I was doing some of the usual noodling with Inkscape last night and spotted something I hadn’t seen before. A menu entry linking up to the Openclipart.org! So at work I tried it today and found no such entry in the XP version of Inkscape I was running here. 

Alas, it was Virtualbox to the rescue and I ran my Vbox install of Hardy and confirmed that in fact yes, the Inkscape you get in the Ubuntu repos (0.46) indeed has this functionality. Of course I’m also running 0.46 at work on XP and it’s not there, so I’m not entirely sure what’s up.  If anybody can clue me in on how to get this going in XP there would be a lot of happy Inkscapers. Of course alternatively we could just tell them they have to use Linux.

Anyway, just to prove I’m not dreaming all of this, here are a few descriptive screenshots:

Here is the File menu entry for OCAL in Inkscape:

Here is the dialog that pops up giving a field to enter search terms to search for clip art from openclipart.org:

Here I’ve entered “usb” as a search term and I get a nice list of clip art images along with thumbnails and descriptions:

And finally, the graphic image I just chose is plunked right into Inkscape. Fantastic!:

Great job people!