Tiled Clones in Inkscape

I was just going through this post by nicubunu. It creates a postal stamp using the Path->difference technique. But in this tutorial, he has discussed different techniques for creating the same effect. One of them involved using Tiled Clones. As mentioned in the link here, its this option is really in a very unusual place in the menu. As usual, I found my curiosity take control, so I decided to explore what it is all about.

Tiled clones is a way of creating several clones of an image, and arrange them in the form of a grid(this word is important).

Ok, lets explore. (FYI, my version of Inkscape is 0.48.1)

Create an object, lets say a circle, give it a color.

Select it.

Goto Edit - >Clone -> Create tiled clone.

You get a dialog as follows.

I am going to select and explore Simple Translation in this post.

Now click on the Shift tab. You can see this dialog.

I just clicked the Reset button so that we can begin from scratch.

Lets understand the shifting. 

I had just 1 circle. As you see in the dialog above, I selected 4 rows and 4 colums. i.e. If i were to click on the Create button, I would get a grid of 4x4 = 16 circles.

As you see in the image, all the circles are stuck together. This is where the shift options come into action.

Let us add spacing between the rows. Lets say that we want to add a 20 percent spacing between the rows.(ie 20 percent of the height of the original selected object). This would mathematically translate to - adding a y coordinate difference of 20 percent between the rows.

In the dialog, set Shift Y - Per row to 20 percent. This is what we get.

Now lets create some spacing between the columns. i.e. adding an X axis spacing between the columns.

In the dialog, set shift X per column to 20 percent.

Now you see that there is quite a good spacing between all the elements of the grid.

Lets try to make it slanting now.

As you can see, I reduced the spacing to 0, and just shifted each row by about 50 percent relative to its previous row.

Lets see what happens if we select the alternate option.

Now thats nice, isint it? You can choose to randomize the circles. Mixing and merging the different options yields unexplainable results though!

Here is the stamp outline that I created as per Nicu's blog.

Nice!

Signing Off 

Ryan