Karbon14 is the vector drawing application in KDE and part of the KOffice Suite.

Karbon (formerly Kontour, which was formerly KIllustrator) is a vector graphics editor.

It is a component of KOffice, the KDE office suite. The name is a play on KDE and the radioactive isotope Carbon-14.

Karbon is a vector drawing application with an user interface that is easy to use, highly customizable and extensible. That makes Karbon a great application for users starting to explore the world of vector graphics as well as for artists wanting to create breathtaking vector art.

Karbon14 is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.

Karbon is a vector-based drawing application for KOffice. It allows artists to create complex drawings without losing image quality when zooming in on, or resizing the drawing. You can use Karbon to add finishing touches to diagrams created using Kivio or charts created using KChart. Graphic design ideas can be quickly and easily transformed into high quality illustrations with Karbon.

What makes a vector-based drawing application like Karbon different from a pixel-based drawing application like Krita?

In a vector drawing - such as the drawing shown above - your drawing is stored as geometric shapes such as lines and curves. When the drawing is resized, the image scales smoothly.

However, in a pixel-based drawing, your drawing is stored as many dots (pixels) in rows and columns. When you resize a pixel-based image, the dots will be enlarged. This can result in jagged edges known as pixelation and aliasing and thus the quality of the image will go down. Pixel-based drawings often have larger file sizes compared to simple vector drawings.

For example: Karbon is useful for creating cartoons drawings or editing clip art which often needs to be resized to fit in a document or on a poster. Krita is more suited to painting pictures or editing photographs.

To get started with Karbon quickly, you might want to try opening and modifying some of the images from the Open Clip Art Library.

Screenshots.

Complex SVG images can be loaded, displayed and manipulated without problems.

Karbon has support for connections between shapes as well as support for text on path.

Karbon displaying its own logo loaded from an SVG file.

Karbon is fun to play with.

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