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"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." - Possibly derived from Alexandre Dumas, fils

Sine Waves

sine
A sine wave produced in Inkscape. Note this is not actually a 'picture' it is instead a mathematical shape like a graph. Click on this wave to take you to a video of how to make a sine wave in Inkscape.

MS Paint

At work if I had to produce a document I used MS Paint for the diagrams. With a few simple tools in MS Paint it was possible to produce all manner of diagrams for instruction purposes. However editing the diagram once it was drawn meant deleting bits of the diagram and painting over it.

Inkscape

As I gradually became more familiar with Inkscape I started using it more and more. The great thing about Inkscape is that it is a vector program, i.e. instead of a circle being drawn as a bunch of pixels, it is actually drawn as a mathematical shape and that shape can be changed in size and colour at any stage. This means that if I have a picture of say a circle overlapping a square I can alter this at any time by opening up the picture and moving the circle and square and changing their sizes and colours or even changing their shapes or replacing them with something else. But if I have a circle overlapping a square in MS Paint then I can't pull them apart because they are just disconnected pixels.

In MS Paint I would produce regular wave like shapes using one of their curvy tools. I would do so by producing one wave and then copying it and sticking them together. Thus an electromagnet could be represented as a wave or flat coil shape. It took me some time how to work out how to do it in Inkscape. Of course it turned out be very straightforward and the curves in Inkscape are much more symmetrical and smoother than I could manage in Paint. It maybe that the shape I model in this video is not an actual harmonic sine wave, it is however a smooth undulating regular shape representing a spring.

24th March 2024