening CorelDRAW, WMF and Sketch/Skencil files. ;Color Palette Collection : a set of free palettes provided in different native file formats for sK1, Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus, LibreOffice, CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, Xara Designer etc. For sK1 2.0 the palette collection is available as a web service. ;CDR Explorer : a program that simplifies the reverse-engineering of CorelDRAW formats. ; LinCutter : an application for interactive work with cutting machines (PLT format).

Awards

* In 2007 the project was awarded the second place in the Trophées du Libre open source project contest in the "Multimedia and games" category. * In 2008 the project was awarded the third place in the contest Hackontest, organized by the Swiss Open Systems User Groupd /ch/open and sponsored by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. * In 2009 the project was awarded the second place in the contest "The best free project of Russia", conducted by Linux Format magazine. Among the group projects. * In 2009 the UniConvertor project was awarded the first place in the Trophées du Libre open source project contest in the "Multimedia" category.

sK1 versions

UniConvertor versions

References

External links

* {{Vector graphics editors Free vector graphics editors Free diagramming software Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in Python Software forks Vector graphics editors for Linux Vector graphics editors Software that uses wxWidgets